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How to cut your energy bills by 30 per cent with a heat pump (www.thetimes.com)

submitted 2 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/unitedkingdom

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[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 12 points 2 months ago

However heat pumps just don’t seem to make any sense, and the more marketing materials I read critically, the less convinced I am of their practicality, nor the integrity of the vendors - if they work similarly to air conditioning units or refrigerators why do they cost 20x as much as those devices?

A refrigerator cools a fairly small volume with excellent insulation, which allows it to use a fairly small compressor running at a single speed. This is cheap.

The big differences between typical air conditioning units and heat pumps are:

they're set up to move heat both ways (eg: both heating and cooling) which requires a tiny bit of additional hardware
They often have a more substantial compressor to handle the larger temperature difference associated with colder temperatures
They're a lot more likely to be a system intended to support the whole home instead of a single room
People care about efficiency, which has variable-speed systems getting installed
There's a lot of demand for them right now, and limited supply