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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.
So? It is basically always as efficient as resistive heating at its worst, and the vast majority of the time it is massively more efficient. And even then they can remain more efficient even as low as -25C and might need resistive heating backup at places that get below that. But even in places that can dip below that they are often not that cold all year round. So overall throughout the year they are way more efficient on the majority of days even if you need a less efficient backup system.
We really need to think of the whole situation rather than just focus on the but sometimes part of the problem. Yes, sometimes they dont work as well. But overall through a year for the vast majority of places a heat pump can be all you need and is a lot more efficient than other heating systems.
And what point does that happen? According to the article and other sources say similar things:
And the lowest recorded temperature in the UK since 1961 is -27.2 °C. So the times you need to fall back to resistive or other backup systems is 0% of the time. And what do you count as a cold climate? is 0C cold? or -10C? -20C? I know many people that would say yes at any other those and I bet there are others that live in places that go way lower. Yeah, what you said is technically true, but without these numbers is almost a meaningless statement. In the UK, and most of europe this article is basically saying that heat pumps are more effective than other sources of heat even at colder temperatures and it takes extremes before they require alternative heating methods.
The way you worded your post it makes it sounds like on a average coldish winters day heat pumps become useless and there is little point in having them. Even if that is not what you intended.