I finally moved across the country for the first time this year. It wasn’t my plan, but my husband and I were forced into a tough situation when his former employer filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. He had to look for work within his industry in any city through the United States to cast as wide of a net as humanly possible. At first we thought that we’d be forced to compromise and move someplace up north where it feels like the arctic tundra for a good part of the year, but the opposite ended up being the case. We had to relocate to an extremely hot and humid area in the south. Sadly, we don’t have the benefit of living close to the ocean and having the sea breezes to contend with as some agent against the sun’s rays. It’s downright miserable down here in July and August when temperatures reach their apex in the afternoon hours for the entire year. However, this might lead you to mistakenly assuming that we don’t have a need for indoor heating during our winter seasons. That simply isn’t true, especially this last year when temperatures got down to 30 degrees for a few days in a row during late January. We were trying to get by with the electric furnace coil in our central HVAC system, but it’s extremely inefficient and expensive to run. Getting a heat pump was a fantastic idea because now we’re getting somewhere close to 300% efficiency during the heating cycles. Since our winters never get colder than 30 degrees, there’s no need for a secondary or emergency heat source to supplement the heat pump.