An air-source heat pump offers one of the cleanest, safest and efficient ways to heat your home, but understanding how the heat pump’s thermostat works can help you cut your wintertime heating bills even more. A heat pump harvests heat energy from the outside air and transfers it inside, so its operation is greatly affected outdoor temperatures. To provide adequate heat for your home when temperatures fall to freezing or lower, most heat pumps will switch to an auxiliary electric coil to supplement the heat pump heating.
While an efficient air-source heat pump can produce three times the heat as the energy that goes into it, the backup heating coil only produces one watt of heat for each watt of electricity it uses. Avoiding having to use this supplemental coil is the best way to keep energy bills at a minimum. Unfortunately, many homeowners don’t realize that when they crank up the thermostat temperature more than two degrees, it will cause the heat pump to switch to supplemental heating, even if it’s not needed. This will drive up electricity usage, with the cost of heating your home increasing by a factor of two or three, depending on the energy efficiency of your heat pump.
However, you can avoid this issue by using a thermostat that’s specifically made for heat pumps. Called intelligent recovery thermostats, they override a programmable thermostat’s setting and keep the auxiliary electric heating coil from kicking on. Instead, the thermostat senses when temperatures are starting to get too low for the heat pump to recover, and turns the system on, regardless of any timer settings for the thermostat.
If you set your thermostat to 62 overnight, intelligent recovery units will figure out when to turn on and how long to run to make sure your home is at your preferred temperature when you wake up. It does this to prevent the supplemental heating coil from running.
For more information about a heat pump’s thermostat, please contact us at Ace Hardware Home Services. We’ve provided top-notch HVAC services for Dayton area homeowners since 1978.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Dayton, Ohio about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).
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