I don’t get it. How is cold, even freezing air turned into heat? How is it less energy consuming than other heating systems?
In: 14
All the other answers explain the thermodynamics of heat pumps, but here’s something simple that really helped me understand it: **unless you’re at absolute zero, there is always something colder than another thing**.
If the outside air temperature is -40C, liquid nitrogen (-196C) is colder, right? If you put liquid nitrogen outside in the middle of winter, it would warm up and evaporate because the -40C air would warm it up.
So if you want to transfer heat out of the cold, winter air what you need to do is make something even colder than that, which will then cause that something to heat up.
Everything described in the other comments is explaining how we make that colder thing, and how we then get the heat out of it, but that’s a core piece that I think a lot of people forget.
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