Good advice. Some people in hvac are not well trained,especially in the south .

Most contractors don’t consider location of heat pump.A lot of times they put the heat pump is a place that gets direct sun for most of the day. They leave the job and the customer pays a elevated bill going forward.

Yes heat does not change .Heat just moves to a new location. From where you don’t want it to a new location where you want it.

A lot to read through. Seems you did your home work. It’s tough to get a good contractor. You do not need a phd to do this type of work. Basic education and havoc school is fine. Many people over think hvac it’s not rocket science.

https://gegcalculators.com/heat-pump-lockout-temperature-calculator/

That’s apparently what happened with mine. They didn’t follow the specs for distance from wall and ceiling, and now the units stop running way before the set temp because we are recirculating the cold air from the units back into the coils. Moral of the story is do not trust people who say they understand the system they are installing unless you talk to other people who have the same system installed by them in the same climate and configuration.

Also the last post mentioned a hot attic… We realized the top of our 10′ ceilings are about 15 degrees warmer than the bottom. Do reversing ceiling fans really help that problem?

Yes I can speak to that because like many trac homes, I am about 10 feet from my neighbor. They replaced a very noisy single stage AC with a Carrier Heat pump. It’s the syle with two large horizontal fans. Their lot is about 4 feet below mine so most of the fan exhaust is into a 4 foot tall cement retaining wall. There’s also a 5 foot vinyl fence on my lot that does little to block noise. All of the ground around this HP is cement and sits on a prefab slam with just a bunch of stacked rubber washers meant to shim it level and maybe issolate it a bit. Lots of noise paths and echos. But they are really not issolation dampers at all. This model, 38MUR is reported to be quiet, 60 dB or so. But it is not really that quiet and it runs in reverse at the highest speed after each cycle to “clean the condenser”. This has been confirmed by Carrier. I’ve measured about 76 dB in this mode aimed directly at the side of the my living room wall. I had another owner of this model contact me to tell that his unit wakes him up at night evertime it ends it’s cycle with this high speed cleaning run!

I’ve also determined that the offending frequencies that get thru my wall are around 41 hz and 125 hz. Virtually nothing I can do short of rebuilding my entire dining and living room will address and block low frequency. I can hear their HP 30 feet across my house in my family room while eating or watching TV when it’s running max rpms. And it’s ecobee thermostat insures that it is no longer variable speed.

Mass loaded vinyl in the walls might help but I would need to do all of them or a another layer of dry wall sanwithching acoustic green glue. I would then also have to convert all the double pane windows to triple pane or acoustic glass. I did build a 5.5′ X 7′ cinder block wall filled with sand against the vinyl fence that only reduced the sound level in my house by about 4 dB and didn’t do much about the low frequency sound. And I knew this was not going to help with all the reflections but hoped the sand would help some with the low frequency, which it did but not enough. I even thought about extending that 4 foot retaining wall by a couple of feet but low frequency passes very easily thru concrete and in this case around as well. My Carrier 5 stage AC exhausting upward is a dream compared to this monstrosity and is only about 53 dB most of the time and never approaches much above 60 dB even running all 5 stages! I love the concept of a HP but not one placed like this one is and designed to transmit noise horizontally to nearby neighbors. Carrier and the installer say it’s not their problem and my neighbor is a bit too laid back to complain on my behalf. It’s on the other side of his laundry room so not a bother. It could have been installed about 10 feet further towards the street exhausting into my front yard and probably would have been a lot less offensive although maybe my large dining room front windows might have transmitting more of the sound.