Split System Heat Pump Definition

By definition a heat pump is merely a machine that moves heat rather than creating heat. In the winter it extracts heat from the outdoors and moves it to the indoors. In the summer it extracts heat from the indoors and moves it to the outdoors.

A Split System Heat Pump is an appliance that has an outdoor unit split from the indoor coil and connected to it via refrigerant tubing. The outdoor unit consists of a compressor, heat exchanger coil, fan, and fan motor. The indoor coil can be a ductless unit mounted on a wall or can resides either on top of a furnace or inside a blower-coil unit and conditioned air is conveyed to the space to be conditioned (heated or cooled) via ducts.

The heat pump even on a cold day can extract heat from the outdoors because “cold” is a relative term. Air as cold as 30 degrees still contains a great deal of heat – the temperature at which air no longer carries any heat is well below -200 degrees Fahrenheit. A heat pump’s heat exchanger can squeeze heat out of cold air, and then transfer that heat into your home with the help of a fan which circulates the warm air through your ducts.

In colder climates heat pumps are often installed with back-up electric resistance heat or a furnace to handle heating requirements when more heat is needed than the heat pump can efficiently extract from the air.

COP (Co-efficient Of Performance) is a way of describing a heat pump’s efficiency. It is the ratio of heat produced to the amount of energy required to run the system. The COP is calculated by dividing the total heating capacity provided by the heat pump, including circulating fan heat but excluding supplementary resistance heat (Btu’s per hour), by the total electrical input (watts) x 3.412.

Another efficiency rating of a heat pump is measured by the SEER (seasonal energy efficiency ratio) rating for cooling and the HSPF (heating season performance factor) rating for heating. SEER measures the efficiency of cooling units according to the BTU (energy) of cooling output during a typical cooling-season divided by the total electric energy input in watt-hours during the same period. The higher the SEER rating, the more efficient the heat pump.

HSPF refers to a heat pump’s estimated seasonal heating output in BTUs divided by the amount of energy that it consumes in watt-hours. The higher the HSPF, the more efficient the heat pump.

By adding desuperheater to the heat pump, it can extract the heat in the system’s refrigerant, split system heat pumps and can boil water for you for free.