In our first (and very casual) video podcast video, Xerxes and Erin sit down to answer the questions around what a heat pump is, and common questions that homeowners ask (semi-focused on our market in Colorado).
Feel free to watch the YouTube video, or you can read the transcript below. Let us know what you think!
Xerxes: Good morning!
Erin: Good morning! Hi, and welcome to the Just Heat Pump podcast. I’m Aaron. I’m Xerxes. And today we’re gonna talk about the question, what is a heat pump?
Xerxes: What is a heat pump? Well, my wife asked me this question on the way in this morning because she went out on a girl’s weekend with her friends and was talking about my business, and everyone was like, what, what’s a heat pump?
Xerxes: And she reminded me that I’m deep in the weeds and I have to come out and really identify these things. So a heat pump heats and cools your home. It replaces the furnace, it replaces your air conditioner, and a lot of folks liken it to a refrigerator, how a refrigerator moves heat from inside of the fridge, which is very cold, or your freezer, and pumps it out into the room.
Xerxes: When I talk to kids, a good analogy is a campfire. So in a campfire you burn wood. You burn fuel to heat your home. That’s the [00:01:00] furnace example. The contrast, the, comparison is the heat pump could be a wheelbarrow. Mm-hmm. The wheelbarrow moves heat around. Right. It doesn’t burn any fuel in your house.
Xerxes: That’s a good one with kids. I’ve also heard another one for kids where they have gnomes moving heat snacks from outside to inside your home in the winter. Then from inside to outside in summer. But to be very specific, a heat pump is an air conditioner that can run in reverse.
Xerxes: It runs in reverse by having a reversing valve that switches the flow of refrigerant, moving heat from inside to the outside in air conditioning mode, moving heat from the outside to the inside in heating mode. I mean, that’s the best way. It’s an air conditioner that runs in reverse. And I’ve heard [00:02:00] some technical folks describe it as, you wouldn’t buy a car without reverse.
Xerxes: So folks who are buying air conditioners right now basically limiting themselves. The heat pump comes with reverse. It can heat your home in the winter. It cools your home in the summer. It does two things in one. Mm-hmm. It uses electricity. It burns no fuel on site. And you don’t worry about carbon monoxide. You’re not worried about indoor or outdoor air quality problems. And it’s a fantastic appliance.
Erin: That’s, that’s great. Could you talk about the efficiency of heat pumps where you’re moving heat rather than creating heat? Such like, electric heat strip backup that we, we do install, but with the combo heat pump backup strip, you can replace the [00:03:00] furnace, in most cases, most homes.
Erin: Especially in Colorado, right? But the heat strip backup or a typical heater in an air conditioner will use a lot more energy than the heat pump itself. Could you talk about the differences.
Xerxes: Oh, electric resistance heat. It uses electricity to run a resistance heater. And because of the atomic nature and the banging of electrons into atoms through there, it creates a lot of heat. And it’s a unitary efficiency. It has efficiency of about a hundred percent. You know you have one kilowatt hour of electricity goes into one kilowatt hour of heat generated in your house.
Xerxes: Analogously, your body puts out about a hundred watts of heat. So one kilowatt hour is 10 hours of you sitting in a room and giving off heat. That’s why your home heats up when you have a bunch of friends over. You have a party, a lot of mini heaters [00:04:00] walking around.
Xerxes: The efficiency of the heat pump is on average about three x. So three times or 300%. So that 100% efficiency of your electric heat strip when replaced with a heat pump can go to about 300% of a high efficiency system. That gets you more heat for less electricity. It lowers your energy costs, it lowers demand on the grid and power plants.
Xerxes: Peak load, if you’re familiar with grid operations, those kind of things. It’s really important to think about efficiency when selecting a heat pump. That’s kind of a key thing. You find a series of acronyms, like the seasonal Energy Efficiency rating or SEER is a whole year efficiency metric.
