Heat Pumps, most notably air source heat pumps, are fast becoming the most popular renewable heating source in the UK.
Though heat pumps require electricity to run, the way that they utilize this electricity means that they are a very cost effective and environmentally friendly way to provide your hot water and space heating requirements all year round.
Chances are, you already have a heat pump in your own home, in the form
of a refrigerator. A common misconception is that a refrigerator makes things
cold... What it actually does is to take energy from inside the fridge and
transports it to the back of the fridge, hence why if you touch the coil on the
back of your fridge, it will be warm, whilst the inside of the fridge is cold.
If we reverse the operation, and apply it to an air source heat pump, you will
find that the inside of the fridge now becomes your garden and the warmth
on the back of the fridge is now the heat circulating around your pipework to
your radiators / underfloor heating.
The area directly in front of the heat pump
will be much cooler than the rest of the garden because that energy is being
transported into your property via the vapour compression cycle. Essentially,
what is happening is that unusable energy from outdoors is being transformed
into usable energy for indoors.
For every 1kW of electricity used by
the heat pump unit itself, it will provide around 4kW of heat. That means that
3kW of heat is being provided completely for free so you could say that a heat
pump is around 400% efficient.
If you compare this with a traditional gas boiler
you will see that for every 1kW of energy used by the boiler, only around
90% of the fuel is used for heating. The rest is sent to the atmosphere via the
flue.
If you combine a heat pump with a PV system in order to offset
some of the heat pump electricity usage, the running costs of the heat pump
reduce even further and if you can also install a Underfloor Heating system you
truly have a whole house solution.
As well as being one of the most efficient forms of space heating available,
an air source heat pump installation may also attract a government subsidy in
the form of the Renewable Heat Incentive.
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or E-Mail: info@energyperformanceltd.co.uk