THIS Is The Future Of Home Heating!
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- Опубликовано: 16 июн 2024
- Heat pumps are heralded as a super efficient and cost effective way to heat our homes. But what exactly is inside this big box that apparently works like a backwards fridge and how exactly does a heat pump work?! We sent our resident scientist, Dr Helen Czerski to find out and she did not disappoint! Cue marble runs, air dusters and bike pumps as she demystifies the inner workings of a heat pump! If you still have questions, please let us know in the comments!
00:00 Introduction
00:30 What is a heat pump?
01:00 The Second Law of Thermodynamics
02:52 Getting heat to flow into the house!
03:19 Cold to colder!
05:23 Hot to Hotter!
05:51 Putting it all together!
07:39 Coefficient of Performance - 400% efficient??
09:05 Heat redistribution NOT heat generation!
09:25 Concluding thoughts
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Great to see Helen presenting again. She is such a good teacher. 👍
She jumps around a lot.
Almost all houses in Sweden use a ground source heat pump which is even more effiecient than this type of heatpump by about 10-20 percent. The prices of these air/water heatpumps with installation has gone up to almost the same as the ground source heat pump, making the ground source heat pump a more sensible choice. A big benefit is that you also can connect air conditioning units all over your house to these pumps where they will provide cool air during summer.
I've been looking at both types, but I can't really justify the substantial cost of the drilling/digging for only 10-20% gain in efficiency. Where ground source really shines is in extreme cold temperatures where it still has a decent COP and most air source heat pumps have switched to resistive heating at that point. That has a much bigger affect on the peak load of the grid if everyone had the same type of heat pump than the 10-20% gain.
Ground source heating have also longer expected lifespan. Because the pump is inside, it could last up to 30 years, right?
If i go down the heat pump route, i'd go for a ground source one.
Drilling is a one-time cost, after that it is not that expensive to replace the compressor once in 15 years or so. Air-to-air heat pumps do not work that well when the outside temperature goes very low. Tomorrow it should be -18 °C here which is no problem with a ground source heat pump.
I guess it depends where you live and whether you want to make a long-time investment or replace the whole system every 7 years or so when the air-to-air heat pump is end-of-life.
@Cristian Seres it's certainly only a one-time cost, but in my area, a typical geothermal well with installation of piping, etc is about $10k-$12k. I have a well insulated house, and my savings for geothermal vs air source is only about $250/yr. That's a minimum of a 40-year payback. Unfortunately, I'll be long pushing up daisies by then.
A decent analogy is to think of refrigerant like a sponge for heat. If you squeeze it it will release that heat, if you let it expand it will soak up heat.
Expand it where you want to soak up some heat, then move it over to where you want to release that heat, compress it and it will dump that heat there. Then just move it back to the other side again and repeat.
…lol i understood this analogy as soon as i read this comment 👏👏👏
Brilliant!
Ah! Now I get it, that's brilliant, thanks!
that's brilliant
Brilliant!!!
Heat pumps were introduced in Norway about 15-20 years ago and the government even handed out incentives to people who Installed them the first years. Most houses from the last 20 years have them here, and we just installed one in our house 2 weeks ago. Ours is also an AC in the summer. Best investment ever.
My grandfather got one and he passed away 2000. So I would say that in Sweden and also probably in Norway heatpumps has been around comersally for 20-30 years, at least.
@@morilot Yeah you're probably right. I just can't remember that far back 😅
How is it working when its under -15c outside? Do you manage to heat your place?
@@poxer1 The one my grandfather bought stopped working as a heatpump at -20°C and switched to direct electrical heating.
But it was replaced last year by a new heatpump that works down to -25°C. That's kinda the problem with air to air or air to water heatpumps they stop working when you need them the most.
Ground to water or water to water heatpumps (sometimes called geothermal) don't have that limitations but they cost more and cannot be as easily installed.
My parent have geothermal and it works great.
I've just installed my second air/water heatpump here in Sweden. It's been a common thing here for decades.
Heat Pumps have been prevalent here in Canada/Québec for at least 25-30 years. They are used to heat many homes (often for central forced-air systems) as well as for cooling in the summer. They are also everywhere for heating pools (slower than gas, but much much less costly). During the winter, it is usually considered that heat pumps become less efficient when it's below -20C to -25C which doesn't happen that often, but it does mean you do need a complementing heating system.
In the UK it never usually gets cold enough to warrant the installation of expensive heating systems. A simple gas boiler that also provides instant hot water is the ideal, which most houses have in the UK. But our moronic politicians want to scrap all these and force people to install expensive systems to ‘save the planet’. All these ideas will eventually come to nothing, but lots of people will have invested in them to their harm. Our politicians on the whole are entitled idiots - Boris Johnson being the prime example!
Just installed 2 12kw Nibe 2125 heat pumps from Sweden for my 480 square meter home, with radiators, in northern Italy. Also installed smart radiator valves from Bticino-Natatmo. They work absolutely without a fault and it’s going to be much cheaper and greener than lpg. Super happy
Well done.
Why is it not air to air heat pump? Do you not go to Italy in summer, so you do not need AC in your house?
