How Heat Pumps Work | HowStuffWorks - Home And Garden

Home » What Is A Heat Pump System » How Heat Pumps Work | HowStuffWorks - Home And Garden

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An illustration of an air-source heat pump
This illustration shows how an air-source heat pump takes heat from the air outside your home and pumps it inside through refrigerant-filled coils. Slave SPB/Shutterstock

There are many kinds of heat pumps, but they all operate on the same basic principle: heat transfer. This means that rather than burning fuel to create heat, the device moves heat from one place to another. There's a key to making this all happen. According to thermodynamics, heat naturally flows from high-temperature areas to those with lower temperatures.

What a heat pump does is use a small amount of energy to switch that process into reverse, thereby pulling heat out of a relatively low-temperature area and pumping it into a higher-temperature area. So, heat is transferred from a heat source — like the ground or air — into a heat sink — like your home.

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One of the most common types of heat pumps is the air-source heat pump. These take heat from the air outside your home and pump it inside through refrigerant-filled coils, not too different from what's on the back of your fridge. The air source variety is pretty basic, and you'll find two fans, the refrigerator coils, a reversing valve and a compressor inside to make it work.

The key to allowing the air-source heat pump to also cool is the reversing valve. This versatile part changes the flow of the refrigerant so the system can operate in the opposite direction. So instead of pumping heat inside your home, the heat pump releases it, just like your air conditioner does. When the refrigerant is reversed, it absorbs heat on the indoor side of the unit and flows to the outside. It's here that the heat is released, allowing the refrigerant to cool down again and flow back inside to pick up more heat. This process repeats itself until you're nice and cool.

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