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.
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.
There are two issues here. The one is how the heat pump is performing, the other is how ecobee/beestat is capturing/reporting the data. For the first, I’m envious. Newer heat pumps use inverters and logic to modulate their output. An ideal heat pump would run 24/7, supplying just the amount of heat that the house is losing. Jon Z seems to be focusing on the 2pm-3pm period.
For newer heat pumps, single stage really only refers to what the thermostat is telling it. The heat pump has its own algorithm to control its output based on its ability to know the outside temperature and the incoming and outgoing fluid temperatures (at least ideally).
