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Heat pumps twice as efficient as fossil fuel systems in cold weather, study finds
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Technology
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Makes sense. Heat pumps are one of the few heating systems that can achieve greater than 100% efficiency. (energy in vs total heat output)
As long as you can keep the evaporator above the evaporation temperature of your compressed refrigerant, you're golden. Burried lines are excellent for that in colder climates, but the space for it isn't always easy to find.
I live in Finland. Heat pump is the only source of heat in my house.
Some of the stations in Antarctica use heat pumps. They have been proven to work effectively at -53°C (-64°F) and do so reliably.
Are they more efficient at more reasonable temperatures? Yes. But they still work even when it's very cold outside.
How well a heat pump works in cold temperatures obviously depends what temperatures it was designed to operate at. Don't waste your money on a model that is designed to operate in a different climate. In fact a lot of heat pumps aren't even capable of heating at all - they can only output cold air (which they can do even if it's stinking hot outside by the way).
It can go down to -30C (-22f) sometimes or even below that
Are you intimately familiar with the inner workings of your heatpump? Nearly all heatpumps in a cold climate have backup heat built in and it would automatically switch to backup when it gets too cold outside. -30C is well into the too cold category for it to function as a heatpump alone
Yeah I have no idea. The alternative would be electric radiators anyways so in most cases that wouldn't make a difference anyways. Temperatures that low are quite rare - maybe just a handful of nights a year. Generally it stays around -10C
Which makes the argument that heat pumps don't work in the cold completely wrong from a user perspective.
Yeah averages are way higher than that. My point just was that saying they don't work in cold climates isn't quite true. Yes, there are locations with way colder climates than this but if Finland isn't considered a "cold climate" then I don't know what is.
Heat pumps are super common here. Many houses just have a electric resistance heating so people switch to heat pumps to save on electricity.