What is a heat pump?
Heat pumps are often misunderstood or not understood at all. Because
of this, you may not realize that there may be a better heating and cooling option
than a furnace or air conditioner.
A heat pump is an efficient method of cooling your home in the summer and
warming it in the winter. Although heat pumps are new to many people, they have
been around for over three decades.
Although its name is a little misleading, a heat pump is an efficient method of
heating a home during the cold winter months and also cooling it during the
blistering summer months.
A heat pump looks like an air conditioner, but that's only the outside
appearance. It actually has two functions based on the same principles for both. In
warm weather situations, the heat pump works as a normal air conditioner. It
extracts heat from inside the home and transfers it to the outdoor air. In colder
weather, however, the process reverses, collecting heat from the outdoor air and
transferring it inside your home.
Even when the air outside feels extremely cold, the air still contains some
heat. The heat pump pulls the heat from this cold outdoor air and sends it inside
to warm your home. When there is not enough heat in the outside air to meet the
demand of the thermostat setting, an electric heater supplements the outdoor air to
warm the home.
While many people find the winter operation of a heat pump the most difficult to
understand, it is during the heating cycle that the heat pump produces the most
savings. Unlike a furnace that turns fossil fuel or electricity into heat, the heat
pump collects heat that already exists in the outdoor air by means of its
refrigeration cycle. Consequently, a heat pump will produce two to three times more
heat than the energy it uses.
In addition, a heat pump can be an effective add-on option to use in conjunction
with an existing gas furnace. With a dual-fuel system, the two systems share the
heating load but never function at the same time. Each system operates when it is
most cost effective. The heat pump will be the primary heating and cooling system.
However, when the temperature drops below the heat pump's ability to operate
as efficiently as the gas furnace, the gas furnace will take over until the
temperature rises enough for the heat pump to operate more efficiently.
Let your local Service Experts sales and service center show you additional
benefits of owning a heat pump and see if a dual-fuel system is right for your
home.
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