Article for Appalachian Voices from December 2015/ January 2016 Issue

Dec 2015 / Jan 2016

Modern High Efficiency Heat Pumps Deliver “Free Heat”

The biggest user of energy in most homes is the heating and cooling system. There are three basic ways to reduce the energy consumed by your heating and cooling system.

• Produce the heating and cooling more efficiently

• Reduce the load by tightening the home’s thermal envelope

• Obtain energy from clean and renewable sources

In this article we will focus on the first item, specifically how a heat pump can help heat and cool a home more efficiently.

In a word, super-efficient heat pumps ROCK in the mountains where the weather can be so variable from one day to the next. An average heat pump is able to get about two and a half times more heat from a kilowatt-hour of electricity than a conventional heat source, such as an electric baseboard. For example, a home that uses 10 kilowatt hours of electricity on heat will get 34,120 BTUs of heat with an electric baseboard system, but would get 85,300 BTUs from a heat pump.

In the past, one concern with heat pumps was that they required supplemental heat during very cold weather. Modern, super-efficient heat pumps, however, can perform at 100% efficiency down to much colder temperatures. A mini split is one such type of efficient heat pump system.

Some models of the Mitsubishi Mini Splits are 100% efficient down to -13˚F. A mini-split system can also be set up with multiple zones, which means that if you have an in-law suite, for instance, you can set that area to a different setting than the rest of your home.

Because heat pumps are 2.5 times more efficient than electric baseboards, you will be paying much less money for what you actually get. And getting more heat from the same amount of electricity equals fewer carbon emissions, which is great for the planet!

• Install renewable energy systems to produce emission-free lean energy