We got our first heat pump estimate today; the company is suggesting a 4-ton Daikin Fit system, which uses an inverter to provide variable speed airflow and reduce the temperature variation. Its SEER (cooling efficiency) is 18 and its HSPF (heating efficiency) is 10.

I also was able to download data for the past year from Ecobee (our thermostat) and found that the burner in the furnace was on for 275 hours and the compressor in the air conditioning was running for 127 hours during 2022.

I hoped to use this data to figure out how much power the heat pump would draw during the year, but I’m confused. The heat pump would not be cycling the way our existing system does – but it also wouldn’t be running full-bore when it’s operating. If I use the calculators at LearnMetrics, I get usage of 4.8 kWh per hour during heating season and 2.67 kWh per hour during cooling season – assuming 5 months of heating and 5 of cooling, that totals nearly 9,000 kWh for the year, which seems insanely high, given that the biggest solar system that’s been proposed to us only generates 10,000 kWh during the year.

I must be missing something.

I was researching yet another program to watch and organize my media, Infuse Pro – I was mostly looking to see how well it is supposed to work with Blu-Ray rips. The first link I found took me to the AppleTV subreddit. It didn’t answer my question, but I saw a few interesting items in the “Similar to this Post” sidebar, one of which talked about a new Apple TV Remote bug that arrived with tvOS 16.3. I read that post and went on about my business.

Tonight, we wanted to watch an episode of All Creatures Great and Small, which meant firing up the PBS app on the Apple TV. There was one small problem – the picture (and the “on” light on the Apple TV) kept blinking on and off every couple of seconds.I didn’t have that problem on any other input, which made me hope that the problem was the Apple TV. And then I remembered the post I’d read this morning – sure enough, I’d run into the same problem (the remote gets stuck and repeats a command – in my case, the on/off button).

I rebooted the remote following the procedure in the article (press and hold the TV/control center and Volume down buttons for 10 seconds), and then I power-cycled the Apple TV for good measure, and all was right with the world again. So far, anyway.