Both a furnace and a heat pump warm your house in winter. However, the similarity between the two devices pretty much ends there. Actually, heat pumps share more components and functions with central air conditioners than with a conventional gas furnace.
While conventional gas furnaces generate heat with the combustion of natural gas, heat pumps are air-to-air units that cool and heat without combustion. Here’s a basic sketch of how heat pumps perform double duty.
- Like a standard central AC, a heat pump in summer cools the house by extracting heat at the indoor evaporator coil, then dispersing it into outdoor air at the condenser coil. What’s left behind in the house is cool comfort.
- In winter conditions, however, a heat pump reverses the functions of indoor and outdoor coils, as well as the flow of system refrigerant. In heating mode, the outside coil extracts heat energy from outdoor air, and the indoor coil disperses it inside to warm the house.
- With today’s most efficient heat pumps, sufficient latent outdoor heat is available to warm the house even when winter temperatures plunge as low as 5 degrees.
How and Why Heat Pumps Are Thriving
According to the International Energy Agency, installations of heat pumps in the United States increased by 22% during 2022. For the very first time, heat pump sales in that year eclipsed the sales of conventional gas-fired furnaces. Some reasons why:
- Less stress on the environment. Because heat pumps do not utilize combustion, upgrading from a conventional gas-fired furnace to a heat pump could reduce more than 7 tons of carbon emissions annually.
- Lower operating costs. Lower annual energy consumption of heat pumps can reduce energy expenses by more than $500 per year, depending on the size of the home and other existing factors, such as insulation and air-sealing.
- Government paybacks. Both federal and state governments may offer incentives to upgrade to a heat pump. These offers can take the form of tax credits and/or rebates. Incentives for low-income homeowners are also available.
For more about the benefits of heat pump technology, contact the experts at Jackson and Sons.