A great video explaining how the technology works. I use a heat pump to heat and cool my house, and it is proving to be extremely efficient and cost-effective. In combination with solar panels I am receiving about €500/year back from my energy supplier instead of paying them, and that’s including all of my heating, cooling, hot water, cooking and charging my EV for 10k kilometers/year. The one thing missing from your video is that a heat pump can also be used to cool your house as well as heat it up - definitely a great benefit now that hot streaks are becoming more common and air conditioners are expensive and hard to come by. I live in the Netherlands which has a climate similar to that of the UK…
Would it still be financially viable without the money back from the supplier? In the UK solar panels were a no-brainer when you got paid 50p /KWh from the government - 5-6 year "payback". Now that payment has stopped, so it's less straightforward, but I imagine as a result the panels are cheaper to buy and install.
@@robman80808 that's why we should take politics and policies seriously instead of the way we currently treat politics as sports clubs rivalry. Why not incentivize individuals producing energy by paying them instead of asking energy corporations to supply more at their extortionate prices? Your government is robbing you if you are not being paid for your excess energy you put into the grid while energy corporations continue to extort consumers
Do you have a Solar FARM?
In winter in this part of Europe, a 12 panel Solar system would provide about 3-4 Kwh per day.
Even with a heat pump, that would heat an average home for about 2 hours.
PLUS: hot water, kettle, shower, washing machine, dishwasher, oh and power an electric car!
And you are paid 500 euros per year by your energy supplier?
How does your cooling work? When I've seen or heard of heating/cooling systems, they're usually air-to-air systems, which dispense with the radiator water and plumb the refrigerant straight to blower units (like an office air conditioner). Do you have an air-to-water system with fan convectors? I've been wondering if that would be a better retrofit solution to UK homes, which nearly all have wet passive radiator systems.
Actually the U.K. has much more wind born rain, especially on its western coast. This is important as there are places where air source heat pumps aren’t suitable 😬
I'm in Canada and have had a heat pump for almost 20 years. Works really well to heat the house in cold weather but is also efficient at cooling it during warm weather.
which city? heat pumps weren't very effective in our climate 20 years ago, they don't operate in our winters. i understand that current heat pumps have that capability but only recently.
Heat Pumps have been prevalent here in Canada/Québec for at least 25-30 years. They are used to heat many homes (often for central forced-air systems) as well as for cooling in the summer. They are also everywhere for heating pools (slower than gas, but much much less costly). During the winter, it is usually considered that heat pumps become less efficient when it's below -20C to -25C which doesn't happen that often, but it does mean you do need a complementing heating system.
@@colors6692 wow that's news to me. I'm in the GTA and all the houses here are heated by natural gas forced air furnaces. It's hard to find a HVAC contractor that does heat pumps.
Heat pumps are now required by code in new construction in Seattle which has the perfect climate for that technology. Today’s heat pumps will operate in below 0 temperatures.
I love a Czerski episode, always informative and super interesting. Also great to see the Scrapheap Challenge graphic artists are working again!
Really clear and inspirational. I had my NIBE 12 kW installed in March and now I understand it better. Thanks Helen
I thought this was a Technology Connections video since it's his favourite subject when I saw the popup. 😅
I have a 1910 end terrace with no insulation and installed a heat pump. These new models run at fairly high temperates but as with any system, they are more efficient at lower temperatures. We installed some traditional looking column radiators as they are roughly the same height and width as a standard radiator but the extra depth and surface area of the columns provides the additional thermal output needed to run at a lower temperature. There was a small additional cost (£150-200) for these rads, but they look nice too. Running costs are comparable to gas and we will over time insulate our house internally to bring bills down further.
We've been heating our water for showering etc. with a heat pump since 2012.👍🏻 Some people think that heating anything with electricity is expensive, but for a good comparison (price per kWh) you have to divide your electricity price by your annual performance factor (COP over the whole year, so a bit lower than the advertised COP).
After dividing your electricity price by 3-4 you can easily get lower than gas or oil. (Especially with special electricity prices for heat pumps)
Technology Connections represent! By the way, there are much more in-depth explanations on that channel, highly recommended.
Great explanation of how air source heat pumps work. Many thanks Helen you always seem make complex subjects so much more interesting and clearer for the lay person.
Great video. Thanks so much for the explanation 👍
I had a general idea of how they worked, but this was a great, proper explanation 👏🏼
Great explanation of the principles. Thanks much and happy birthday, Helen!
Such a clear and interesting explanation, I always love Helen’s episodes! 😎
FUTURE? This has been the standard in NZ for years, as we don't have gas lines in most places. Fascinating to see what's considered "normal" around the world. We have 3 in our house. Heat in winter, Air con in summer.
That said, NZ's home insulation standards have historically been awful, so I'm not going to throw any stones. 😁
The last time I'd heard about heat pumps, 15-20 years ago, the objection was that the heat pump didn't feel as comfortable as a furnace. The heat pumps I was familiar with acted like reverse air conditioners, the refrigerant heated air which traveled around ventilation ducts to locate hot or cold air around the house. The problem seemed to be that the compressed fluid didn't raise the air temperature to the point that it was as hot as warm air from a furnace.
