Learning about the heat pump the hard way
My wife and I are recent transplants to the land of the heat pump. Well, I suppose there are many other regions which rely on a heat pump to provide quality heating and air. But we live in a region where the heat pump is pretty exclusively used for the HVAC cooling process. While there is a bit of winter here, it simply doesn’t qualify as anything that we were accustomed to in our old region. We lived year in and year out with a gas furnace running night and day during the deep cold of the winter months. I don’t think even a heat pump would have been up to the job quite the way the gas furnace was. But thankfully, that is all behind us now and we enjoy the type of mild winter that brief periods of heating from the heat pump take care of. But it has taken some getting accustomed to having a heat pump. Our only air conditioning needed way up north was a few window air conditioners that I put in for the worst midday summer heat. And that wasn’t all that anyway. There just wasn’t that much call for air conditioning of any kind up there. So when we got down here, the HVAC cabinet on the outside of the house was not exactly recognizable to my wife. And she ended up using it as a bit of a shelf or table while gardening one day. She covered up the HVAC cabinet so much that it nearly choked out the heat pump due to air flow restriction. It wasn’t the best situation but at least we both learned that the HVAC cabinet outside has to be totally obstruction free.