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Heat pumps continue to push fossil fuels out of Canadian homes
(440megatonnes.ca)
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Flip your refrigerator inside out. That is exactly what is happening.
You need to understand the difference between "heat" and "temperature".
When you squeeze a gas inside a perfectly insulated container, no heat is transferred, but the temperature increases. If you allow the gas to expand again, it will return exactly to the temperature it started at. Again, no heat has transferred into or out of the gas, due to our (hypothetical) perfect insulation. The temperature has changed, but no heat has moved.
In reality, we aren't using a perfect insulator. When we compress the gas, the temperature of the gas rises. Heat starts flowing from the compressed gas to the container, and into the air. The gas is still compressed after the heat has left, but its temperature falls to ambient. This all happens inside the house.
The cooled, compressed gas is now piped outside. It is expanded. Because it doesn't have the same amount of heat that it started with, the temperature plummets. It gets extremely cold, far colder than the outside atmosphere. Heat from the atmosphere flows into the cold gas. The cold, decompressed gas then goes to a compressor, and the cycle repeats.
Its not always piped in/outside. IIRC mine the refrigerant never leaves the outside unit, instead hot water (and a shitload of glycol) is pumped around between the unit and the inside of the house. My heat pump only does heating in this configuration though but because of that I got £7.5k from the UK government towards the install, more than half the total cost and that included getting all new pipework and radiators. I assume the idea is they don't want to be giving people AC as that is seen more as a luxury.
I suppose that makes sense if you're retrofitting a heat pump onto an existing hot-water radiator system. The unit replaces the existing boiler.
Well it also provides my hot water for the shower, I had a completely new hot water radiator system installed with the heat pump but they are by far the most common form of system in the UK anyway. Convenient to be able to hang clothes on them to dry and the cat loves sleeping on top of it when its on as its warm.