The heat pump has become a popular home comfort installation in Florida because it’s a fantastic fit for our weather. A heat pump works as both an air conditioner and a heater: its cooling mode is powerful enough to overcome hot Florida summers, the heating mode is efficient and energy-saving for the mild winters. For many homeowners, having their year-round comfort taken care of with a single installation is a huge benefit!
Heat pumps are new to many people, so we’d like to share four important facts about them with you. If you want to know more, or you’re ready to schedule installation for a heat pump in Lake City, FL or elsewhere in North Central Florida, get in touch with a member of our team.
1. A heat pump is similar to an air conditioner
If you want to know how a single system can provide both warmth and cooling, the answer is that a heat pump is an air conditioner that can change the direction it works. Think about using a standard AC: when the system is running, what do you feel coming out of the outside cabinet? That’s right, warm air. The air conditioner is shifting heat from inside the house and pumping it outside (making it a type of “heat pump”). What a heat pump does is make the system capable of switching around the roles of the indoor and outdoor units, so when in heating mode, the heat pump moves heat inside the house. In most other ways, a heat pump operates just like an AC.
2. A heat pump uses the same refrigerant as an air conditioner
This is an important similarity between the two systems. Homeowners often wonder if a heat pump must use a special kind of refrigerant to be able to both heat and cool. It doesn’t. The modern heat pump uses the same refrigerant blend that’s the standard for residential systems, R-410A (sometimes referred to by the trademarked name Puron).
3. A heat pump can save money on heating
The cooling mode of a heat pump will probably cost the same to run as a standard AC of the same cooling load. But the heating mode is significantly more energy efficient than its closest heater counterpart, the electric furnace. In fact, you can expect an efficiency increase of 3 to 4 times if you replace an electric furnace with a heat pump. The reason for the energy savings is that a heat pump only uses electricity to move heat, rather than to generate it, and it’s a less consuming process.
4. A heat pump won’t struggle in Florida winters
You may have heard that heat pumps have one major flaw: they can lose efficiency in extreme cold weather because it’s for them to draw on the heat outdoors. Although this can happen, don’t expect it to happen here in Florida. The temperatures have to dive significantly below freezing before affecting a heat pump. This is a reason why heat pumps are such a great match for local homes.
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