We got a heat pump put in about a year and a half ago. We kept the oil as backup for the days its too cold (which if I remember right it switches over to oil somewhere around 40 F.

Our situation is the opposite. The house feels more comfortable overall. Its still a little warmer upstairs where the home office and bedrooms are but generally around the house it feels a little more consistent.

You can definitely tell when the oil furnace kicks in as the air is noticably hotter. But when that happens the house gets warmer faster and gets a little too hot before it turns off again. And stays a little too hot for too long.

We went with a midrange system. In hindsight I do kind of wish we went with a different installer who was pushing a more "cadillac" type system where the fan (according to him) would always be (or just about) on but be variable in speed basically keeping the house at the right temp more often and slightly more savings.

It sounds like something is wrong with your installation. That behavior certainly isn't normal for heat pumps and I would get a new vendor. I had a heatpump in my Condo and those things were rock solid, from 20 degrees to 110 I never had issues. In my new house we have a gas furnace and are experiencing the same behavior this winter you describe where the programmed temp and the actual temp in the room wildly diverge.

Just this morning I woke up to it feeling chilly. The thermostat said it was 65 and the programmed temp was 68 but it wasn't running. When the furnace runs it works great but something is off with the controller system. I need to call the heating people....

I had my heat pump installed in Dec. The contractor really screwed up where they wired the zoning incorrectly - the upper floor thermo controlled the lower damper and vice versa, meaning that the pump would run almost indefinitely because the thermostat would never register the temp of the opposing floor.

It took me a full week to troubleshoot this (what helped was I bought a thermometer and placed it next to the thermostat to verify temperature readings) and when I realized what was happening, the contractor came and re-wired things, and now things work like how it should. The temperature stays consistent for both floors.

So definitely test your dampers.

> the upper floor thermo controlled the lower damper and vice versa

I have 2 floors with multiple units and I was running around with a wall thermometer taking measurements. This was actually my guess as well since the temperatures seemed to align this way. But the installer assured me it was wired correctly .... I might need to find someone else to check things.

My system is a Trane with a 1050xl thermostat and a companion thermostat. If you have one of those (or a related thermostat model), you can get into the service menu by going to "service" and holding down the tech access button for a period of time. There should be a damper check option in the menu which will allow you to trigger specific dampers and there are some other buttons that show you which dampers are hooked to what thermostat.

That is simply not normal. I have a heat pump downstairs (albeit a fancier Mitsubishi one) and it stays within one degree of the target temperature at all times. It's much more comfortable and stable than it was with the previous gas furnace or the gas furnace we still use for the upstairs, and it handled the temperature dropping into the low teens overnight with no issues.

8 degrees is not normal+/- 1 C is what I experience.

I'll put in another "not normal". I have a heat pump and the temperature stability seems better than the furnace. It takes longer to change but once it gets there it's very stable. With every AC system it can be a challenge to get different regions to be perfect but that shouldn't be worse with an air pump.

Did you check the hysteresis value? I've had similar issues with some radiators, and the hysteresis was set to 0 (don't know why it's even allowed), which caused it to run a lot more than normal.

If you have a mini-split, some of the remotes have a "follow me" feature, where it will go off the remote temperature instead of the indoor unit temperature (which is usually much higher since it's mounted close to the ceiling). Not sure if this applies to your situation. I found using the remote/follow me temperature worked better for me, since there are less fluctuations further away from the unit. But, you can't place it too far away or the IR on the remote doesn't work to report back the temp and control the indoor unit. It took some time to figure out, but now we leave it alone for the most part.

Do you have ducted or ductless system? They are different and can result in different experiences.

8 degrees is not normal+/- 1 C is what I experience

It's worth checking if room temperature is measured at the thermostat or at the return. It's a common issue with ducted Mitsubishi systems.

Also, a thermostat should be away from the air flow from supply registers to measure representative temperature