What Is a Heat Pump and How Does It Work? (Video)

Mike Cappuccio talks about heat pumps and how they work to both cool and heat your home with a high-efficiency, variable inverter.

I’m Mike Cappuccio, the founder of N.E.T.R., and today I’m here to talk to you about “what is a heat pump?” Well, basically it is an air conditioning system with an additional component that is added.

So when you look at a central air conditioning system that you might have in your home, it’s made up of four different components. You have an evaporator coil, an expansion valve or a metering device, a compressor, and a condenser. The compressor and condenser sit outside the home and the evaporator and the metering device sit inside the home. Okay, so when we have that system and we run that system, cold air comes out into the home and the warm air goes over the cold coil, and it gets extracted to the outside of the home. So if you go outside the home, you’d feel warm air coming out of the condenser coil.

Now, when we use the heat pump side of this, and we put the thermostat to heating mode in the wintertime, we activate the reversing valve, which basically makes the air conditioning system a heating system now. Now inside the home, we still have the evaporator coil, but that becomes a condenser coil. The cold air runs over the warm coil and the cold air gets extracted to the outside of the home. So when you go outside the home, you feel the cold air coming out of the condenser coil, which is now what we call the evaporator coil, that sits outside the home. So it’s really an air conditioning system with the reversing valve added for the heating side in the wintertime. It’s as simple as that.