I have a lot to ask her but thought it's worth a shot. It has to do with
the house not heating well.

Last August we moved into a single family home (2 years old), which has a
number of heating/cooling systems.

The upper floor has a heat pump, presumably in the attic. When we had the
home inspected I followed the guy into the attic where he pointed out the
unit. My assumption is that this unit handles the heating/cooling of the
2nd story. It has a thermostat in the master bedroom and appears to work
fine when the outside temp is above 20 degrees or so. I'm not worried about
this system.

The main floor and basement are handled by several systems, and it's here I
have questions. There are two units outside, one of which appears to be a
dedicated air conditioner and a second unit that's a heat pump. We also
have propane furnace/air handler. These units were controlled by a
mercury-based manual thermostat, but I replaced it with a Honeywell RTH7400D
programmable thermostat using the same wires (4 wires: g,w,y,r). For what
it's worth, the propane also provides the heated water and a gas fireplace.

Here are the questions:

1. Is the heat pump the primary heat source and the propane secondary, or
the opposite? The inspection report calls the propane the primary source,
but that doesn't seem right, and the seasonal contractor we had inspect the
unit recently said the propane "appeared" to be the secondary. If it's not
all that cold outside, the heat pump is on, but not the propane, for
example. Today, at 16 degrees, both units run. And struggles to maintain
70.

2. The thermostat required a setup before programming the 7 days of the
week. One of the steps was choosing the heating/cooling system. There are
10 choices:
- heating and cooling (conventional)
- single stage heat pump with no backup or auxilliary heat
- heat only with no fan (conventional)
- heat only with fan (conventional)
- hot water heat only (conventional)
- Cool only (conventional)
- multistage heat pumps
- multistage conventional heating and cooling (2 stages heat and 2 stages
cool: requires w/w2 and y/y2 wires)
- multistage conventional heating and cooling (2 stages of heat and 1 stage
cool)
- multistage conventional heating and cooling (1 stage heat and 2 stages of
cool)

Right now I have it on the first setting.

3. What are the "stages" regarding heating systems as referred to above? My
assumption is that a heat pump with emergency/auxilliary heat is a
multistage heat pump (like the one in our attic for the second floor) but
does it also refer to a secondary heating source like natural gas, oil or
propane? If I had a W2 wire I suspect the 9th choice would be the most
appropriate but I just had the 4 wires mentioned above. After calling
Honeywell, the person agreed that the first choice seemed the most
appropriate.

4. I have heard twice now that heat pump/propane heat systems work just fine
if you leave the temperature constant throughout the day/week, but have
trouble with "recovery" when you let it dip in the evening and try to reheat
in the morning when everyone rises. This seems to be the problem with these
systems and programmable thermostats. Today I programmed every day and
every "event" to the same temp to see if this pans out over the next few
days.

I AM going to get the HVAC contractor out here again, at my expense, to pick
his brain in person, since I wasn't at home when he did the initial
inspection for us. However, any insight to the above beforehand would be of
great help. Thanks in advance.

John