[{OF}G_Man]

Yes definately would want to turn up your thermostat in the summer when you are gone. This saves big bucks. It more than compensates for the recovery time when you do get home and set your thermostat back down. A programmable thermostat for AC summer time is a very good thing since it does it for you automatically in case you forget to adjust it manually.

In summer, heat pump systems run just like a standard air conditioner would.

One thing about design with heat pumps. Since heat pumps do both heating and cooling, when a heat pump system is sized correctly for heating capacity, it is almost always oversized on the air conditioning side since it uses the same compressor for both. This is just the nature of the design. It's not necessarily a bad thing, just the facts of heat pump design.

For heating, if you could program you programmable thermostat to increase the temperature setpoint one degree at a time from your lower set back temperature, you could then slowly warm the house back up, without kicking on the electric strip heater. So if you set back your thermostat to 66 while you were gone to work, you would to need to program your thermostat to raise the setpoint 1 degree at a time over a period of time in steps to get the house up to say 70 by the time you get home. Many programmable stats have limited amount of schedules you can put in, but you might want to look at that.