If you’ve recently swapped a gas boiler for a heat pump, one of the biggest adjustments may have nothing to do with the technology itself. It’s learning to use your heating differently.The temptation is to treat a heat pump just like the boiler it replaced: turn the thermostat down when you go out, crank it up when the house feels cold and expect the radiators to get piping hot within minutes.But heat pumps generally work best when they provide heat more steadily and at lower temperatures. Getting a few basic settings wrong may mean your system has to work harder than necessary, which could leave you paying more money to heat your home.Keep reading to discover some heat-pump habits worth reconsidering.Stop cranking the thermostat up and downWith a gas boiler, you may be used to turning the heating up by several degrees when you feel cold and expecting the house to warm quickly.A heat pump typically works differently. Rather than delivering short blasts of very hot water to your radiators, it generally heats your home more gradually.Phil Steele, future technologies evangelist at Octopus Energy, says one of the biggest boiler habits to leave behind is “that tendency to whack it up three degrees in the evening and then turn it back down again.”“A heat pump prefers a steadier heat because it is a slower heat,” he says.That doesn’t necessarily mean your heating has to stay at exactly the same temperature around the clock. Instead, smaller adjustments and a more considered schedule can help avoid asking your heat pump to repeatedly bring a cold home rapidly back up to temperature.Newer heat pumps that are capable of operating at higher flow temperatures can give homeowners more flexibility than some older systems, Steele adds, but the basic principle remains: think gradual rather than on-off.Don’t switch it off every time you leave the houseThe same logic applies when you go out. Turning your heating completely off for a few hours can allow the fabric of your home to cool significantly. When you return, the heat pump then has to make up all of that lost heat.Reducing the thermostat slightly can be a better approach than switching the system off altogether, particularly during colder weather.Steele recommends being more considered about when a heat pump runs. You can, for instance, programme it to start warming the house earlier in the morning rather than expecting an instant burst of heat when you wake up.The right schedule will depend on your property, your heat pump and how your household uses the home, so it is worth experimenting gradually rather than making any dramatic changes.Pay attention to your flow temperatureOne of the most important heat-pump settings is one that many boiler owners may never have thought about: the flow temperature.This is the temperature of the water leaving the heat pump and travelling through your heating system. Generally, heat pumps can operate more efficiently when they can keep that temperature relatively low.That doesn’t mean you should simply turn the flow temperature down as far as possible. Your ideal setting depends on factors including the heat loss from your home and the size of your radiators, and settings configured by the installer shouldn’t be changed arbitrarily.If your heat pump appears to be operating at a consistently high flow temperature, however, it may be worth asking your installer whether the system or its weather-compensation settings could be optimised.And don’t assume something is wrong simply because your radiators no longer feel as hot as they did with a boiler. A heat pump can keep a home comfortable while the radiators themselves feel comparatively lukewarm.Get your hot-water schedule rightIf your heat pump also heats a hot-water cylinder, the times at which you ask it to produce hot water is important, too.A heat pump will typically provide either space heating or hot water at a given time, rather than doing both simultaneously. That means heating your cylinder during a period when you also want the house to warm up can temporarily interrupt your space heating.Steele says he avoids this in his own home by scheduling the hot-water tank to heat between around midnight and 3am, and then again from midday until 3pm.“That means I have a full hot-water tank in the morning,” he says, with the second period topping it up again during the afternoon. “You need to think about the right schedule to decide when to produce hot water… without affecting your comfort level from heating.”If you are on a time-of-use electricity tariff, scheduling hot water during cheaper periods can also help reduce running costs.Match your heating schedule to your electricity tariffOptimising a heat pump isn’t only about using fewer kilowatt-hours. It can also mean choosing when you use them.Octopus’s Cosy tariff, for instance, offers cheaper electricity during several periods of the day, which gives heat-pump owners the option to warm their home or heat their hot-water cylinder when electricity is cheaper.This can create a trade-off. In some circumstances, you might use slightly more electricity by deliberately warming your home ahead of a more expensive period, yet still spend less overall because you bought more of that energy at the cheaper rate.In other words, the settings that produce the lowest electricity consumption aren’t necessarily the same settings that produce the lowest bill.Don’t panic over one day’s efficiency figureFinally, resist the temptation to constantly adjust your settings because your heat pump’s efficiency looks worse on a cold day.Most heat pumps report a coefficient of performance, or COP, showing how much heat they produce for each unit of electricity they consume. But that figure naturally changes with conditions.Steele says a heat pump might show a COP of around 2.8 during colder winter weather, compared with 3.5 in summer. If you have only recently had a system installed, seeing that lower winter number might make its performance look worse than it really is.“You might look at it and get worried, thinking ‘Oh gosh, it’s going to be 2.8 all year,’” he says.This is why Steele recommends also looking at the seasonal coefficient of performance, or SCOP, which averages performance over a much longer period.“I might get 2.8 in the winter, and I get 3.5 in the summer,” he says. “Knowing what that seasonal figure is is more interesting than what the instant efficiency is.”In other words, don’t judge the success of your settings from a single cold day. Longer-term performance gives you a much better indication of how efficiently your system is actually running.