We’ve waited a while for this, HVAC is finally in! We’re excited to have an air source heat pump for our house. No GAS, just electricity. Paired with our solar panels (not yet, but in the works), we’ll be saving money and the planet!
Lets talk about the heat pump. What is it?
Heat pumps operate using the refrigeration cycle to move heat rather than generate it by burning fuel. In winter, they extract heat from the outside air or ground and transfer it indoors to warm your home. In summer, the process reverses, and the heat pump removes heat from inside your home and releases it outside, functioning like an air conditioner
This means that it needs to be warm enough outside that the heat pump can grab heat from the air and bring it inside. As you might imagine, as the nights get colder, the heat pump has to work harder to get heat from the air and bring it inside. There are different levels of heat pumps. A standard heat pump from Carrier (the brand we have) can go down to about 25°F. If it gets colder than that, they use “emergency heat”. Think of this like a toaster. A heat strip uses electricity to warm up an element and have air blow over it to exchange it. Using “emergency heat” is very energy intensive. Our house would have required a 20 kW heat strip for this backup heat. We estimate this would cost approximately $4/hour to run heat in this mode. Compare this to closer to $2/hour to run the heat pump.
Our goal of this house is energy efficiency. We were able to get a cold climate heat pump instead of a standard one. It used advanced refrigerants and other technology to go as low as 0°F at full heating capacity before having reduced efficiency down to approximately -22°F before it no longer provides any heat. We opted to not have any emergency/backup heating strip and get a cold climate heat pump. Its more money up front for heat, but the long term pay off will be less electricity consumed and cheaper bills. We figure if it gets colder than -22°F, we’ll have lots of other issues to work with.
Enough about heat pumps, I will be writing more about it as we get using it and our experience with it. For now, we’re excited that our bathroom has the concrete filled back in and will be ready for tile soon! We don’t expect anybody to put any more concrete down the sewer pipes.
Yeah progress!!!
Hogan Haake