I don’t get it. How is cold, even freezing air turned into heat? How is it less energy consuming than other heating systems?
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It’s easier to understand if you realize that when we refer to “cold” air, that is a relative term. It’s “cold” compared to what humans fund comfortable. But in ABSOLUTE terms, that is still pretty warm. Absolute Zero is the absence of any heat energy. Thats 0 Kelvins (or -273 * C, -460 * F). Compared to THAT, a freezing temp (0 * C, 32 * F) is still pretty hot. That means there is still a LOT of thermal energy floating around in “cold” air. What heat pump does is use a small amount of electrical energy to move a large amount of that thermal energy from the cold air into the house. It gets into tricky thermodynamics to explain how/why (explained in other comments in detail), but the short version is it uses pumps and expansion valves to make a refrigerant a lot colder than the outside air, so that it absorbs heat from it, then does some more thermodynamics to make the refrigerant ‘reject’ that heat back into the house.
But the main ELI5 part is that “cold” air still has a lot of heat left in it, and heat pumps are a way we figured out of concentrating and moving that heat energy inside the house.
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