  We discuss the properties of a model incorporating both a scalar electroweak
Higgs doublet and an electroweak Higgs triplet. We construct the low-energy
effective theory for the light Higgs-doublet in the limit of small (but
nonzero) deviations in the rho parameter from one, a limit in which the triplet
states become heavy. For small deviations in the rho parameter from one,
perturbative unitarity of WW scattering breaks down at a scale inversely
proportional to the renormalized vacuum expectation value of the triplet field
(or, equivalently, inversely proportional to the square-root of the deviation
of the rho parameter from one). This result imposes an upper limit on the
mass-scale of the heavy triplet bosons in a perturbative theory; we show that
this upper bound is consistent with dimensional analysis in the low-energy
effective theory. Recent articles have shown that the triplet bosons do not
decouple, in the sense that deviations in the rho parameter from one do not
necessarily vanish at one-loop in the limit of large triplet mass. We clarify
that, despite the non-decoupling behavior of the Higgs-triplet, this model does
not violate the decoupling theorem since it incorporates a large dimensionful
coupling. Nonetheless, we show that if the triplet-Higgs boson masses are of
order the GUT scale, perturbative consistency of the theory requires the
(properly renormalized) Higgs-triplet vacuum expectation value to be so small
as to be irrelevant for electroweak phenomenology.
