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Heat Pumps: A Household Mystery Explained
By Jen Garvin
Most people, I guess, have heard of a heat pump - but few of us REALLY understand how they operate. In this brief article I would like to provide some simple explanations and illustrations of the technological principles common to most heat pumps.
The first thing I should deal with, I guess, is the name itself: heat pumps. Why are they called that? If they are pumps, then what are they 'pumping?' Well, the word pump is actually very appropriate (at least to my mind), as pumps move something - water, gas, oil - from one place (like the bottom of a well) to another place (like your sink). And that's exactly what heat pumps do: they move, or 'pump' heat energy. If this is a hard concept for you to grasp, here's an illustration. Imagine letting a cup of hot tea sit awhile to cool down. Now think about it: What really happened? Well, when a hot liquid cools, the heat energy passes from the hot liquid to the air surrounding it. In other words, heat was 'pumped' (moved) from one location to another.
You might not realize it, but even on the coldest day outside, the air contains some heat energy. The same is true for the ground beneath our feet: it has the capacity to store, or hold, heat energy. Heat pumps simply move, or 'pump' heat energy from one place to another. When you use a heat pump to heat or cool a room, you are making use of this basic fact of physics.
So let's see a heat pump at work: you have a heat pump installed. It's summertime, and your room is hot. A heat pump will circulate the air in the room, draw off some of the heat energy and transfer that heat energy outside. Because heat energy has been taken out from the room, you feel cooler.
In the wintertime you simply reverse the process - you use your heat pump to move heat energy from the great outdoors to your cold rooms inside (remember what I told you: even in the dead of winter heat energy
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can be captured from the outside air). You will begin to feel warmer in that room as a result.
It is very important to remember that heat pumps do not actually burn fuel to add heat to any room - they simply move it from another location. This means that heat pumps are not furnaces - furnaces burn fuels, heat pumps do not. A heat pump is an energy-transferor, not a producer of energy.
Some heat pumps, called air-source heat pumps, capture heat (for heating) from the surrounding air. To cool, they simply draw it off and expel it into the air. They may draw heat energy directly from the air that surrounds the heating unit, or they might have a separate unit outside that captures and funnels the heat energy to the inside unit for dispersion throughout your home.
Other types of heat pumps include Geothermal heat pumps. These units use the ground - they draw heat from it to warm, and expel heat into it to cool. They make use of a complex system of coils that are buried into the ground. What makes it possible for these units to work is that below a certain depth, the temperature of the ground actually does not change very much from season-to-season. Article Source: http://www.articlemap.com About the author: Jen Garvin writes about home repair and Heat Pump Installation Read about the issues relating toHeat Pump Problems at her site today.
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