Can air source heat pumps provide hot water?

An air source heat pump (ASHP) works by transferring heat absorbed from outside air to an indoor space. It works through wet central heating systems to heat radiators and provides domestic hot water. Most homeowners who have heat pumps use them to heat and cool their homes. But a heat pump can also be used to heat water, either as a stand-alone water heating system or as a combined water heating and space conditioning system.

A heat pump can not only be used to heat and cool your home, but can also be used to heat water. To operate, an air source heat pump water heater draws heat from the surrounding air and pours it at a higher temperature into a tank to heat the water. Heat pumps can also be an excellent source of hot water, but the water will be colder than that of a boiler. Practically this means that if you are going to take a bath, you will need more hot water and less from the cold tap.

Therefore, you may also need a larger hot water tank to cover your needs. Assuming that it has been properly sized and installed, a heat pump can supply more than enough heat for both space heating and hot water. However, there are a few things you should keep in mind if you want to use a ground or air heat pump for hot water and achieve high efficiency. An accredited microgeneration certification system (MCS) installer must install and operate an air source heat pump.

Heat the water with an inexpensive electric resistance tank (my guess here is that because the design heat load is small, the house is also small enough that the noise of a heat pump water heater is problematic). Air-to-water heat pumps use the heat of circulating water for this purpose, resulting in a small and probably undetectable drop in water temperature; For air-to-air systems, heat is taken from the building air or an electric heater is used. The lower outlet temperatures of the heat pump would mean that the size of the radiators would have to be increased or a low-temperature underfloor heating system installed instead. The defrost cycle significantly reduces the efficiency of the heat pump, although newer (on demand) systems are smarter and need to defrost less.

Therefore, it is key to understand the heat load of the property and the performance characteristics of the heat pump. It is crucial that this system is designed correctly so as not to ventilate the property too much and only use heat from the air that would normally have been expelled into the atmosphere. Daikin heat pumps not only offer economical heating for residential and commercial environments, but can also provide a total solution for home heating and hot water supply. With traditional boilers operating at 90% efficiency rates, 10% of heat is lost by burning fossil fuels to generate heat.

It uses a refrigeration cycle to move heat from outside air and transfers it as usable heat in your home. These combined systems extract indoor heat from outside air in winter and indoor air in summer. With frequent operation during the summer, the geothermal heat pump can cover most of your hot water needs. Changing is not as simple as it sounds, and deciding to upgrade an air source heat pump in an existing home will mean that certain changes will have to be made.

More information on the impact of radiators and underfloor heating on heat pump design can be found here. When the liquid refrigerant at low temperature and low pressure passes through the coils of the outdoor heat exchanger, the ambient heat causes the liquid to boil (it changes to gas or vapor). .