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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Let’s establish a few principles that we’ll use later:
* When you compress a gas, it heats up. If you compress it enough, it will turn to liquid.
* If you remove the pressure, the liquid will turn back into a gas and cool off again.
* Heat always moves from hot to cold. So if you set a glass of boiling water outside, it will cool down, even if it’s really hot out side by human comfort standards.
To generate heat, the heat pump compresses a gas to its liquid state so that it gets nice and hot. We blow air across the tubing that contains the hot liquid, and that heats our homes. The liquid exits the coils cooler than when it entered.
After we’ve used it to warm the air, the tubing containing the liquid runs outside. There, we let the liquid expand so that it returns to a gas state. When this happens, it gets cold. *Really* cold. Much colder than the outside air. Because heat always moves from hot to cold, the outside air actually heats the cold coils up, putting energy back into the liquid. The now-warmer liquid goes back into the pump where it is compressed again, and the cycle repeats.
It does require energy to pump the liquid around, constantly compressing it, but the actual heat energy that warms our homes comes from the transfer of warmth from the outside air to the cold coils. As crazy as that sounds.
For cooling in the summer, we simply reverse the direction of the pump. Now the gas is compressed outside where it gets *very* hot. The air outside may be hot by human comfort standards, but it’s cool enough to cool a coil that is near boiling.
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