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So May would not be the typical time to start asking questions about heat pumps with respect to their heating efficiency, but here's one anyway:
Our electric bills have been excessively high during the winter. We have a Carrier heat pump which heats/cools the second floor of our home. Gas furnace and inline AC unit heat/cool the first floor.
The Carrier heat pump was installed around 2007. Shortly after installation, we thought it would be a good idea (in retrospect probably not) to have a programmable thermostat instead of the one installed by the HVAC company.
Would it be plausible that the off-the-shelf programmable thermostat (designed for a furnace) would cause the heat pump to run only in auxiliary or emergency mode, heating off the strips, rather than using the pump itself?
Bingo! Heat pumps have a pretty low tolerance of temperature variation before the emergency heat strips very expensively kick in. If you really want to go programmable, you need to find one that is specifically designed for heat pumps. In its tiny little computer brain, there is a mathematical algorithm that carefully finesses the heat pump system so you can go up and down with temperatures by more than a degree or two without the emergency heat being triggered.
And the heat pump is a system that's designed to work best at a stable temperature. We've had both the specific for heat pumps programmable thermostats and the non-programmable thermostats, and haven't really noticed an energy use difference between the two in winter.
Extremely unlikely that any modern heat pump (made after about 1980) would be incompatible with any off.the shelf programmable thermostat.
Now the fact is that an amateur could screw up the install AND could very easily attempt to dial in so much set back that the system will end up calling for more heat and/or cause the other unit to run longer.
Any time you have.multiple units.to balance it makes sense to hire a firm.that has tools to accurately audit energy usage and then balance total systems.
They're compatible in the sense that you can easily connect them to the heat pump. It's just that most programmables not labeled 'for heat pump' lack the finesse to take advantage of the heat pump's strength and tend to get caught up in its one big weakness. (tendency to kick on the emergency heat too quickly when it tries to increase air temperature)
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