Sunday, April 13, 2008

Buying a Heat Pump



Outer collector and pipe installations were already finished and it was time to select and buy the heart of the system, so called Heat pump. In Europe we have from 5 to maximum 10 well known and high quality heat pump production companies. I was investigating many of them and after that decided to buy a quality product from my country. When buying a heat pump you should be careful what to buy. You should consider many options:




  • Do you plan to use the heat pump only for heating or also for hot water

  • Do you plan to use a heat pump also for cooling the house during summer

  • Do you prefer active (needs reversible heat pump) or passive cooling (less energy used for cooling)

  • Do you prefer a product out of the box (this kind of heat pump already includes automatics, electric connections, pumps, valves, and also boiler) or do you prefer only bare heat pump with basic regulation and security automatics (you will have to install some parts additionally)


And most important: don’t forget to calculate carefully how much power you will need for heating the house. I have bought the heat pump with output power of 14kW, input power 3,1kW. It has a scroll compressor. It also has additional pipe heater of 6 kW for extremely cold winters (I didn’t use it so far). You can see the heat pump on the photo.