When air from a furnace blows against you it is hotter than your body temperature, so it makes you feel warmer. I was told that the air coming from the heat pump tended to be warmer than the air inside the house but colder than human body temperature. Thus when air from the heat pump blew against your skin, it would actually feel colder even though it was warming the house. The heat pump would keep the room temperature at the level it was set, but the house might not feel as warm as one with a furnace. At least this is what I was told at the time.
Has this situation changed?
I'm sure you convinced a lot more people to look at this solution. What an informative video.
A fairly good explainer for those of us curious about this tech. Thank you!
Thanks Helen , my Nissan Leaf has a heat pump and seems very efficient and fast to warm up .
First time I've understood the general principle behind heat pumps... Well done!!!
If you look at temperitures in kelvin, it becomes obvious that there is a *HUGE* amount of energy available in the atmosphere even at temperitures that, to our skin, are very *very* cold.
Water freezes at 273 degrees kelvin. Your living space (20 degrees C) is ideally 293 degrees kelvin. In other words, the difference between freezing and comfortable is around 7% raw heat energy. There's a huge amount of energy available to a heat pump, even well below freezing.
Heat pump designs over just the past 5 or 10 years are now able to effectively heat a typical home even when the outside temperature is a bone-chilling -20°F/-7°C!
During lockdown, I replaced my mother's rather old heat pump system just such a design. Not only does it cool her home with much high efficiency (thereby saving money), but it also now heats her home in winter *without* the aid of 10kW resistive heating elements as in the old system). Overall, she's consuming roughly 65% of her previous energy usage, even as she keeps her home cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter as she gets on in age.
That was a very good presentation of the principle.
Fantastic thank you so much! I have been explaining this to sooo many people, (yes I’m boring at dinner parties!) thanks for putting this in a video!
I used the same explanation of telling people it’s like when they feel the cold from an aerosol if they spray it on their finger as the gases expand. I also used the bicycle pipe getting hot due to temperature example!
Really reassured I was on the right tracks with my explanation, just relieved I can point people to a proper video now instead of me just waffling!
Excellent video.
Your bicycle pump analogy is a much better explanation.
Excellent stuff. Love the sunshine Y fronts
Fantastic video. Well done!
Nice primer Helen, many thanks
A very good illustration of how the heat pump works. ❤
Just installed my first air/air heat pump to replace a 20+ year old gas furnace.
Traded heating only 👉🏽heat + a/c
Under discussed benefit 👉🏽 improved quality of heat feel
Two weeks ago I put a heat pump in the home I rent out an it's working great so far. According to my calculations for my case it will be cheaper than if I had put in a gas boiler, due to a lower running cost.
Note power prices are rising but so is natural gas price. The bigger return is the insulation and home changes you did to get the heat pump to work. This will have cut your heating demand.
Isn't it annoying that electric is almost 3 times more expensive per kWh. Ends up costing nearly the same
@@Chrom35kull Time for solar if possible. The payback has come right down with the energy price hikes.
@@weeeeehhhhh Trying to organise them for the company I work for.
A proper uphill struggle and the energy rates we're being offered at the end of December are ridiculous. £1.20/kWh. No one can afford that, o business could afford it. They may as well have said we don't want you.
@@Chrom35kull That depends on whether you can get gas when you need it at a realistic price.
Let's all forget it's a climate warming gas that taxpayers will have to pay to mitigate it's early damage at massive cost. Lucky it's our our children then grandkids who will suffer the most...
Brilliantly presented.
In 1992. I had a roof-mounted heat pump HVAC central-air in my brand new all-electric $67,000 3-Bedroom 2-car garage in Phoenix, Arizona and my electric bill was around $60 a month.. When I sold it to retire overseas in 2001, it was still in good order. A few air filter change was all I did... Most people around me then had roof-mounted swamp-coolers... Yes to heat-pumps...
I love these episodes full of facts. Very insightful.
As an HVAC technician I've worked on heat pumps for over 40 years. Nothing new here. The efficiency has improved greatly and with much higher natural gas, heating oil, and propane costs it can be more economical. However the outlet temperature is lower than combustion or electric resistance heat and most people don't want heat pumps for that reason.
have been working with the vapor compression cycle for years now. building hot water systems for butchers shops in the 80s using there freezer motors as the heat source. so glad the technology is now filtered through . keep smiling everyone
Exactly what homes need, cool rooms and hot running water. A combined system that meets our needs.
@@bhatkrishnakishor fred west . lol
Thanks so much for a wonderful explanation of how heat pumps work. I hope they will come down in price and become even more technologically advanced so I can replace my heat exchangers one day. Cheers!
Heatpumps have been available for over 40 years. I had one in my home in the early 80's.
They have come in to their own now though as uk electricity is no longer produced from coal. Scandinavia have had more hydro and wind making it a good envoronmental choice for longer.
you could have added that there are heat pumps which can reverse the heatflow. which means they can be used as a ac in the summer.
Yes but there are some caveats to that depending on your home, something to do with avoiding condensation along the pipes from what I was told
@@youngwt1 We have one of these. A mini split system. The lines inside the house are very very short run straight out the back of the inside unit, and they're also insulated.
