Heat pumps are economical and efficient way to both heat and cool your home. Although a heat pump has many advantages, it does have one serious limitation – with most standard models of air-source heat pump, the appliance struggles to maintain comfortable heating when temperatures fall below freezing. That's why they almost always come with an auxiliary, or backup/emergency heating method.
Heat pumps work differently from furnaces or boilers. Instead of heating the air inside the home, a heat pump extracts latent heat energy from the air outside the home and via refrigerant, transfers it to the home, where it's released into the indoor air. This is a highly efficient form of heating during mild winter days in Indiana, putting out three times the amount of heat energy as the electricity that goes into the system.
During times of extreme cold, however, there is simply not enough warmth in the outside air to pull into the home. When the weather sinks below freezing for an extended period, a heat pump generally will shift to emergency heating, usually in the form of an electric resistance coil, similar to the heating element in a toaster oven. This form of electric heating can never exceed 100 percent efficiency, meaning you're paying quite a bit more to heat your home than with the heat pump itself.
Increasingly, homeowners are considering dual-fuel heat pump systems where instead of using an electric heating element to provide auxiliary heat, a gas-fired furnace takes over during cold weather. While the furnace can't achieve any more efficiency than the backup electric heating element can, natural gas is much cheaper than electricity, BTU to BTU, in most parts of the country. This, coupled with the fact that a gas furnace can quickly heat up a space to a comfortable level, makes a dual-fuel system a quality alternative for auxiliary heating for your heat pump.
If you would like more professional help and advice on choosing a heat pump for your Fort Wayne area home, please contact us at Hartman Brothers Heating & Air Conditioning, Inc.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in New Haven, Indiana and surrounding Fort Wayne area about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about heat pumps and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.
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