For those looking for a heating and cooling system for a new home, or a replacement for an existing system, a heat pump offers several appealing benefits over furnaces and air conditioners. Here are a few of those benefits to help you understand heat pumps and make a better choice.
- Single-unit convenience:Heat pumps provide both heating and cooling for your home. This means you do not need a separate gas furnace for heating and air conditioner for cooling. This is possible because a heat pump moves heat instead of creating it. An air-source heat pump captures heat out of the air inside your home and takes heat outside in the summer, producing cooling. The opposite occurs in the winter, when the heat pump captures heat from outside air brings it inside in the winter, producing heating.
- Extremely high efficiency:Heat pumps are well known for being highly efficient. During heating season, for example, they can reach efficiency levels of 300 percent or more. This seemingly impossible result happens because the system moves existing heat instead of creating it by burning fuel. Cooling functions also reach very high levels of efficiency.
- Substantially lower cost of operation:The cost of running a heat pump for cooling can be around 40 percent less than an air conditioner. Overall, heat pumps can reduce total electricity use for heating and cooling by around 50 percent or more. The monthly savings gained by using a heat pump are usually sufficient to pay for the system within a few years of installation.
- Safety of operation:Heat pumps have no open flames, making them a very safe option for residential heating. Since they do not burn fuel of any type, they do not produce the potentially deadly gas carbon monoxide.
Visit our website for in-depth information on most HVAC topics, or just give us a call at (408) 868-5500 Weandrsquo;ve been serving the South Bay, peninsula and Santa Cruz for more than 40 years and can help you with more information on heat pumps or with choosing the right heat pump for your home heating and cooling needs.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in the South Bay Peninsula and Santa Cruz areas of California about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).