THIS Is The Future Of Home Heating!

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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[sktaylor]

Great to see Helen presenting again. She is such a good teacher. 👍

[PaperCoffeeTable]

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.

[HermanVonPetri]

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.

[carlodanese]

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

[oddvar]

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.

[kaboozle]

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…

[kforfun]

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.

[rejeangagne]

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.

[graemedoctor]

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.

[antontaylor]

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.

[wizzwas]

I love a Czerski episode, always informative and super interesting. Also great to see the Scrapheap Challenge graphic artists are working again!

[grandpoint]

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.

[neillewis]

Really clear and inspirational. I had my NIBE 12 kW installed in March and now I understand it better. Thanks Helen

[sailingoctopus]

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.

[Muskatnuss]

I thought this was a Technology Connections video since it's his favourite subject when I saw the popup. 😅

[hellelujahh]

Technology Connections represent! By the way, there are much more in-depth explanations on that channel, highly recommended.

[matthias]

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)

[jamiefox]

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.

[huibu]

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.

[skfalpink]

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!