What is a heat pump?
An air source heat pump is an electrical device that draws heat from the outside air or ground during the heating season and dumps heat outside during the summer cooling season. A heat pump is essentially similar to the cooling system on your refrigerator, except that it is fully reversible, so heat pumps can provide year-round climate control for your home – heating in winter and cooling in the summer. As such, heat pumps are generally a more cost effective solution for homeowners than air conditioning only, and heat pumps are in certain cases eligible for utility company and/or government rebates. A heat pump generally requires that the home have a ducting system throughout the home, and a fan system to circulate air through the ducting, which is typically supplied by the furnace fan system. In cases where there is no ductwork, there are also high efficiency ductless heat pump solutions available. Complete Home Energy can provide you with a free home energy assessment, and discuss th
It is a machine, which transfers heat (energy) from one medium to another. I.e. we can link a heat pump to the heat recovery system (forced air ventilation system). If the house is already very warm the house does not need the heat from the exhausted air put back into the house to further raise the temperature. We do not want to lose this heat (energy) so we need to find a way to store it for future use. We can do this by linking the HRS to the heat pump and the unwanted energy is put into water (Heat store or heat sink) for future use as space heating or domestic water. Geothermic heating systems use a heat pump to take the heat from the ground to use within the house. Air to Air heat pumps work by taking the ambient energy within the air temperature and putting it into water.
A heat pump is similar to an air conditioner in the sense that it pumps refrigerant through copper line sets removing heat from your home’s air and pumping outside through the condenser, resulting in a cooling effect. What makes a heat pump a heat pump is that it has a reversing valve that can reverse the flow of refrigerant. With reversing in mind, the heat pump is now removing heat from the outside air and pumping it to the indoor coil which transfers the heat into your home’s air, resulting in a heating effect. The heat pump is powered by electricity rather than fuel which will significantly reduce your energy bill. The heat pump system is very efficient, even more efficient than a furnace, but it can only produce so much heat. There is a point in temperature outside when the heat pump can not keep up with the amount of heat that your home loses. That point is called the “balance point” and it is determined by how much heat your heat pump is producing compared to how much heat your
By reversing the flow of refrigerant in a system, a heat pump converts itself from a cooling unit to a heating unit too. When a heat pump unit is cooling, it is actually removing heat from the air we feel. They use a condenser, and evaporator and a blower to basically move the heat from one place (inside the house) to another place (outside). The refrigerant is what is used to carry the heat along. A reversing valve in a heat pump allows this system to operate the other way when in heating mode, switching the roles of the evaporator and the condenser and bringing heat from outside into your home. Even when it is cold outside, there is heat that the unit can use to pump into your home – but when it gets really cold, electric heating elements inside the system engage to supplement the process. Even with the addition of electric heating to this operation, the heat pump process is far more energy efficient than electricity alone to produce heat for the home.
