MarkECIN, I don't know if you're still having trouble with your electric heating strips coming on too often, but if you are you might check that your water lines to the geothermal unit aren't freezing. Our unit is in an uninsulated attic area and we had some really cold days right after getting it installed. When the lines froze, the geothermal heat stopped working, when they thawed, it started working again. This can make it difficult to diagnose! If this is the cause the solution is wrapping the pipes or possibly building an insulated closet around your unit.
We're using a Climatemaster and we had our HVAC guy set us up so that the heat strips never come on automatically. Our thermostats (honeywell touch screens) still shift between indicating "heat" and "aux heat" as if they're using the auxiliary heat strips when needed, but it's really always using only the geothermal. If we ever decide we need the electric heat for some reason we can manually switch to "emergency heat" on our thermostat. I think this is a much better set up since if the geothermal isn't working or keeping up for some reason I'd rather find out by getting too cold than by a huge electric bill a month later. Of course, this might not be a good idea if you're leaving a house unattended during cold weather, but for us it works great.
