The Most Efficient Method for Heating and Cooling Your Home

One of our goals is to help you eliminate the use of less efficient fossil fuels for heating and cooling your home so that you are not impacted by the demand or fear of oil and gas availability.

With most fossil fuels providing an average of only 80% fuel efficiency, this means that 20% of what you purchase to heat your home, goes right up the chimney, plus, this is also sucking out the warm air that has been heated and requires a lot of fresh cold air to infiltrate into your home, further impacting the efficiency of the heating system. If you do not already have a heat pump system, we highly recommend that you hire a professional heat pump installer because your savings could be substantial.

Until recently, if I were to say you would do better by replacing your oil or gas heating system with an electric system, you could assume I was misinformed or simply ignorant of true heating costs, but times have truly changed, now that they have dramatically increased the efficiencies of the Heat Pump.

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Basically, a heat pump is an air conditioner than can run in reverse. During the Heat Pump cooling cycle, it absorbs the heat inside your home and exhausts it outside. During the Heat Pump heating cycle, it absorbs the heat outside the home and exhausts it inside. What makes a heat pump so unusual is that it can find heat in outside air, even when the air temperature is close to 10 degrees F or -12 degrees C.

There is an universal law that you cannot create nor destroy energy, but can only transform it from one form to another. A Heat Pump uses electricity, but instead of simply providing 1KW of heat by burning 1KW of electricity, it extracts heat from the air and outputs more heat than what electricity alone would provide. In essence, it uses power to extract heat that is freely available, thus it provides more heat than the power it initially consumes.

The term used to describe the relationship to how much extra heat is absorbed from outside air is called the COP or 'Coefficient of Performance'. A good heat pump that has a COP of 2.5 means that is provides 2.5 times the amount of heat than what would normally be supplied by using electric resistance heating alone.

Primary advantages of heating with a heat pump are:

There is an Unlimited Source of Power - You can't drill for your own oil or gas and you can't dig up your own coal, but you can make choices to either create or use power from sources that are unlimited and have absolutely no impact on our environment. These power sources currently consist of solar, wind and hydroelectric. When using a heat pump that draws power from one of these resources, your power source is unlimited and creates no carbon footprint.

You Gain Access To Free Heat - The reason a heat pump works so well to heat is because it extracts heat from the air, ground or water (depending upon your system) and this portion of your heat is absolutely free! Your only cost is to use a small amount of power necessary for the heat pump scroll compressor to transfer it to your home use. If fossil fuels worked the same way, you would only pay for the fuel to be delivered to your home, but the fuel itself would be free.

Your Health is Not Impacted - Using electricity via a heat pump to heat your home, eliminates fossil fuels from your home. This means there is no possibility of carbon monoxide poisoning, plus there is nothing in your home that is consuming the oxygen that you need to live a happy and healthy life.

Heat is not Wasted - All fossil fuels require venting to the outdoors and/or fresh air intake to compensate for the oxygen they deplete. This means that air MUST be drawn into your home so that it can be exhausted out. Some gas and oil furnaces provide a closed loop for this, but most simply exhaust the air up the chimney which forces frigid air to get sucked into other areas of the house. If air is being pushed out, then it is also being sucked in through small cracks around windows, door frames or poorly constructed walls. This is called 'infiltration', but can simply be called 'drafts'. Heat pumps require no fresh air is drawn into the home, and therefore, it does not suck in frigid air and then toss your heated air away.

In addition to heating your home, heat pumps can now also provide the heat for creating hot water, and at a substantial savings of 2 to 3 times less than standard electric heaters. Heat pump water heaters also provide a considerable savings over fossil fuel water heaters, plus they provide many safety and health benefits as compared to using fossil fuels.

To summarize, heat pump technology allows you to use electricity in an extremely efficient manner that results in your heating costs being reduced by half or more, while also improving your homes state of health and reducing its carbon impact on the planet.

Find a Local Professional Contractor

Only a professional contractor can accurately determine the perfect heat pump or boiler system for your home, and also provide a clear picture of why and how it would work best within your home and climate zone.

Almost all contractors offer free estimates, so before you spend another day unsure about how much heat you are wasting by burning inefficient fossil fuels heating systems, find a contractor in your area by using the simple form below. Get the facts from a pro and then you can make an informed decision about how much you will benefit by making energy saving improvements within your home.

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