Although you may recognize your home’s heating and cooling system as an integral part of what helps your home keep functioning like you want it to, many homeowners don’t realize exactly how much it takes to keep your home comfortable. In the average home, heating and cooling account for about half of your home’s total energy use, meaning that a lot goes into making sure you and your family are able to remain comfortable at all times. If you are looking for a great way to cut down on your monthly heating bill, however, it might be wise to consider having an energy efficient heat pump installed. As one of the most energy efficient heating options on the market, you can expect to get between $2 and $4 dollars worth of heat from your heat pump for every $1 actually spend in electricity. That’s what our HVAC Contractors call, efficiency. A heat pump can also act as a central air conditioner during the summer months, helping you to maintain the comfort of your home all year long.
How Much Do You Save Compared To An Electric Furnace?
This can vary largely from family to family, but if you are currently using a standard electric furnace in your home, you can count on saving anywhere between one-half and one-third on your monthly heating costs, on average. While it is possible that you could switch to a furnace that uses a different fuel type, you would also lose out on the built in benefit of having the comfort of a quality air conditioning unit during the summer.
How Is A Heat Pump Different From A Furnace Heating System?
Instead of making their own heat, a heat pump extracts heat from the outside of the home. Your refrigerator is a good example of this process in action as it removes heat from the air inside the itself and moves it to the coils on the outside. A heat pump heating system uses this same principle, extracting heat from the air and moving it around the house to where it is needed. Even during the middle of winter, the outside air holds heat, so you never have to worry about running out of fuel. There are also different types of heat pumps that get their heat from different places. A ground-source heat pump is a great example of this. A ground-source heat pump removes heat from the ground, like its name implies, which stays at about 55 degrees Fahrenheit all year round. It uses a series of flexible pipes that are filled with a liquid and buried between four and six feet underground. The liquid absorbs the heat and transfers it to the inside of your home.
Are Heat Pumps A Good Option For Homes In Minnesota?
Quite so, actually. A standard air-air heat pump can continue to pull heat from the air, even in the coldest of temperatures, and many of them have a backup furnace to help if temperatures plummet to extreme lows. Even in 17 degree weather, an air-to-air heat pump is able to pull roughly two units of energy from the outside air for every one unit of energy it consumes. Ground-source heat pumps, however, don’t have to worry about this since the ground temperature stays fairly constant year-round, meaning these systems don’t even require a backup furnace as they are able to maintain a high level of efficiency at all times.
What About Reliability?
Because they use a similar process, heat pumps are about as reliable as the refrigerator in your home. In fact, studies have shown before that after 20 years, many home heat pump units are still in operation, and of those that were removed, less than half were from mechanical failure. You would be hard-pressed to find a more reliable home heating solution.
The post Why Should You Choose To Install A Heat Pump In Your Home? appeared first on Neighborhood Plumbing, Heating, Air Conditioning and Electrical.