Xerxes: And you know, about 20 SEER is really good. [00:05:00] There’s higher numbers and lower numbers. Anything below 16, I would shy away from these days. The one number that we focus on very much in Colorado is the heating seasonal performance factor HSPF. That number is really important because most of the energy use for your heat pump in Colorado comes with heating, and we’re a heating state.
Xerxes: We do have air conditioning, but it’s almost a ratio of three to one and how much energy you’ll use heating your house versus cooling your house in Colorado.
Erin: Great. I’d like to tackle a couple common questions we get from homeowners. Especially in, heating climate like Colorado, which is high altitude, low humidity.
Erin: We have our own climate zone here. One common question we get is, can a heat pump replace a furnace?
Xerxes: Absolutely! I mean, [00:06:00] that’s kind of a sticking point. And folks, HVAC contractors historically dislike heat pumps because of experience 15 to 20 years ago, going back to the eighties, honestly. About 20 years ago, Japan and parts of Europe kind of solved the cold climate issues and introduced technologies that work in very cold climates.
Xerxes: We have heat pumps running in Alaska mid to Northern Canada, Minnesota, and in the US that are doing great at negative 25 below. So, the technology’s here. It’s ready. And you reminded me of a recent customer, who built their home and their builder refused to put a heat pump in. They were adamantly against it because of the experience where [00:07:00] as a region in Colorado attempted to introduce heat pumps. Before the technology was ready, and that left a lot of people cold. In the winter, the design is really important. Mm-hmm. If the design is not right, I mean, the first mistake you can make in getting a heat pump is getting the wrong one for your house. Yes, either too low efficiency, not cold climate, too small, too big, you know?
Xerxes: The heat pump really needs to have this goldilocks design element to it to get off on the right foot. And then the second one is the installer needs to be competent, detail oriented, have high integrity, and follow the design plans. Don’t just change it on the fly to save money or to save time.
Xerxes: You really need to take your time on site to get it right. And so those are some key components of what we find in Colorado. Yeah. And, why a lot of folks might think [00:08:00] it’s not a viable technology when it absolutely is. It’s been ready for 20 years. We’re just coming around to it now.
Erin: And, to add a little bit to that, we have heat pumps in our own homes. A common question we get is, or concern we see from homeowners is, is their home too big for a heat pump? And we’ll say it’s not. The example that you brought up is a very tight home with good insulation, and we’re energy auditors here too.
Erin: So we add a holistic building science to the mix and design, but that was a 4,000 square foot home.
Erin: Right. And we commonly do 2,500, 3000 plus square foot homes with heat pump only and no furnace. And again, it goes back to correct design.
Erin: So you don’t need gas backup heat when designed correctly. I think that might be the bottom line.
Erin: Another common question we get is do heat pumps work in cold weather down to negative 10 or [00:09:00] zero. You know, negative 15 degrees, like where we are in the Denver metro area.
Xerxes: Absolutely. Right. I mean, thermodynamically, there’s heat even in the coldest regions of the universe.
Xerxes: Nowhere exists at absolute zero Kelvin, and so there’s heat available and we have now technology that can extract heat at negative 15, negative 20, negative 25 through the evaporation condensation thermodynamic cycle using, you know, high heat capacity refrigerants. And that’s how these things work.
Xerxes: Kind of to bring it back to, you know, what is a heat pump in the simplest terms – a heat pump is an air conditioner that runs in reverse. That can run in reverse. It can heat and cool your house. Then there’s all the details that go along with it, sure. And I’m really excited to tackle these through this podcast, through this [00:10:00] video series, and hopefully inform and help empower folks who are on their heat pump journey and really trying to electrify their home, improve the air quality in their home, improve the air quality in their neighborhoods, and capture some of this rebate money before it’s gone.
Erin: That’s great. We’ll keep it there for this podcast. It’s our very first one. You can see our setup in the warehouse here. If there’s a background noise, we apologize for that. But it’s work going on. We’re gonna try to do a lot more of these video clips to help answer your questions. And if you need help with a heat pump yourself, feel free to reach out.
Erin: We’ll see you next time!
Xerxes: Bye-bye. Thanks.
