Reply number 51
On any heat pump I’ve ever lived with. I always lock out the back up resistance heat. It really lowers the operating cost to do so a lot of times the heat pump in the winners going into a defrost cycle in the automatically turn on the resistance heat so you don’t have any cool air blowing around for a few minutes. I don’t mind that when you look at the cost so I’ve locked out the electric heat.
I did this on my former partners system over 10 years ago. I put a switch on the side of the air handler. I said if you ever feel like you need more heat, go down and change it. He’s never used the resistance heat in over 10 years.
Normally, I find you can turn the air conditioning off when you’re gone and save energy, depending on the power of your cooling system and help well sealed your home is usually your home will not get all that humid. If you leave everything closed up, then when you get home, you can turn the cooling back on, you do save a considerable amount of energy doing this, but it depends on the power of your system and your house if it will work for you or not.
John