- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
Heat pumps can’t take the cold? Nordics debunk the myth::By installing a heat pump in his house in the hills of Oslo, Oyvind Solstad killed three birds with one stone, improving his comfort, finances and climate footprint.
It never ceases to amaze me how people don’t read past the title 🤦 There are people debating about -10 to -30C when the article clearly states that it works in those temperatures. Not only does it work, it’s twice as efficient as electrical heating at those temperatures.
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Arrogantly uninformed. It’s an impressive combination
Do you understand how heat pumps work? The heat you’re drawing on is the the heat of the outside compartment on the outside, therefore the heat moved to the inside can be more than just the heat equivalent of the electric energy you put in. That’s how these achieve more than 100% efficiency, in general. In fact if the outside isn’t so cold outside they can achieve 300%-500%.
Now the trick to moving heat from a cold outside compartment to a warmer inside compartment lies in the compression. If you draw even a moderate amount of heat energy into your medium, then compress it, it will turn quite hot allowing you to dump heat into your warm inside compartment. Then as the medium flows out you let it expand and it turns really cold, cold enough that it can draw in heat from the cold outside. But the lower the difference in temperature of the outside air to your expanded medium gets the less heat you can transport per unit of time, that’s why we’re only looking at 200% here.
“at those temperatures”
well, to a heat pump even -40° is still 230K, which is plenty of energy to move around and work with. It may be cold to you, but to a heat pump it’s not.
So you’d rather trust your feelings? Just loon into it if you’re that skeptical.
Don’t you just love it when people decide things are true because they feel it’s true?