If you live in Ortonville, Lake Orion, Oakland Twp., Leonard, or Southeast Michigan in general and your home uses a heat pump in combination with a furnace or boiler, then you’re well positioned for improved comfort and savings. However, the way a heat pump works is quite different from the principles upon which forced-air systems, like a gas furnace, function. So it’s important to know how to operate the heat pump’s thermostat to maximize its capabilities.
A heat pump is designed to take advantage of heat already in the air and supply that heat to your homes interior or exhaust it to your homes exterior, depending on the season. In that way, it is very energy efficient. However, because it relies on heat that exists in the air, when temperatures drop below freezing, the backup supplemental heating system cycles on, which is a far less efficient system.
Heat pumps are also different because they are designed to produce a low but even heat consistently throughout the day. This is different from the blasts of hot air that furnaces emit when they cycle on.
With these two principles in mind, you can use your thermostat more efficiently.
- In order to operate the thermostat correctly, while staying comfortable, you’ll need to limit how frequently the backup heat cycles on.
- Heat pumps don’t function well with setbacks. By the nature of their design, heat pumps already operate efficiently, so they work best when the thermostat is kept at the lowest comfortable setting, which remains consistent throughout the day.
- If you’re going to setback the temperature setting, limit it to a single degree; otherwise the backup heat will likely cycle on. This happens because when the indoor actual temperature and the thermostat set temperature are more than 2 to 3 degrees different, the backup heat is called into action automatically by the thermostat’s factory settings. These settings are typically factory defined and permanently set.
- If you want to schedule setbacks, you need a special thermostat, equipped with a feature called adaptive recovery. It will read the indoor temperature, the set temperature, and use the heat-pump system to restore the temperature, while locking out the supplemental heat source (e.g. furnace, boiler, or electric heat).
Take your heat pump’s efficiency to peak capacity and use the thermostat wisely. If you’d like help selecting a heat pump or thermostat device, give the Ortonville, Lake Orion, Oakland Twp., and Leonard area experts at Aladdin Heating & Cooling a call today! Serving Oakland, Macomb, and Wayne Counties since 1945.
Our goal is to help educate our customers about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about heat pumps and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.
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