> I am not sure about "always". Does it not depend on the temperature difference? My understanding: A heat pump is always better than resistive electric heatin

> I am not sure about "always". Does it not depend on the temperature difference? My understanding: A heat pump is always better than resistive electric heating. Sometimes a outside air using heat pump needs to use extra energy to defrost the outside unit (with resistive electric heating). The defrosting is driven by sensors, but rarely happens more than e.g. once an hour for 5 minutes at a time. Heat pumps really do win over resistive electric heating on everything except initial cost, and that's not even hard -- resistive electric heating is very wasteful.