rnwalsh... I an not in the hvac field, but I have owned heat pumps for the past 18 years and from what you're describing, I think you may have something wrong. In my experience you're strip heat or auxillary heat should only come on when (1) the heat pump itself is not able to satisfy the temp set at the thermostat or (2) when you manually turn the elec. heat on at the thermostat. Of course your aux heat may be coming on when your heat pumps go into defrost. But from what I think your describing, the strip heat comes on first, then shuts off, but your outside unit / condensor never kicks on. I believe that's something you should have checked... Good thing is if you only had the unit installed last year your warranty should still be in play. Good luck.

Roland

That definitely sounds like a problem. The way the heat pump should work is that it should try to run on heat pump only operation. If that can't satisfy the heating requirement in a certain amount of time, then it turns on the backup heat.
There are a variety of settings that control the behavior. For example, the aux lockout can be set to prevent the aux heat from coming on whenever the temperature is above some set value, like 30F.

Anyway, you need to get your system checked out, something is wrong.