Heat pump dilemma

The heat pump is competitive only with a surface heating system, because of the higher temperature -needed for air heating- the COP (coefficient of performance) is significantly decreasing and the operational costs are doubling. The COP is a ratio of how many unit of thermal energy can we get from one unit of the invested electric power. Before You buy a heat pump, it doesn't hurt to have a healthy amount of scepticism, because the producers often use tricks to get better COP values and factores featuring the performance. Comparing the different products You have to check what kind of temperature of the environment, temperature of the heating medium, strain did they assume and the efficiency is for a year or a season.

The big disadvantage of the air heat pump is that the efficiency of them depends highly on the temperature of the environment, because this is the heat source. We can say that the rule of thumbs is, under 0 °C it isn't really efficient because the COP decreases and the electricity is much more expensive than the gas. Because of this, generally next to air heat pumps, another calorofic is needed. We call this method, when we use 2 calorofic, a bivalent mode.

The ground heat is a much more reliable heat source. Approximately until 15-20 m of depth the solar radiation can affect the temperature in the ground, it means that depending on the seasons, the temperature is 11-17 °C 5 meters below the ground surface. With the horizontal collectors, we can use this heat for the preheating and precooling of the air. However, it requires a big garden and we can't set deciduous plants and features above the collectors.

It is common knowledge that the geothermical capabilities of Hungary are outstanding, however the heat pumps, using it are very rare. But why? The ground source heat pumps get the heat from 100 m depth. Before installing the probes we have to check the field, searching for streaming groundwater(good to have), and value that how much heat can we extract. The drilling and the installation is also very expensive (in our case: 10 000 000 HUF) but the heating costs per a year are half of the heating costs of the condensing gas boiler. One more huge benefit of the ground source heat pump is that the cooling is almost free.

Cooling

Heat recovery ventillation

Solar cell in any case!