[MediocreButArrogant]

Originally Posted by tiger08

Let me give a couple of tips for cheaper heating with a heat pump.

Not all but most of the heat pumps in this valley, have a built in electric auxillary heat kit. The purpose of the heat kit is to aid the heat pump on super cold mornings, when it just cant quite keep up.

The heat strips are actually installed in the air handler, but I think you knew that. When they are assisting your heat pump to raise the temperature it's called auxiliary heat, but if your heat pump ever conks out and the resistance strips are providing the only heat, it's called emergency heat.

If you walk up to the thermostat and throw it up more than 2 or 3 degrees, not only are you engaging the heat pump but you are also engaging the heat strip, this is where running the unit gets expensive.

If you have a fancy digital thermostat, it likely has a setting to adjust this temperature delta where the auxiliary heat kicks in. The Filtrete Wi-Fi thermostats they sell at Home Depot have this.

I added an outdoor lockout thermostat to my heat pump that keeps the auxillary heat strip off, unless it's below 30 degrees outside. If you dont want to go that far, usually you can just shut the heat strip off at the unit.

That seems unnecessary if you keep your home at a constant temperature. The auxiliary heat only kicks in to close large (>2 degrees F is typical) differences between target and current temperature. During normal operation with the thermostat at a fixed temperature they should never get used.

Also, if you have a heat pump, you never want to keep the house below 65 degrees in the winter. It takes way too long for a heat pump to recover on its own.

My uncle used to complain of high power bills with his heat pump and he was one of those people that would let the house get ice cold at night and then get up in the morning, throw the thermostat way up and was running heat pump and strip heat. Very very expensive! After a lesson from me, their power bill dropped to half of what it was.

An intelligent thermostat understands nighttime setback and can gently raise the temperature in the morning without going to auxiliary heat. My old Honeywell thermostats had this feature. They would learn how long it took to hit the target temp in the morning, and start running the heat pump before then so the target temp was hit at the scheduled time. I never used this feature though. Heat pumps are less efficient as the outside temperature drops, so if you have a nighttime setback, you are usually asking the heat pump to raise the temperature a few degrees at the time of day when it is the least efficient. Not much energy savings over just keeping the home a constant temp.

[tiger08]

You and I may understand the whole principal but how many people actually keep their house one constant temperature, not many,

As far as the emergency heat setting, most of our units here only have a 5 KW 17,000 Btu heat strip, not near enough to heat the house in a compressor fail situation.

Heat strips also run during defrost, this is why I mentioned setting the defrost cycle to 90 minutes. Not to mention, we dont need frequent defrosts here.

Many heat pumps in this valley, are not setup to be as efficient as yours and mine are and alot of people just dont understand the principal of how they work and how to set the the stat up to slow heat strip run time.

I had to have an outdoor lockout, because we do large temerature changes on our thermostat and you can only do so much on the stat to shorten strip time.