Hot and cold – 1

A few short posts back I was regaling ever patient readers with a description of life under the great North American ‘heat dome’. My intention to develop that thought into something related (but slightly off-topic) was overtaken by the tragic events in Lytton.

With (as ever) the reader’s kind permission – and given that I am always loathe to leave a notion only half-considered – I will just dot back to that thought now…

OK? Good!…

When we purchased our home here on the peninsula some six years ago it came with a heat pump. For those who do not know what a heat pump is, Wikipedia offers this explanation:

“A heat pump is a device used to warm and sometimes also cool buildings by transferring thermal energy from a cooler space to a warmer space using the refrigeration cycle, being the opposite direction in which heat transfer would take place without the application of external power. Common device types include air source heat pumps, ground source heat pumps, water source heat pumps and exhaust air heat pumps”.

A heat pump, then, is a sort of air-conditioner that works in both directions – taking heat out of the air during the summer and adding it in during the winter. Heat pumps are all the rage in these parts because they can offer considerable potential savings on heating costs in this sort of climate.

I say ‘potential savings’ because the amount of heat that such a pump can produce depends greatly on the type of device that has been chosen – and on that also depends the cost. Air source heat pumps are unable to deal with very low temperatures but are the cheapest to install. The other types do better with lower temperatures but cost a great deal more.

Systems such as the one we inherited use the relatively inexpensive air source pump but supplement it with a backup furnace – ours being an electric one. The problems that can occur with this sort of system became apparent a year or so after we moved in. The refrigerant circuit sprung a leak which went unnoticed until the electricity bill for a couple of months of electric furnace heating showed up, causing us to fall off our chairs with the shock.

We were advised that the old heat pump was not economical to repair (quelle surprise!) so we set about looking for an alternative. This was at about the same time that we were starting on the major renovations that were most fully documented within these pages. Being uncertain as to whether or not a straight replacement for the old heat pump was the best solution we chose instead a sort of halfway-house. We replaced the electric furnace with a modern efficient gas furnace and left space to add either a heat pump or an air conditioner should such prove necessary in the future.

Since then we have enjoyed a lovely toasty warm house during the winters for very reasonable gas costs – helped considerably by the replacement of most of the windows and the upgrading of the insulation during our renovations. Until this year the summers had not called for anything more than throwing the windows wide and turning on the ceiling fans.

This year – of course – has caused us to think again…

…but more on that next time…