If your home is located in moderate climate, you can use a residential heat pump to heat and cool your home. Replace your furnace with a residential heat pump.

What Types Of Residential Heat Pumps Are Available?

At its core, a heat pump is simply an air conditioner that has been designed to also work as a home heating system. So instead of having a standalone central air system plus a separate furnace, the heat pump acts as an “all-in-one” unit and it does this through a principle called heat transference.

Heat transference is a tenet of thermodynamics where heat is absorbed in one location and then moved or transferred to another. Most people would be surprised to learn that there are other types of home heat pumps on the market other than the standard air-source model.

The standard residential heat pump system is called an air source since heat is extracted from the surrounding air near the unit. The other types of units are called earth source or green source heat pumps. These units either use ground water as the heating element or the soil itself or ground-source heat pumps. But no matter what kind of heat pump you may look at for your home, the basic theory behind their technology remains the same.

Residential Heat Pumps Heating Cycle

The heating starts when the thermostat senses that heat is required. The outdoor fan draws air across the outdoor coils so the refrigerant can absorb the maximum heat from the surrounding outside air. The compressor then pumps the refrigerant to the indoor coil system. The air handler now blows air from inside the home across the heated coils. The newly warmed air is then circulated throughout the house. In earth based systems, plastic tubing has been submerged in either the ground or the local water table.

Residential Heat Pump Cooling Cycle

The cooling process is actually the reverse of the heating cycle. The outside compressor pumps a refrigerant (typically R22) through the coils. The outside fan blows air over the coil system which cools the refrigerant down.

Now the refrigerant (which is under pressure) runs through the tubing line to the indoor unit’s evaporator coil. There the pressure is released and the refrigerant makes the evaporator coils very cold. Any air that passes over them is cooled and any excessive moisture is removed. The air handler blows the cooled air back into the home via the air flow ducts.

Air source residential heat pumps as mentioned before work well in moderate climates but their overall efficiency is determined by such outside factors such weather conditions, the seals around air ducts, etc. But a geothermal (earth-based) residential heat pump has heating capabilities that are 50 to 70 better than other systems, even under the harshest of conditions. This is energy savings that come directly into your family’s pocket.

In the end it really doesn’t matter what type of residential heat pump you finally decide on, because with the raising costs of direct fossil fuel heat sources, air source or geothermal heat pumps may be your best bet to keep warm and reduce those expensive heating bills.