The concept behind heat pumps is simple: powered by electricity, they move heat around to either cool or heat buildings. It&#;s not a new idea&#;they were invented in the s and have been used in homes since the s. But all of a sudden, they&#;ve become the hottest home appliance, shoved into the spotlight by the potential for cost savings and climate benefits, as well as by recent policy incentives.
Simple though the basic idea may be, the details of how heat pumps work are fascinating. In the name of controlling your home&#;s temperature, this device can almost seem to break the laws of physics. Heat pumps are also getting better: new models are more efficient and better able to handle cold weather.
So let&#;s dive in and uncover what makes a heat pump tick.
At a high level, a heat pump gathers heat from one place and puts it in another place. We&#;ll mostly talk about heat pumps in the context of heating, but they can also be used for cooling, gathering heat from inside and sending it outside like an air conditioner. Many heat pumps can actually be run in reverse, either heating or cooling depending on what&#;s needed.
The hero in a heat pump is the refrigerant: a fluid that moves in a circuit, soaking up and releasing heat as it goes. Electricity powers the system, pushing the refrigerant around the cycle.
As the refrigerant moves through the heat pump, it&#;s compressed and expanded, switching between liquid and gas forms to allow it to gather and release heat at different points in the cycle. (If this is enough detail for you, feel free to skip to the next question. Otherwise, join me on a journey inside a heat pump to understand how this all works.)
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Picture this: it&#;s a chilly winter day, say 25 °F (-5 °C). You&#;re sitting on the couch in your living room with a good book, and your cat is curled up nearby. You look over at the thermostat, which is set to 68 °F. Sensible, but a little chilly. You walk over and bump it up a bit, to 70 °F.
Your heat pump has been quietly humming along in the background. Now it kicks things up a notch to raise the temperature: the fan and compressor inside speed up, and the refrigerant starts moving faster to transfer more heat from outside to inside.
The 1st heat pump invented, as we know it today was created by Peter von Rittinger in . He recognized the principle of the heat pump while conducting experiments on the use of water vapor&#;s latent heat for the evaporation of salt brine. As a result, in Austria the heat pump was used to dry salt in salt marshes.
By the late s, when the first Generation X babies were born, most new homes in North America had central air conditioning. It wasn&#;t until the oil crisis of the s that the heat pump became a more popular choice for heating and cooling homes. Heat pumps used a single &#;fuel&#;, electricity, to heat and cool a home.
Moving ahead in time to today, you can even heat the water in your pool with a heat pump as illustrated below. Heat pumps now have multiple uses and help in reducing our individual carbon footprints.
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It is estimated that about 140 million heat pumps are working in the world. This evidences
that the equipment conceived by Lord Kelvin back in has finally penetrated into the market.
In the last 20 years the heat pump has improved. The thermal exchange surfaces, the compressor, and the control and defrosting systems. Not only was the COP strongly improved, but also seasonal performances. Further equipment improvements are aimed to better exploit the properties of new refrigerants. Utilizing even the pressure drop between condenser and evaporator, usually dissipated by throttling. Gas driven heat pumps were also improved with higher efficiency i.c. motors and much longer maintenance intervals. Absorption heat pumps are now available in many different models suitable to different applications. Probably most improvements took place with lower heating temperatures and the use of cold sources. More suitable than the outside air, above all surface and underground water, the ground and the recovery in mechanical ventilation systems.
The year was &#; a year stuffed with curious activities. A year in which the first tape recorder was sold, Harry Truman was re-elected president and 84-year-old baseball legend Connie Mack challenged 76-year-old fellow legend Clark Griffith to a race &#; which surprisingly ended in a tie.
It was quite an interesting year to coincide with the creation of something that almost all of us enjoy, and all because one man didn&#;t want to be wasteful.
While the world turned and events happened, a man by the name of Robert C. Webber was working on a freezer in his cellar beneath his home. Home refrigeration was nothing new and had, in fact, been around for years. You see, Robert C. Webber was looking to improve his electric deep freezer &#; the kind of freezer so cold you can store meat for years without spoiling.
On that day in , though, Robert burned his hand on his freezer. An intriguing incident since the freezer should be displacing cold water, not hot. By hot we&#;re not talking about warm to the touch or lukewarm. Nor are we describing the kind of heat you experience when curled up next to a fireplace on a cold winter morning reading your favorite book, newspaper or Facebook post. This was the kind of heat that boils water and makes you scream out loud when you touch it. The kind of heat where running cold water over it makes it worse and sends you scrambling for aloe vera. Robert discovered that the deep freezer was producing scalding hot water.
Not wanting to be wasteful, Robert thought about how to use this heat from his freezer. Many ideas came to mind, and when all seemed to fail, he decided to send the hot water to his boiler. As you may have experienced with your own water heater, his boiler could not keep enough hot water flowing into his home for showers and washing hands. Not having enough hot water is an issue all families have encountered, and nothing is more surprising than singing in the shower to your favorite song when the hot water runs out. And you know it ran out because all of a sudden you hear that note &#; higher than you think is possible &#; coming from your mouth. So Robert fixed his boiler problem by sending the heated water from his deep freeze in the cellar into his boiler. And, just like that, there were no more cold showers for his family.
But now Robert encountered the issue of having too much hot water. Not wanting to be wasteful, he needed to send the leftover heated, scalding hot water from the boiler somewhere else. As an inventor, his mind worked in ways different than the average American. So he thought and grumbled, drew sketches and mumbled. Finally, he had an idea for the leftover wasted hot water.
Robert ran that leftover boiling water into a coiled copper tube with a small electric fan. The hot water heated the coil and the fan blew and blew. In fact, the fan blew so well it heated his entire home. In , Robert C. Webber created the first electric heat pump by reusing the wasted boiling water from a deep cold freezer.
The following year, Robert replaced the coal furnace in his home, and decades later heat pumps were found all around the state of Tennessee. The water has now been replaced by Freon, and the systems have grown smaller and more efficient. Robert C. Webber inspired a new generation of electrical technology centered around the idea of air conditioning.
was a year filled with curious activities, as you may have discovered by now. So as you sit comfortably in your home, office or anywhere indoors with your HVAC system running, you can thank Robert C. Webber for his burned hands and not wanting to be wasteful.
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