Electricity

Environmental-Friendly Heating of Your Dwelling

Heat Pump

What are heat pumps?

Heat pumps are devices that use the principle of conditioning only counter wise. Conditioners cool down the refrigerating chamber using evaporator and pass the cooled air inside the premises of your dwelling. With a heat pump, it works on the other side: the premises are heated up thanks to the heat that has been taken from the environment and transferred to you using the system of pipes.

The heat is contained in every piece of the biosphere of Earth: water, soil, air, rocks. The thing here is to absorb some part of this energy by the liquid that transfers it to the place that must be heated up. There it gives it out thanks to convection processes. As the cycle repeats, you receive the warmth in your dwelling.

Such a system may be connected easily to:

  • your under-floor heating system
  • your central heating systems with radiators

Why are heat pumps better than fossil fuel?

The principle of work of heat pumps is based on the physical processes of heating & cooling. For instance, let us imagine that soil has +16°C in temperature. If you put a hosepipe in it with a circulating liquid that enters a soil having only +10°C, it will heat up approx. at 6 degrees. It will bring these 6 degrees to your house, cooling down in the process of distribution of heat to the initial state of +10°C. The beauty of such thermodynamic process is that it does not require big differential of temperatures to work. Heat pumps efficiency is revealed in work on inequality of temperature levels.

It requires some electricity, though. But the system’s efficiency if to calculate its coefficient of performance (COP) for the end user is near 400%. Thus, consuming 1 kilowatt of electric energy, it gives out 4 kilowatts of the heat energy.

Of course, you may ask – does it mean that it breaks the law of preserving the efficiency known that any energy transformer may not have the efficiency more than 100%? No, it does not mean that: it collects the energy from the sun and Earth’s inner convective processes (heated water/air/soil) and transfers it to you. If to put it simply, it consumes 1 kW of electricity, giving you 4 kW while taking 5 kW from the environment.

So, its efficiency is:

4/(1+5)=0.67

But for you, heat pumps efficiency is:

4/1=4.00

When you use the fossil fuel to heat up the premises, its efficiency for you is somewhere around 0.5…0.7. Let’s adopt it as 0.6. It means that the increment when using heat pumps for you will be (4.0-0.6)=3.4. In addition, when burning up the fuel, you leave a carbon footprint. With heat pumps, you don’t have a carbon footprint at all.

Thus, installing air source heat pumps, you receive the 340% increase in efficiency comparing to what you have had before and turn environmentally friendly.

Air source heat pumps efficient in the city area, as they take minimal place to be installed. Air-to-air pumps may be a bit noisy, so that is why we recommend air-to-water pumps – they are silent. Air-to-ground pumps require a huge site of land to be installed on for the same efficiency, so they may be good for rural users.

Where to buy?

The heat pumps manufacturer in the UK is Husky Heat Pumps. They produce air source heat pumps UK that meet all requirements:

  • efficiency
  • high environmental standards
  • the certified production process
  • 25+ years of life span.
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Paul Tomaszewski is a science & tech writer as well as a programmer and entrepreneur. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of CosmoBC. He has a degree in computer science from John Abbott College, a bachelor's degree in technology from the Memorial University of Newfoundland, and completed some business and economics classes at Concordia University in Montreal. While in college he was the vice-president of the Astronomy Club. In his spare time he is an amateur astronomer and enjoys reading or watching science-fiction. You can follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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