It's highly effective, much less expensive than the system most people fit, with radiators and is perfectly capable of heating our 1982 build house.
Not sure why the narrative is set to deliberately avoid these in the UK. They're the system of choice in much of Scandinavia.
@@youngwt1 it is automatic 18 degrees setting and without any condensation. Cooling is not efficient unless you have solar panels.
For Air-Air heat pump, it can be done. But i don't think it works in the example of Air-water heat pump, that discharges the heat through radiators inside the house. That's a definitely a con for air-water heat pump, but these tends to be more efficient during winter, where you'll spend most of the time using it.
Sounds to much like a air conditioner in reverse and we know how much damage there doing to the environment air con 2.0 😳☠️☠️☠️ stick to solar and wind to produce our heat just cause we can do something doesn’t mean we should .
Interesting, what an impressive piece of tech 😃 We have a heat pump & greatly appreciate the lil'scientific breakdown of how it actually works 🙏🏼 Cheers !
So Wise , Thank You
Wow. That was a great explanation how it works. Reference Video for Beginners.
Helen missed off a few things.
She didn't say where the heat comes from in the first place; the heat comes from nuclear fusion in the sun and travels to the Earth by radiation. A heat pump harvests the solar energy that exists as low-grade heat in our outdoor environment and moves it indoors into the (hopefully) insulated envelope of our home. The insulation slows down the movement of the heat from our homes back into the outdoor environment.
Although she spoke about overall efficiency being 300 to 400 percent, she didn't speak about what affects efficiency; heat pumps are very efficient at moving heat from one place to another where the temperature difference between the two places is low, but less efficient at moving heat between places where the temperature difference is high; the lower the temperature gradient the higher the efficiency. This is why you cannot simply replace a boiler with a heat pump, as boilers operate at far higher temperatures and distribute the heat through heat emitters (radiators) that are designed to operate at those high temperatures. Heat naturally moves easily from a hot to a cool place the higher the temperature gradient between the places, so, with boilers, there is no great challenge to emitting the heat in our homes to achieve the required comfort temperature. Traditional radiators are very poor at emitting heat at low water temperatures and heat pumps are very inefficient at producing hot water at high temperatures. There are a number of different ways of tackling this issue. One way is fitting oversized radiators, so they have a greater surface area to emit the heat. Another way is to increase the flow rate and another way is to increase the duration of the heating cycle, so that the heating system has longer to replace the heat loss of the building. Another way is to use hydronic underfloor heating, which is very efficient at heating homes to the required comfort temperature using low temperature water. Another way is to increase the level of insulation, so the heat loss is reduced, which means there is less heat to replace so the emitters have to work less hard to replace the lost heat.
In practice, often some or all of these measures are required to keep the flow temperature of the heat pump at the low levels required to achieve high efficiency. It is these remedial measures that lead to the high cost of replacing a boiler with a heat pump.
Fascinating and excellent timing as we are finally looking to set up sustainable energy via solar and pump.
Still trying to find out what the best sustainable source is to use with underfloor heating
nice explanation thank you
Love your work 👍
What a good demonstration/explanation. Now all we need to do is get the price of electricity down so we can afford to run all these heat pumps.
I had a heat pump HVAC in my home including ground loop well back in 1980.
Thank you!
A house must be insulated to the highest standards for this to work efficiently.
Partly true. Gas boilers send water out to radiators at (typically) 50-70°C. This allows smaller, less efficient radiators to be used, and for 'effective' heating of draughty buildings. Heat pumps can deliver radiator water at 60°C, but their COP drops and you need to run cooler to get a COP greater than 4 (ideally 40°C).
If the house is fitted with small gas boiler-sized radiators, a heat pump is going to struggle and the house will need to be very well-insulated to stand a chance. Some older houses have impressively large radiators that would work fine at ~50°C, as long as the insulation and draught-proofing is good. Investing in larger radiators and/or fan convectors will allow a heat pump to work more efficiently, even if there are some minor heat loss issues.
I kinda feel that heat pumps are like a home efficiency lie detector. If it's well-insulated, it's easy to get a heat pump to work well. If it's poorly-insulated, a heat pump is going to struggle. Insulating ''to the highest standards' will give you the best results, but there's a big range of possibilities between this and the heat pump horror stories (where some heating architect evidently hasn't done their job right)
@@gigabyte2248 There’s also the issue of inbuilt inefficiencies in some heating systems. I’ve seen systems with underfloor heating downstairs & steel radiators upstairs. Those systems will never function well with a heat pump.
not true it will still work in a house with zero insulation like mine its just far less efficient thats all. But I use it more for cooling than heating. But the heating side gives more warm air than cool air for unknown reason
@@hughmarcus1 A lot of new builds have just that. Is there a better solution (or more radiators upstairs?)
300 percent efficiency!
More out than in ?
Really?
Understanding heat pumps through evaporation and condensation could be much easier.
even more easy is - liquid to gas and gas to liquid state change releasing or absorbing heat, and frion gases are used as they can change the state depends on the pressure which is created by compressor.
