Heat pumps have become a popular choice for keeping homes comfortable. One heat pump system can take care of both heating and cooling needs, while keeping costs low. Heat pumps are an economical and comfortable choice for providing year-round comfort.
Unlike a gas furnace or boiler, which burns fuel to create heat, a heat pump heats your home by using refrigerant to transfer heat energy from outside to inside. There’s enough heat in the outside air to accomplish comfortable home heating, until the temperatures begin to fall below freezing for extended periods.
Once the temperatures drop low enough, heat pumps struggle to provide comfortable heating. This is why standard heat pumps come with auxiliary/emergency heating, usually in the form of an electric-resistance heating element. While an air-source heat pump can accomplish 300 percent heating efficiency, the backup electric system can’t exceed 100 percent, so it’s relatively costly to use with current power costs.
Homeowners increasingly are opting for dual-fuel heat pump systems, which use a gas furnace for the emergency heating. With the relatively low cost of natural gas these days, this is a smart choice that should help your energy budget and home comfort. A heat pump generally will shift over to emergency heat when a certain temperature, the balance point, is reached. This is the point where your home’s heating load matches heat pump capacity. However, dual-fuel systems should allow you to manually shift to the gas furnace, if you decide that gas heating is cheaper than the power that’s required to run the heat pump. This decision largely depends on gas and electricity prices in your area.
If you need professional advice about what sort of backup heating to choose with your new heat pump system, please contact us at Ace Hardware Home Services, Inc. We provide expert services in the Dayton and Springfield areas.
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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