How is it that a machine (like a heat pump) can consume 1kw of power and produce an amount greater than that of heat? What am I misunderstanding?
In: 320
Heat pumps work like they sound. They pump heat around. It’s not a cheat of the laws of thermodynamics. They use energy to transfer heat from one area to another. And the coefficient of performance is “how much heat is moved” over “how much energy was put in the system in order to do so”.
So let’s use a fridge as an example. As made-up round numbers, we’ll say it uses 200W, and has a coefficient of 2. So it uses 200W to remove 400W of heat from the inside of the refrigerator. What isn’t explicitly stated is that 600W of heat is ejected out of the back of the refrigerator (the 400 that came from the interior, and the 200 that came from running the heat pump).
Latest Answers