fub

Actually, it’s been about one month and a half since we had our air-to-air heat pump installed. Since it was installed, we have stopped using gas for heating — and what with the political situation, I’m all for reducing my gas usage in order to not fund a genocidal fascist regime. But it’s certainly different from the gas-fueled central heating we used before.

The unit is in a corner of the living room, which means that in order to spread the heat more throughout the LDK (Living/Dining/Kitchen) the fan is set to blow diagonally into the room. But that means the air stream is directly on the couch, so if we’re sitting there, we sometimes let it blow straight in the front: still comfortable on the couch, but more localized heating.

The outside unit is amazingly quiet, even at full blast. That’s a relief: I would not want to get into trouble with the neighbours over any noise. But then again, we live near the last bit of highway, so there’s always sound from there. You can’t hear the unit over that, and since it’s on the roof of our extension, it’s also not near where people are in the first place.

The thermostat works quite well. Put it on 20 degrees, and it will start heating. When the air around the unit reaches the desired temperature, the system will shut down and only start up again to keep the temperature on that level.

It’s also quite efficient: only with the really cold day on Friday did we ever go over 4 kWh of electricity used in a single day. I do not know how much gas we would have used on such a day though.

We only heated the ground floor of our house, so it was easy to just switch completely. One thing I noticed is that the rest of the house is much colder: our house was built in the 80’s, and the heating pipes are all on the walls, not inside. Which means that the hot water for the radiators would circle through the rest of the house to and from the ground floor. That is, of course, a loss of heat, but it did keep the other rooms somewhat warmer than they are now.

When you turn of the system, it starts to cool off immediately. There is no ‘residual heating’: once the flow of warm air stops, that’s it. Not a problem, but different.

Our home office is at the front of the house, furthest from the unit. That part doesn’t heat up like the rest of the LDK, but we have been supplementing with an infrared panel when needed.

Overall, it fits really well on our situation. If we wanted to heat rooms upstairs, we might have had to rely on multiple units or a multi-split system (where multiple indoor units are connected to a single outside unit), with the associated costs. As it is, it is still a hefty investment — and the price difference between gas and electricity is not such that we can expect to earn the money of the installation back within a reasonable time frame. Though if you have a lot of solar panels and produce more electricity than you use, then it might be a good way to turn that surplus into direct savings on gas.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.