When you’re shopping for a new HVAC system, spend some time considering a heat pump. They provide both heating and cooling in one unit and offer many advantages in this climate, including high energy efficiency, safety and easy operation.
This all-in-one HVAC appliance uses electricity to create and remove heat. It uses the same technology embedded in refrigerators, but instead of just moving heat out, it gathers heat from the outdoors and brings it inside via a reversing valve that changes the refrigerant flow from summer to winter.
Energy Efficiency
Heat pumps are the only way to use electricity for home heating in an energy efficient way. Electric heating systems that rely on resistance by creating heat use one unit power for each unit of heat they create. Heat pumps create at least three times the amount of heat for the same power consumption, and the most efficient heat pumps do even better.
When these appliances are equipped with a desuperheater, they use the waste heat from the cooling cycle to heat water for home use, a swimming pool, or hot tub. In the cooling mode, heat pumps work as efficiently as an equivalent central air conditioner.
Safety
Since a heat pump uses electricity, it doesn’t require combustible fuels for home heating. They pose no risk of carbon monoxide and other noxious byproducts of the combustion process to indoor and outdoor environments.
There are heat pumps that combine the ability to heat with gas when temperatures fall below freezing, when less efficient systems might struggle. As long as these hybrids receive regular professional maintenance tune ups, they’re completely safe.
Operational Simplicity
Heat pumps switch between heating and cooling at the thermostat. They’re relatively easy to maintain, since they use the same parts for heating as they do cooling whose components are housed in an indoor air handler and an outdoor condenser.
This climate lends itself to energy efficient and comfortable heating and cooling with a heat pump. To learn more, contact Jackson & Sons, providing top-notch HVAC services for Eastern North Carolina homeowners.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Eastern North Carolina (including Wayne, Johnston, Greene, Lenoir, Pitt and Duplin Counties) about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).
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