|
Posted by Uhh Clem on November 2, 2009, 7:21 pm
>I am thinking of setting my thermostat to single stage this winter The
>heat pump is two stage but the heating bill is very high the months when
>the second stage kicks on (and it kicks on a lot). Is it ok to do this or
>will it make it worse or cause a problem?
Personally, I lock out all of my own electric strip heating ( including upon
defrost ) up until the point where the outdoors temps drop into the mid
teens which is where our heat pump simply cannot maintain target temperature
even though running constantly....the result here in SW WA( since we are
primarily sized for heating load instead of cooling ) is about a 40%
reduction in electric costs.
Once it gets to this point though it actually does get to be a bit more
tricky ( and also gets even more tricky to try and explain )...short story
is that when you finally do bring in the electric strips you need to be
aware of the effect of "recovery time" and understand that if you are
running any "nightime" or "away from home" programmed temp setbacks" then
they need to be a fairly severe temp drop and also of a rather long duration
or else you can actually end up losing whatever gains you might have
otherwise gotten...for this reason, it's better to have total installed
wattage of heat strips towards the high side whenever possible.
--
| 
Yahoo! 
Google 
Windows Live 
del.icio.us 
digg 
Netscape 
XML Sitemap