Is a Heat Pump a Good Choice for Heating My Home?
A heat pump is a very effective and useful installation for a home, since it works as both an air conditioner and a heater. It isn’t a combination of two separate systems, such as an AC and furnace in the same cabinet, but a single system that uses the same process—heat exchange—to heat and cool. Essentially, a heat pump is an air conditioner that can switch the direction it moves heat so that it can also move heat into a home.
When you are looking for a new residential heating installation, is a heat pump one you should consider? That’s a good question, since heat pumps work well in some situations, and not in others. It’s important that you have professional HVAC technicians assist you with making the optimal choice, and then let the professionals handle the actual work of installing the new heat pump (or whatever system you end up selecting).
For fast service for quality heating in Pocatello, ID, call on Advanced Home Services, and we will see that you receive the best possible comfort for your home.
The key issue to understand about how heat pumps operate is that they remove ambient heat from the air, absorbing it through evaporator coils. The refrigerant in the coils later moves to condensing coils, where its heat is released. When a heat pump switches between heating and cooling mode, the indoor and outdoor coils swap their functions. In heating mode, the outdoor coils are evaporators, absorbing ambient heat from the outside air.
This leads to a common question: “How can the heat pump absorb heat when it’s cold outside?” Since you will use the heat pump in heating mode during cold temperatures, this is an understandable concern. However, there is always heat energy in the air (molecular motion), no matter how cold it gets. During most cool temperatures, a heat pump will experience little difficulty extracting the heat from the outdoors necessary to warm up a house.
But heat pumps may encounter issues with efficiency when the temperature drops too low, usually below freezing. This is why it’s vital that you have a heating technician help you select your home comfort system. A technician will perform a heat load calculation that will determine how much heat output is necessary for comfort. This will help the technician figure out if a heat pump is a good idea or not for your house.
If you have any further questions regarding heat pumps or other kinds of residential heating services we offer in Pocatello, ID, please give our knowledgeable team at Advanced Home Services a call. We are happy to help.
