It wasn’t until I moved much further south that I learned about heat pumps.
Living in the far north, my priority was always a powerful heating system.
I relied on a furnace for more than eight months of the year. It needed to handle outside temperatures down to negative twenty-five degrees. When I had enough of the sub-zero conditions and feet of snow, I started searching for a house to buy down south. I didn’t want to move so far south that I’d suffer year round heat and humidity. I chose a location where I’d never need to worry about temperatures below freezing or snow. Most of the nicer properties were outfitted with an electric heat pump. The real estate agent pointed this out like it was an impressive feature. Since I had no clue what a heat pump actually was, I did some research. I discovered that a single unit combines both heating and cooling capacity. Rather than burn fossil fuels to generate heat, the system moves existing heating between the indoors and the outdoors. In the summer, it draws heat out of the indoor air and moves it outside through the use of refrigerant. It operates almost exactly like a conventional air conditioner. In the summer, it grabs ambient heat from outside and brings it indoors. The process avoids creating carbon monoxide, fumes or greenhouse gasses. An electric heat pump is super energy efficient and environmentally responsible. I like that it helps to get rid of excess humidity in cooling mode but doesn’t dry out the air in heating mode. Plus, the heat pump works to filter contaminants out of the air.