This makes it easy for me to understand: The temperature of a substance is just the average energy of its molecules, which have quite a wide distribution.
With evaporation, only the most energetic molecules can escape, so the average temperature of the remaining liquid *must* go down.
The marbles suggested that heat moves down. Not the best analogies.
@@santosvella heat does always moves down, from hot to cold. The heat pump makes the refrigerant colder than outside and hotter than inside
@@peterbrown6453 for me the slightly confusing part is that we're taught that heat rises. But yes heat will spread its kinetic energy to the surrounding molecules, which can be down or any direction. It wasn't crystal clear how the analogy applies to the heat pump though as the heat exchanger relies on pumping fluid and air. It doesn't seem like it waits for heat to flow down to achieve its goal.
I still have SERIOUS concerns over the practical rollout of these devices in the UK. In Finland, some one million of the nation's 2.7 million homes are now heated with ASHPs, and this places an increased demand on the power grid of 3.3GW during the coldest months. When we imagine replacing the UK's twenty-four million gas boilers with ASHPs, this translates to 80GW, which would need twenty-five nuclear reactors the size of Hinkley C, or twenty offshore wind farms the size of Hornsea to be constructed. For some comparison, right now, TOTAL UK grid demand is 45GW
Even assuming we started to build the nuclear stations tomorrow, we'd still be looking at a turnaround time of almost fifty years (with over a hundred years being needed to construct the required offshore wind farms). Oh, and that's the BEST case scenario! When you factor the additional power needed for EVs, industrial furnaces and ovens, agricultural grain drying, etc, etc, we're looking at an additional 120GW above the 80GW needed for ASHPs.
Sorry to rain on the parade here, but NO ONE seems to be asking these questions, and they are questions that NEED to be asked - and answered!
Sure - it's going to take a lot of energy. However, if we want to get away from burning Fossil Fuels, then that energy that we're currently burning as Gas has to come from somewhere. If we e.g. switch to 'clean hydrogen', then the power-demands are going to be ~9x higher than for heatpumps (based on 300% avg efficiency for a heatpump, vs. 30% efficiency for generating green hydrogen using electricity).
So, whatever happens, we're going to have to massively increase our power generation capability... whether that be through more solar, onshore wind, offshore wind, or newer / more experimental sources such as wave and tidal (both of which as *massive* sources of potential power for the UK, if we can solve the reliability issues, etc)
@@logicalChimp The idea that we are going to increase generating capacity by >500% is for the birds. irrespective of the practical considerations of actually building the required turbines, we then move into the whole area of distribution. Are we really going to replace 400,000 sub-stations and string an additional 5,000 miles of EHT overhead cable between another 90,000+ pylons? Even assuming the aluminium could be found for such an enterprise, where would the copper come from for the 180,000 miles of buried cable that would need to be replaced to meet the increased load?
I’m grateful for Helen’s video - it will take time to sink in but at least I now understand some of the magic of heat pumps.
YAY! I fully support the timeliness of this video.
I love the presentation, it was clear and concise! A couple things - are air-to-liquid heat pumps common in the UK? Here in Finland, I mostly see liquid-to-liquid (liquid circulating in ground or in a lake to collect the energy from there) as a primary heating source and air-to-air as a secondary heating source; I don't think I've ever seen air-to-liquid units in actual use.
I have a friend who lived his childhood in the 1980s and 1990s in a house where the central heating was connected to an experimental heat pump system (his uncle was a physics professor who had built it from scratch). They typically got something like 1.5 times the amount of electrical energy from it as heat. Progress seems to be progressing :D
One nit to pick: I've always been taught that a heat pump is a device that moves heat from a colder place to a warmer place, and the textbook example has been a refrigerator. It's not a heat pump running in reverse, it's just a heat pump.
I have a heat pump tumble dryer and it’s rated at 800w. The clothes only ever reach 50c which is perfectly adequate to dry them and actually looks after the clothes far more than cooking them like a conventional tumble dryer does.
Come to Scandinavia and make a video about air to air heat pumps! New ones gives heat down to -35c!
Good stuff. Hope this goes a way to inspiring some engineers!
All very good, I've always liked Helen's style of explaining relatively complex issues. The downside is it costs around £10k for an average house according to most of the information I've been reading. The savings on your energy bill based on Oct 2022 prices are about £400 per year if you have an old gas boiler and if you have a A rated combi boiler it will actually cost a little more. So if you finance the installation over 5 years at around 10% interest rate then you'll be paying out an additional £1800-ish per year once you've deducted the savings assuming you have an old gas boiler.
Great show Helen. Heatpumps will be ubiquitous before long. They are moving into domestic appliances, that use heat as well...
Amazing video.
Thank you
I hope this channel will do a video on geothermal heat pumps as they work better in more situations since in the case of below freezing temperatures; the stand alone heat pump literally has no heat to pump. Where as below ~8 feet in the ground is a pretty consistent temperature. Though of course, there is a need for ground space to lay the pump piping which can be intrusive.
I wouldn't say the air-source heat pump has "literally" no heat to pump below zero, since it's not in fact the absolute zero (-273.15°C), but the efficiency does rather plummet, mainly because there's complications with frost etc.
