Originally Posted by double vanos
Heat pump. Used in many mild climate areas......... I prefer a straight out A/C with a old school gas furnace to handle my climate control needs.......
This ^^^^^^^^
I had a heat pump / A/C unit in my home in Lake Havasu City, Az. And I'll never have another one. It's the worst of both worlds. They are expensive to run, (just like an A/C unit is), and you never get hot air out of them. They run and run when it's cold out, (just like your neighbors), and never deliver hot air out of the ducts. Barely luke warm air came out of the thing. And the colder it got, the worse it worked. I was stuck with it because natural gas was not available in my area.
When we moved into this house it had A/C, but with a gas fired heater. It's excellent, and can raise the indoor temp 10 degrees in just a few minutes. Not to mention it's much cheaper to run. My heat pump was so bad I thought there was something wrong with it. But all my neighbors had the exact same performance, (or rather lack of it), from their units. We eventually bought a couple of electric space heaters to compensate for the worthless performance of the heat pump. They warmed the house quicker, and they were much cheaper to run.