Air Conditioning Heat Pumps
Heating at home accounts for more than 60 per cent of a home's energy cost which makes them the best place to look for savings with spiraling energy cost.
Conventional Electrical Heating
Some conventional electrical heating can be 100% efficient. If you put one kilowatt of electricity into an electric heater, you get one kilowatt of heat out. So, as long as the heat isn't being wasted, you may assume the only way to make savings is to turn the heater down.
Heat Pump Vs Conventional Electrical Heating
With heat pumps, as an alternative form of electrical heating, it can give you more than 4 times the efficiency of a conventional electrical heating. This means, if you put one kilowatt of electricity into a heat pump, you get at least 3 kilowatt of heat out.
Inverter Heat Pump
Even better is the Inverter heat pump which pumps out over three times more energy than the traditional heat pumps, in the form of heat, than they consume. Impossible? Not at all. The pump simply transfers the heat from somewhere else. They pump warm air from the air outside into the house - hence the term 'heat pump'.
How Does a Heat Pump Work
Conventional heaters power is converted into heat whilst heat pumps power the pump that circulates the liquid through the system. It works the same way as your refrigerator. The heat pump in your fridge takes the warm air from inside the fridge and releases it outside which is why the back of your fridge is warm. And it continues to work even when the inside is colder than the outside.
The heat pump warms the home the same way. Even on cold days, the heat pump can extract warm air from the cold air outside and transfer it into a heated room, just as your fridge keeps extracting heat from your freezer even when it's below zero. The heat pump can still warm your home when the air outside is below zero degree.
Heat Pump also an Air Conditioning
As if that isn’t enough, heat pumps can be ‘reversed’ to provide cooling on hot days in the summer. Say air conditioning to most people and they will think of big noisy boxes, but they are a thing of the past. A modern inverter air conditioning runs as quietly as a desktop fan. At as low as 28 decibels, it's quiet enough to hear a pin drop.
Cost of Heat Pumps
Heat pumps with high COP’s use 1000 watts to produce the same electricity needed to run 2 x 2 kw heaters . Therefore the running cost is less than half that of gas and a quarter of traditional electric heating. Heat pumps cost more to install than conventional electric heaters but they pay for themselves with running costs that are about half those of gas or electric heating and less than a fifth of an LPG heater. Heating in winter, cooling in summer, they also filter the air to remove irritants like pollen and dust, see our Plasma Air Conditioning - and they work as dehumidifiers as well. You can save on costs of buying several different units, making a domestic heat pump air-conditioner a very cost effective package during the credit crunch.
