How do heat pumps work and why are the energy efficient?
Edit: the question is sufficiently answered. Thanks guys!
In: 50
Imagine two half filled buckets of water, and a sponge.
You want to move water from one bucket to the other.
So you put the sponge in bucket A, and let it spread out as much as possible (like it’s at low pressure). It will soak up a bunch of water.
Then you move it to bucket B and squeeeeeeze it out (put it under high pressure). You have just used pressure to transfer a liquid from one place to another.
In a heat pump, the “water” is latent heat. The “sponge” is a liquid called refrigerant or coolant. It gets passed between two tanks in a circular pattern. One tank puts it under low pressure, which forces it to evaporate into a gas. To be in a gas state, it HAS to absorb heat from its surroundings, making them cold.
Then this gas with heat in it gets pumped to the other side, which is under high pressure. The pressure squeezes the gas back into a liquid, and thus it gives up its heat and makes that area hot. Then it continues on its journey back to the low pressure tank to absorb more heat.
There are other devices at play to make this efficient, but that is the fundamental idea. You use pressure to change the temperature, using gas laws.
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