The mild Yuma winters can still pack a chill, and air-source heat pumps are highly efficient at keeping your home warm during the colder months. Unlike forced-air furnaces, which produce heat, heat pumps move heat energy from one location to another.
Air-source heat pumps serve as both a cooling system and heating system, which means you don’t need two separate systems for summer and winter.
How Air-Source Heat Pumps Work
Like a split-system A/C, air-source heat pumps consist of an outdoor condenser/compressor unit and an indoor air handler. In the winter, refrigerant flows through the outdoor coil, absorbing heat energy from the outside air and moving it indoors, where it’s released from the indoor coil and blown through your duct system into your rooms. In the summer, the process is reversed: heat energy from your home’s air is absorbed through the indoor coil, and transferred to the outdoors, via refrigerant, through the coil housed in the condenser/compressor unit.
Why Air-Source Heat Pumps Are So Efficient
Because heat pumps don’t generate heat like combustion systems do, they don’t consume expensive fuel. Although an air-source heat pump runs on electricity, a properly-installed system can provide up to three times more heat energy for your home than the electricity it consumes.
Additionally, technological advances have made heat pumps more efficient than ever before, from improved coil design and quieter, more efficient electrical motors to variable speed blowers and thermostatic expansion valves that allow more precise control of heat absorption.
Coupled with an efficient duct system, an air-source heat pump can operate up to 40 percent more efficiently than the most efficient furnace.
Maintaining an Air-Source Heat Pump Is Easy
Like all HVAC systems, air-source heat pumps should be inspected and tuned up annually by a qualified technician. Aside from a yearly tune-up, the only maintenance task required is regular air filter changes, which keep the interior of the system clean and improve your indoor air quality.
For more information about whether an air-source heat pump is right for your Yuma area home, please contact Hansberger Refrigeration and Electric Company.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Yuma, Arizona about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about air-source heat pumps and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.
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