Why does this heat pump stay on so long?

This system has a single-stage heat pump that seems to run differently than all of my other heat pump systems. This one runs for a long time, coming very close to the heat setpoint over and over again, but then dropping off and doing it again. If I zoom in to the highest zoom level I can see in the tooltip that there are brief intervals when the system is off, but they don’t show in the graph at all.

Does this look normal?

There’s an issue with the charting where short bursts (less than 5 minutes I believe) don’t show up properly. This normally isn’t an issue as those are rare.

In your case, I’d be a bit concerned. The heat pump cycling that quickly can damage it. It’s probably mostly fine, but I would look at increasing your heat differential to help with that.

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Heat pump going into defrost perhaps.

The only thing about that is that the ecobee doesn’t know about the defrost cycle so that shouldn’t even show up.

But, it might show up in the temp readings as a drop while the system is heating.

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