I have lived in the Midwest of the country for the majority of my life.
What that means for me, as an HVAC technician, is that I have a lot of furnace service calls in the winter.
The winters tend to get pretty rough out in that part of the country and that means that they take the “health” of their furnace very seriously. When I moved here, where the winters are much more moderate, I found that furnaces were not nearly as popular as they were in the Midwest. In fact, heat pumps were almost all I had to work on. I had never really worked on a heat pump before. Well, I guess that’s not true. Technically, air conditioners are a form of heat pumps (except the heat only goes one direction, and that is outside of the house). The heat pumps that I’m referring to would replace the air conditioning and furnace systems with just one unit. Heat pumps can either pull the hot air out of the house- like an air conditioner- or pump hot air in- like a furnace. Heat pumps are better about efficiency and keeping that heating and cooling bill low, but they don’t get the house as warm as a furnace would. However, like I said before, it’s moderate here so there’s really no need to have the level of heating that a furnace can provide. I have a heat pump in my own home, and I love it! It makes it so much easier to only worry about one heating and cooling unit. I will admit, though, sometimes I do miss the toasty heat of a furnace.