Wondering just how well home heat pumps work and how you can tell the difference between good brands and one that may cause you trouble down the road?

The Concepts Behind Home Heat Pumps

It used to be that buying a home heat pump could be a big and painful headache for people who were not in the housing or construction industry. But now most consumers can take advantage of online equipment ratings and reviews done by independent testing labs.

Plus many, respected sites offer in-depth and informational articles that will help you navigate the various traps and pitfalls of buying a new heating system. But before you can make such an expensive decision, you really need to understand the fundamentals of how a heat pump works.

The heat pump was originally conceived by Lord Kelvin (the physicist who worked on the thermodynamic theory at the turn of 19th century.) But a commercially available, heat pump wasn’t developed until after the first World War.

The theory behind how a home heat pump works is best seen in another household appliance that uses a very similar process: the lowly home refrigerator.

A heat pump cooling system is very much like a regular refrigerator. Both a refrigerator and a home heat pump use a principle of thermodynamics call heat transference. Fundamentally any type of air cooling system like a refrigerator works by using a “refrigeration cycle”.

In this process a refrigerant (usually some type of Freon in older units) is compressed so that it absorbs heat from the surrounding atmosphere (inside the freezer in this case). And then the next step in the cycle uses a process where the refrigerant is rapidly decompressed which causes “flash evaporation”.

The absorbed heat is released (from coils on the back or on the bottom of the refrigerator) and the now cooled refrigerant (inside a looped pipeline) releases the cold back inside the into the freezer box.

The process inside home heat pumps use the same procedures except the cycle is called “reverse refrigeration” because the whole cycle can be completely flipped-flopped between cooling and heating at the switch of a button.

The Advantages of Home Heat Pumps

A high efficiency home heat pump (dealing with mild to moderate average temperatures) can easily save you and your family thousands of dollars over the life time of the machine. The two factors you should be on the look for are the SEER or Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio and the HSPF or Heating Seasonal Performance Factor.

SEER represents the predicted efficiency of the unit during summer, while the HSPF represents the same for wintertime. In both cases the higher these two standards are then the more efficient the system will work, which is better for you.

While there are other factors to consider in the performance of home heat pump, only a trained heating and cooling professional can really inspect your home and give you a realistic idea of how well any given heat pump will work in your home.

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