In the greater Cleveland area, one of the most important decisions homeowners encounter for comfort and energy savings is selecting a new heat pump. Heat pumps available today afford homeowners a wide array of features to maximize performance year after year.
Selecting a new heat pump
For enhancing heat exchange, controlling heating options and potentially even providing inexpensive water heating for your home, consider these advanced heat pump features:
- Desuperheaters are auxiliary heat exchangers that utilize excess heat that would otherwise be wasted energy to heat water for your storage water heater. Considering that water heating accounts for about 20 percent of utility expenditures in the average home, a desuperheater offers amazing energy savings by heating water three times more efficiently than standard storage water heating.
- Variable-speed air handlers deliver more comfortable airflow for evenly distributed heating and cooling. Variable-speed air handlers operate 90 percent of the time in low to medium speed. Rather than a cold blast of air blowing into your living space, variable-speed air handlers power on in low speed, and slowly increase speed to match exact needs.
- Two-stage compressors precisely regulate refrigerant flow based on current heating and cooling needs. This enhances the refrigerant’s natural properties of heat exchange. When combined with a variable-speed air handler, and improved coil engineering, you may see efficiency rates well beyond the 250 percent of standard air-source heat pumps.
- Two-stage thermostats regulate the heating source between the heat pump and its backup electric resistance coils. As the outdoor temperature falls below freezing point, most heat pumps can’t keep up with the heating demand. The backup heating powers on to augment the system. The down side to this is that the electric resistance coils are inefficient, and energy savings drops. You can solve this problem by using a dual-fuel system where your gas furnace kicks in as the backup during cold weather. The two-stage thermostat determines the appropriate time to trigger the backup heating for greatest efficiency. For instance, if you lowered the thermostat overnight to save energy, when you raise the temperature in the morning, the two-stage thermostat won’t trigger the backup heating coils.
For more information on selecting a new heat pump for your Cleveland area home, please contact us at Geisel Heating, Air Conditioning & Plumbing.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Western Cleveland, Ohio about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about heat pump and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.
For those Do it Yourselfers who would rather take control of your own indoor comfort, you can shop our online store for replacement parts, products and accessories!
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
