Heat Pumps - General Overview

Heat Pumps - general overview and description

Heat pumps are part of every day life these days. You might not always recognize a heat pump when you see one, but at this moment, heat pumps are working hard in your home, making life more enjoyable.

While tooling around the house, you may turn on the air conditioner if it's too warm, or during colder seasons, you might turn the temperature up on the thermostat. Something cool and refreshing from the kitchen, or indulging in some tasty baked goods?

All of these are examples of how heat pumps help make a home more comfortable, and life more livable every day. A heat pump is basically any device that moves energy in the form of heat from an area of higher temperature to an area of lower temperature, and vise versa.

How does a heat pump work?

Probably the simplest illustration of how a heat pump works can be found with any home refrigerators.

If you've ever wondered how a refrigerator works, the mechanics inside can vary, but the principals are the same. Refrigerators simply remove heat from the items placed inside - it moves heat from inside the compartment to the outside. The resulting effect is that anything inside the fridge gets cold.

Thermodynamic laws dictate that temperature in any environment tends to normalize amongst each object in that environment. In keeping with this, we can better understand - a warm object placed inside a refrigerator among cold objects will eventually equalize in temperature.

So a thermal heat pump - refrigerator in this case, works by transferring the warmth of objects inside to the outside. This explains why you may have noticed the back and sides of your refrigerator are warmer than the other surroundings in your home.

Air conditioning - another example

Another good example of a heat pump is the air conditioner.

Just like a refrigerator, an air conditioner gets quite warm outside the room, while it pumps cool air inside the room. Window mounted room units give off a warm breeze of air outside as do separate AC condenser units used in central AC installations.

You can also find examples of heat pumps in nature, but to best understand the idea of heat pumps, the simplest understanding can be gained with our two examples above. When thought of in terms of a heat pump, air conditioners and refrigerators make the idea clear.

The thermal heat pump is an invention of great significance for the modern age. You might not think of things like refrigerators and air conditioners as heat pumps before, but it's hard to imagine life before these modern day devices were invented.