Thirty eight to four dollars and nobody told you for months is crazy.

That buried on page 8 thing got me. Back in March I showed up to our town board meeting cause they were voting on the budget and I wanted to ask about the library hours. Turned out they were also pushing through a new policy about what books could be in the kids section. Nobody said a word about it. I only caught it cause I flipped through the whole packet while waiting for my turn. It passed with zero discussion. The librarian later told me they got a list from a group three towns over. So yeah, these things hide in plain sight if you dont dig.

The placement might be your real issue, not the climate. A lot of people stick these things in a basement because that's where the old tank was, but a heat pump needs a decent amount of air volume around it and some way to get rid of the cold, damp air it blows out. In a tight basement, that air just recirculates and makes the unit work harder, which drags in the resistance heat. I had a neighbor in Cleveland with the same problem, and he ended up ducting the exhaust outside and putting a small vent in the door. His electric draw dropped by almost half after that. Might be worth checking if your installer even looked at the air flow setup, because the brochure math assumes a big open space, not a 800 square foot crawl space.