Green living and eco-friendly energy sources

How the heat pump is operating? As all the pumps, the heat pump transports substance as well. For heat pumps this substance is the heat. As we use the pumps to overcome gravity and pump the circulating liquid to a higher level, the heat pump can also be used for the same purposes.

In this case, the higher level becomes a the higher temperature, and the lower level is the cooler temperature. The heat pump's aim is to deliver heat from a cooler location (such as soil or groundwater) to a warmer location, such as floor heating, wall heating or radiator network.

The heat pump system is best compared to an inverted refrigerator. Follow along the cooling process:

A bottle - containing liquid at room temperature - is placed into the refrigerator. The warm liquid starts to heat up, so the air in the refrigerator warms and reach the 6°C. Thereafter, the walls of the refrigerator absorb heat, and lower the inner temperature back to 4 ° C.

Subsequently, the refrigerator passes the removed heat at a higher temperature to the envoriment through a cooling coil, located on the back of the refrigerator, which is much hotter than the 4-6 ° C in air stored indoors.

Building on this analogy we could say, that the refrigerator's cooler, inner surface is the collector of the heat pump, and the coolig coil is corresponded as the building's heating network (wall heating, floor heating etc. ).

The main advantages and disadvantages of heat pump systems
The most important to know that the pumps operates with electrical current. Therefore these types of heating systems have advantages and disadvantages as well. During the heating period, the heat pump returns many times of the power consumption, so it could be operated with low costs.

To compare the effectiveness of several heat pump systems, we should rely on the so called COP value. The COP number defines, how much heat could be produced with a given amount of electricity, at a given temperature.

The following numbers are typical COP values for various heat pump systems. These values may vary depending on several factor, but these values could give a good approximation of what efficiency could be expected.

For example, on a mild winter day (10 ° C outdoor temperature) the air to water heat pump's COP value is between 3.0 and 4.0 (with 1W of electricity the heat pump could produce 3 - 4W of heating energy). In this case, the conventional electric heating system's COP value is 1.0. To put it simply, to produce 1 Joule of heating, the system should use 1 Joule of electrical performance.

As the temperature decreasing, the air source heat pump's COP values is getting closer to 1. At the temperature of -18°, the heat pump is no longer capable of producing additional energy, so suddenly the system's efficiency is reduced as well.

In contrast to this, the geothermal heat pump operates with almost constant efficiency in the whole year. It is possible, because the soil has a constant temperature, and the probes could absorb the same amount of energy constantly.

Geothermal heat pumps could operate with a COP of 4.0 - 5.0.

To determine a similar value to cooling - as the COP - we should use the EER (energy efficiency ratio), or SEER (seasonal energy efficiency ratio). These values are usually characterized by the values %u200B%u200Band units (kWh) / (kWh).

For more information about this topic visit this site: http://geotherm.co.hu/en/blog/