Ground-source will always be more efficient, yes, the only issue being that a lot of people do not, in fact, have the option to dig up their gardens - primarily if they live in flats, or city centres, or similar. And ground-source does tend to have a higher upfront cost, which can be a problem for adoption.
Great video.
Thanks for another great video guys! Very cool kitchen as well!
Gotta love the dude's comment below about how if enough homes install heatpumps...it will cause an ice age! lolol
These are reserve cycle air conditioning units in Australia so both useful for heating and cooling
Do you mean reverse? 😁
Why don't people go for multi split airconditioners over this? Wall units heat rooms much faster than heat pump to radiators have similar efficiencies and are much cheaper, plus you get heating and cooling. Would be nice if they could run a domestic hot water heat exchanger on one of the splits and heat up the hot water as well. If it had some sort of crossover technology you could be cooling the house and heating the hot water from the heat taken out of the house.
Last sentence, I have one fitted. Chapee is the brand, 1300 euro and the money saved in 3 years has already paid for it.
Takes the heat from the bathroom and heats the water, does have an immersion heater for emergencies, but I have never used it.
I also have a budget 700 euro reversible split heat/ air con unit, but it is used as an aid to extend the period before I turn the pellet stove on. Qlima is the brand on that.
These are all piss easy things to fit and quite cheap to buy and own, I have no clue why they are seen as unusual in the UK.
@@ForeverNeverwhere1
We have a mini split too. Does just fine for us.
In the UK most houses have wet plumbing already so a split require more ripping out and making good. Also when we looking in to ot , splits have a larger charge of refrigerant and more prone to leakage than a monoblock. As they need a non flammable refrigerant they have to use say r32 which although better than older ones has a pretty massive global warming potential so in the event of a leak you might undo a year or two of your carbon savings. We opted for r290 which if it leaks is the equivalent of a 10km drive...
@@ForeverNeverwhere1 It's simply because the UK has had access to extremely cheap gas for many decades. However, the time has come for heat pumps here, now.
I have a Midea 3.5 kW split in my living room. Brilliant. Still have the old gas central heating, but it hardly ever gets switched on..
At last someone who made me understand how this works 👍
Normal for apartments, on the countryside ground source heat pumps are perhaps preferred, recently seen more older building getting new roofs and a layer of multi-decimeter wide insulation added on the outside of typical brick houses with weatherproofing on top.
Ground source heat pumps are always preferred, they can be as much as 600% efficient.
Thank you. I found the video informative and entertaining as well as being pitched at a level that eased understanding. Well done.
Great explaination, nice and clear. A little bit of a shame that the difference between COP and SCOP wasn't explained, this is a key concept to get over for consumers.
It’s true, so much attention is given to the COP and this part is pushed to the consumer as a sale technique. Many videos are doing the same. When you bring in the run time of these appliances it makes it more practical to understand the cost to run them.
Very good. Well explained. Could have been better explained by heat as being energy of molecular vibrations.
I would have liked some mention of the idea that a practical system can only heat homes down to a certain temperature. Below the system becomes increasingly costly to build and operate, so (as I understand) a practical system has a backup for low temperatures.
Maybe it wasn't mentioned because it's bunk? Heat pumps are good down to -20C and remain efficient. At -20 my heat pumps weather compensation will give a flow temp of around 45 degrees. That's still going to be COP well over 2. That's never going to happen in the UK, so it's COP is probably going to stay over 4 for heating
I bought my first heat pump in 2000, and they were already quite popular here on Vancouver Island in Canada.
A good explanation - I think very helpful for those without much science knowledge. One small point - it's not the opposite of a fridge, rather the same - the expansion of pressurised refrigerant causes cooling, allowing heat to be extracted from the fridge, and the compressor raises the temperature of the gas enough to pass that heat the the air on the outside of the fridge.
Yes - but it's the opposite in the sense that the fridge is moving heat *out* of the enclosure, rather than into it. If Helen didn't emphasise that it's the opposite, there would be people thinking it meant a heatpump would turn their house into a freezer :p
@Geoff Willingham, you make a very valid point, thanks.
We’ve got heat pumps all around the house, to cool it (and occasionally heat it). To heat the swimming pool, one in the clothes dryer and of course the fridge and freezer. They’re everywhere.
Love the marbles..😊💯
good heat transfer explanation. but does that heat transfer and compression release enough heat to make your house warm enough to be comfortable? or does it only heat the water in radiators to make the house a tiny bit warmer, but still chilly?
Depends where you live, if it's an Arctic climate the heat pumps, air to air, cannot keep up as it gets colder.
Geothermal sure, but air to air systems shut down around - 20*C
It's an aircon unit, outside with the vent for hot air aimed inside the house.
I'll be absolutely honest. I had to go back and watch this several times to make sure I got it through my thick skull. Was I the only one? Not Helen's fault of course; she did a great job of dumbing down the physics. I think that for the average viewer it would have been simpler just to say that a heat pump takes in air from outside, compresses it which heats the air up & a refrigerant is used as a heat transfer medium to whatever you wish to heat up inside. I think I've gotten that about right.
