Traditional HVAC systems use a furnace to heat your home during cooler months, and an air conditioner to cool your home through the summer. But this isn’t the only possible setup: depending on your home’s heating and cooling needs, a heat pump may be more efficient.
Heat pumps save money because of a simple, powerful principle: they don’t need to create heat through combustion or electricity. Instead, they use heat energy which is already present in the environment to warm your home. In the summer, they work in reverse, taking the excess heat energy of your indoor environment and expelling it outside. This means that not only do you benefit from heating which may be up to 400 percent as efficient as a gas or oil furnace, but you may only need one appliance – the heat pump – instead of a furnace and air conditioner.
Because heat pumps rely on environmental heat, they do work best above a certain temperature called the heat pump’s balance point. Below the balance point, the amount of available energy is often insufficient to raise a home to its desired temperature – especially because more heat has to be used to warm a cold home than a cool one. For many heat pumps, the balance point lies around 32 degrees. However, that doesn’t mean that heat pumps can’t be used in climates like Dayton, Ohio, where winter temperatures do drop below freezing: models which employ a backup heat source can still warm homes through much of the cooler season, dropping back to the lower-efficiency heating system only when the temperatures drop too low for the heat pump to handle alone.
Alternatively, a water-source or geothermal heat pump relies on the ground temperature (which above freezing all year round), rather than the outside air temperature. These heat pumps are more costly to install, but their reliability and high efficiency make them attractive choices for some homeowners.
If you’re curious about how a heat pump could work in your Dayton home, call Ace Hardware Home Services to learn more today!
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Dayton, Ohio about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).
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