Saw a blurb about this but don’t know much about it, anyone’s thoughts on “heat pumps”?
Apparently they use electricity to bring heat from outside in to the house in winter, and draw heat out in summer?
Example article: https://www.energy.gov/articles/pump-your-savings-heat-pumps Now
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If you’ve ever used an air conditioner you’ve used a heat pump. ACs are just one way heat pumps that take heat from inside and dump it outside. You can add a “reversing valve” to allow it to move heat in either direction, making a general purpose “heat pump”. They can be nearly 400% efficient, which is better than any other heat source.
Depends where you are.
If it doesn’t get that cold outside, you can get back considerably more heat than you put in energy. If it does get quite cold outside, there’s a point it becomes first as efficient as electric and eventually it stops working altogether. I live somewhere that routinely sees -40C, by that time you basically are fully on a normal furnace.
so it might be useful for like a hybrid system that could run in in a more normal temperature range and then switch off when it gets hotter or cooler?
That’s what they do a lot around here. When it’s summer they get AC, when it’s cool but not cold they get heat from the ambient air outside, when it’s freezing cold outside you get high efficiency heat, when it’s actually cold the furnace kicks in.