What type of heat pump to choose? – PART 1

Winter is knocking on the door and I started my heat pump again. Since last post one idea occurred to me and that is answering quite frequent question: What type of heat pump to chose. I prepared relatively simple decision making model for choosing a heat pump for heating the house during the winter. Everybody knows that we have several types of heat pumps multiplied by number of producers and you can get 1000 of different heat pumps … O.K. it is not so bad :-) … actually we have few types of heat pump to choose between – in general: air to air heat pump, air to water heat pump, ground sourced heat pump (water to water). To be able to choose the right one you must consider: type of heating to be used, current/new building conditions, available heat sources, legislation, building restrictions, climate, heat losses, preparing also hot water, heating regime (low or high temperatures), and financial part.

In general one could say – every heat pump is better than no heat pump. But let us check in details in PART 2 … coming soon.

What is heat pump – explanation for beginners

You have probably noticed that warm air is rising behind your fridge when operating. Well your fridge is your every day heat pump cooling your food and at the same time heating your kitchen. This is the basic working principle for heat pumps – cooling down one medium (in case of fridge this is the food you have putted in) and at the same time warming up other medium (in case of fridge this is air in your kitchen). Similar to your fridge is also the operating principle of air conditioning device for cooling your home, deep freeze and other devices.
Why so much talking about heat pumps to be on of the cheapest ways to heat you home … it is because of simple calculation: for example you input in your heat pump about 80% of renewable resource, which is for free (e.g. water, air, earth), and 20% of electrical power = and you get 100% of energy for heating your home. That means that you pay only 20% of electricity to get 100% of heating power mostly because of renewable resource (see simple picture in this post). That is something to think about.

Maybe you are thinking now… is it possible to design cheap home made heat pump using old fridge or more of them… well, it is possible, but I will describe this maybe some other time.
Next … Choosing renewable resource for my Heat pump project.