Residential HVAC (Heat Pump) question

72Dinger said
If your tstat has an emergency heat or aux heat setting you can flip to it. That will engage the electric heat strips directly. You won't have to freeze, but it might lighten your wallet if you have to rely on it for a few days.

If the tstat is set up correctly, in normal heating mode, after a fixed period of time during which it does not see an increase in temp running heat pump, it will automatically engage the electric (or other backup) heat. It will keep backup heat engaged until it reaches setpoint, then let heat pump take over.

That's what I ended up doing last night. If I left it on normal heat mode it would run the blower for a long time waiting for the pump to kick on which obviously never happened then finally kicked on the emergency electric heater. I tried leaving it set to 67° but that was too cold for me to fall asleep so I bumped it to 68°. I turned it back to 66° this morning before leaving for work as I currently live alone, aside from my 2 cats. Tonight I'm going to set up my space heater in my bedroom and see if I can set the thermostat lower.

Probably a dumb question but is there any way to check or "unstick" the TXV from the outside? I can see it in the outdoor unit, ironically it looks brand new, same with the filter-drier...