At #GetHeatPumped, we’re here to be your guide to exploring the full potential and joy of getting heat pumped.
What is a heat pump?
You’ve heard about heat pumps before. Sounds sexy, I know. But just what is a heat pump? And why is everybody talking about them all the time?
Air conditioning can pull heat from the inside and put it outside to keep the room cool. Heat pumps do the same thing, but they swing both ways. They can either pull heat from the inside and put it outside, or they can pull heat from outside even on the coldest days and put it inside.
That last bit sounds crazy on first glance, but that’s exactly what your refrigerator is doing. It’s taking heat out of something that’s already very cold and pulling it out into a pretty warm room. That’s the same way a heat pump works in the winter.
How does it work on electricity alone?
It uses a special type of fluid called refrigerant that is designed to move heat around exactly the way you want it. The heat pump knows what to do and how hard to go based on a couple of factors, mainly what temperature you tell it to set in your room and also all the details about what’s going on outside.
The many flavors of heat pumps
Heat pump is just describing what it does. They can take many different forms, and a lot of them look pretty square, but don’t let that fool you. Inside, they’re all hot and bothered, and they’re looking sexier every year.
There are units that fit inside of a window, just like a window air conditioner. There are types that fit in a hole in the wall, like what you’d find in a hotel. There are ones that look an awful lot like a regular air conditioner, where there’s a box outside and a box inside with refrigerant tubes running between the two. There are some that rely on water loops or geothermal to take the heat instead of air. There are even some that use big units outside and go to many, many units inside.
All of them are heat pumps, and they all do the same thing, just in slightly different ways. For the full menu, see Don’t Yuck My Yum.
How do you get your first heat pump?
Some of them you can install yourself, like window units and ACs, or even mini split systems, which don’t require special tools to install. Specifically, Mr. Cool mini splits are the only ones rated for the end user to install them, which is why they’re listed in Home Depot and on Amazon.
On the other hand, most systems do require professionals to install them. This is serious business and requires years of expertise to design and install properly. And even then, it helps if you know a couple of things before letting them root around in your hot and cold parts.
Sizing your pump
How do you pick the right size and style of heat pump? Well, in this case, bigger is not always better. It really comes down to:
- How big is the space you’re trying to heat and/or cool?
- Where are you based, which will determine the load?
- How hot and bothered do you wanna get?
We also have a sexy little calculator that can help you figure out just what kind of thing you need.
The confusing metrics
- BTUs, which incredibly stands for British Thermal Units, speaks to how much thermal energy they can pull in or out.
- Tons, even though it doesn’t look like it weighs a lot of tons. This is the rate of heat extraction equivalent to melting one short ton of ice over 24 hours, formally 12,000 BTU/h. Yes, really.
- COP (coefficient of performance), which is just another sneaky way heat pumps have of hiding just how slutty they really are.
Power requirements
You can think of heat pumps as your power bottom because they’re usually the most power intensive device in your entire electrical grid. They take a lot of energy electrically to move heat around, and therefore must be rated correctly on the wiring necessary.
Leave the money on the nightstand: how much is this gonna cost?
Heating and cooling, unlike big expensive purchases like a car, are actually energy dominant. You’re going to spend more money on energy over the life of the heat pump than you will on the heat pump itself. This is the inverse of a car, where the upfront cost dominates rather than the cost of fuel or maintenance.
Which is why it’s so essential to be sized correctly, installed correctly from day one, and maintained throughout. There could be a difference between buying a new heat pump every year in energy versus every ten years.
Want to play with the actual numbers? The Cost Explorer has side-by-side installed-cost ranges and 15-year totals by region and system size. And if you’d rather see the math against a different kind of pump, here’s a heat pump versus a Honda Civic.
Why now?
It’s actually a pretty amazing time to get into heat pumps. There are a large number of incentive programs depending on which state and what type of heat pump you’re buying that can help offset or reduce the total cost of ownership dramatically right now.
The reason for this isn’t just political (although sometimes it feels that way). It’s because electric heating and cooling is the wave of the future. And that’s not just about sustainability. It’s about the increasing availability of cheaper, delicious electrical energy.