No, video was meh imho, recommend watching some other videos as well on them
2:47 I had too laugh during that marble bit as it looked like she is wearing her knickers on the outside of her jeans.
luckily i had already planned to get a heatpump this summer. i used 6000kWh to electrically heat my flat last year(paid around 1400bucks) that would be about 5000bucks with current energy prizes. with the heatpump and a few other optimizations i am sure i can get below 3000 kWh, maybe even around 2000 kWh. saving around 3000bucks in the first year for a 800buck investment. thats the stuff dreams are made of. ;)
Good video, BUT, you should explain that your explanation is for just one "type" of heatpump, specifically an "air source heatpump". The most efficient types of heatpumps are VERTICAL ground source heatpumps, which involve drilling down small holes 200 to 300 meters down (so you only need a TINY garden, rather than a massive garden that you would need for horizontal ground source heatpumps), and then putting pipes down them, through which water with anti-freeze is pumped; the reason these are so much better than air source heat pumps is that the amount of heat recovered for the amount of energy used IS affected by the difference in temperature. As the temperature that deep underground remains constant at around 14 degrees C all year round, vertical ground source heat pumps can very quickly heat up the super cooled fluids coming out of your home, so use even less energy. Whereas air source heat pumps have to suck heat out of whatever the air temp is, so if its -10 degrees C outside, then the air source heat pump has to work MUCH harder to suck heat out of -10 degrees, so the colder it is outside, the more energy an air source heatpump would have to use to raise the inside temperature to the same level!
Another advantage of heatpumps over boiler is that they can be flipped into reverse! You can use it to REMOVE heat from your home in the summer and take it outside, then bring in COLD fluids to cool down your home, very much like an air conditioner!
Also worth noting that there are a LOT colder temperatures countries who use a LOT more heatpumps than we do here in the UK, so if someone tells you that "its too cold in the UK for them to work" then they don't know what they are talking about! If they start talking about insulation, then that's true for EVERY type of heating - the better the insulation you have, the less heating you have to use, so its not an argument to avoid a heatpump! Just remember, a vertical ground source heat pump will heat your home MUCH faster than an air source heat pump on a really cold day,. The latest vertical ground source heatpumps can easily manage to heat your water to 80 degrees C without any problem at all.
excellent !!!!!!!!!
Thank you Helen, that was very helpful. I still have one area of confusion. Is a Reverse Cycle Air Conditioner the same thing as a Heat Pump?
Yes.
Heat pumps (geothermal or air source) has been the standard way of heating homes here in Sweden for the past 30 years or so. They perform really well!
Maybe the houses in Sweden are much better insulated than UK. They're no good for most UK housing
An interesting way to look at it. In school in the 1980's we learned about Boyle's law, and enthalpy. More bare bones physics, but the same thing. I have a heat pump in my house. As it was built new, around the concept of energy efficiency, it uses air ducts for heating, but importantly also, for recovering heat. This is due to the other advantage of a purpose built or fully retrofitted building - active air recirculation. This keeps the building climate ideal, stops dampness, mold and other nasties. But of course, it is also necessary, because modern buildings are close to air tight, and at the same time, using air as the medium, your heating system must continuously force more air into the volume occupied by your house's interior. Something has to give, so old air must be pushed out. Hence, another reason for recirculation. Of course, the old air is still warm and its heat can be directly recovered within the same heat pump cycle you showed. You just need appropriate ducting running through the house to do this. it was fascinating to watch it being built. The technology, including the pump itself, is incredibly simple. Our energy consumption is tiny compared to almost any other house, even in our new-built street. Heat pumps can also be reversed to cool (but more importantly, dry) the air in the house. Energetically, not great, unless you consider that electric power when you need to cool can probably be derived directly from the roof of your house if you have solar PV up there. Something we are very glad we chose to do. The summer temperatures since we built our house have been, to say the least, impressive. One thing I keep on having to do though, is explain the physics to my family to convince them of the advantages of keeping doors and windows closed most of the time. In fact, you could leave them closed most or all of the year and suffer no ill effects whatsoever. But human intuition and lived experience doesn't always recognise this.
Heat pumps have been commonly used in the USA for over 50 years. This is because they are similar to central A/C units, but both heat and cool. As heaters electric heat pumps are not documented to save fueling costs over a natural gas furnace. Heat pumps are typically sized for A/C needs with them able to heat at about the same BTU values as they cool. For cold climates the heating needs are about 2-1/2 times that of A/C. Heat pumps become inefficient and produce less heat at temperatures below freezing for air-to-air heat pump systems.
It is typical for heat pump system to have electric resistance heat as a hybrid system to make up for the low BTU heating of the heat pump and work at far below freezing temperatures. Electric resistance heat is about five times more expensive than natural gas heat. During very cold periods the hybrid heat pump adds large loads onto the public electric power grid when it is being stressed. It is being a bad neighbor to use a conventional hybrid heat pump in a cold climate.
Geologic heat pumps need to be sized for the entire heating load and being in the ground they don't suffer from lower efficiencies of cold temperatures. Those are used in Finland.
Atmospheric CO2 levels of 1200 ppm about three times what they are today would greatly invigorate C3 plants the majority of plant life on earth greatly greening the planet.
Earth's greenhouse effect is frequently used as a primary example to high school students of a system always in saturation from the strong greenhouse gas water vapor absorbing all the greenhouse radiant energy from the earth with greenhouse gases within 20 meters of the surface that is all around us everyday and can't have its overall effect changed. There is no further greenhouse radiant energy to interact with greenhouse gases. At 1% average tropospheric water vapor over 99% of earth’s greenhouse effect is from water vapor. Water vapor would hold earth's greenhouse effect in saturation if it were the only greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
In Canada put in a ground source heat pump, went from $3000 propane to $300 electricity. With grants payback was 8 years.
Preheats the hot water to 45degC in a storage tank, then an electric hot water tank. Put a timer on the hot water tank to only heat at the lowest electricity rates.
Summer air conditioning is almost free since I'm dumping the heat into the cold ground which is around 5degC
Amazing
Just a thought - could you put a heat pump in the loft, where it could “recycle” the heat that escapes through the insulation??
Nice simple explanation, also thought it was Technology Connections channel again 🤣🤣
Why do we treat heat pumps as strange, futuristic things when Europe, Scandanavia, etc have all been using them for years?
We're just catching up not using something new so what's the objection to them?
It's a perplexing thought, isn't it. Back in the 1980's the UK's "Dash for Gas" started. The UK had an abundant supply of North Sea Natural Gas or Methane [CH4], which kicked technology like Heat Pumps into touch. They'ed been kicking it into touch for years because of coal and oil. Gas was the latest fossil-fuel that we could exploit the UK citizen with. Incidentally, it was Lord Kelvin [yes, he of the temperature scale] that first described the properties of the heat pump, in 1852 [yes, eighteen hundred and fifty two]. A few years later the first heat pump was built. Plenty of time for countries to develop practical versions. But not the UK. Just another example of a missed opportunity.
I think the main objections are they are a lot more expensive than just replacing a gas combi boiler and you usually need updates to existing pipework and radiators in the home.
@@ramblerandy2397 and couple that with the BBC's "dumbing down" mission to undereducate the population by over-catering for the lowest common denominator, and you end up turning the UK into the sorry state it has become.
@@markreed9853 No, the main objection is that people don't understand how they work. Or even refuse to.
@@ramblerandy2397 ... Well that's what I'm hearing here in the UK🤔
Funny how the UK is only now using what the rest of the world in warm climates has used for decades for cooling. The split unit AC is very common in office and domestic use as a way to cool, and simply adding in an extra valve, operated by the gas pressure across the compressor to drive the plunger, you can convert what is basically a one way heat pump to a dual way one, with only needing to add in a small bit more complexity in the expansion system. As a interior cooler it is very effective, however the heating capacity is very much going to vary depending on the temperature outside, as the curve of heat pumped versus differential is going to mean that you get less heat as it gets colder, to the point there is no heat being transferred once outside gets cold enough.
Normally as cooler you can achieve a 30C difference between indoor and outdoor, pretty much going to handle all climates except Saudi Arabia, where you will need to have a larger capacity unit to handle the lower efficiency, but as heat pump you have to have additional resistive heat (COP of exactly 1.000, as this is the reference) elements to supplement the heating. So not as useful up north, where you might have a 50C differential on the colder days, needing that extra heating, but still a good help till the point it stops.
As well you have to remember the outdoor unit has to stop every so often and defrost the coils, either using resistive elements to melt the ice build up, or running in reverse cycle using the indoor elements to provide heat to the coil.
Plus location is important, in summer you want that outdoor unit located where there is no sun shining on it adding in extra heat, but conversely in winter you want it off the ground, well out of the snow, and where it can get maximum solar radiation to help heat up the unit.2 very conflicting requirements. Plus coil design for heating and cooling is vastly different, to dissipate heat you want as many fins close together, each sharing airflow to radiate heat, but for absorbing heat you want to have the fins further apart, so that water and ice build up can be easily shed, and also longer fins to get the same heat transfer, so the outdoor units are also a compromise.
Few years ago when my electricity was 5x the cost of gas per kWh I compared the cost of using a heat pump in place of a boiler and it wasn’t even close. The cost of electricity was far higher (about 40% I think) than the equivalent cost of gas with a boiler.
Now both have gone up dramatically and the gap is closing hard between electric and gas… but is it fair or wise to assess this on current energy prices?
In 5 or 10 years from now the ratio could be back to 5:1 and heat pumps’ efficiency isn’t anything like enough to bridge that gap.
Maybe for new-builds or ultra efficient buildings but not for the vast majority of housing in the UK. Not yet.
As many others commented, heat pumps both air and ground source, has commonly existed in Scandinavia for the past 20 years at least.
Another way to understand how heat pumps can be so efficient is to imagine you have a road covered in snow, and you are tasked with clearing it. What do you think will require the least amount of energy, between trying to melt it, or trying to move it off to the side? And waiting for the spring sun to do its work in 4 months is not an option!
I meant to add in the first part that it is great to see that the English world is at last catching on to this hidden gem of the energy revolution. :)