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Old 09-27-13, 01:10 AM   #10
mejunkhound
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Let's see. Hmm, try to explain this really simple so even a democrat (or republican, take your pick) can understand.

It takes heat to boil water right? OK.
Freon, propane, etc. boil at much lower temperatures, the engineers (pick a fluid that boils below zero, of which there are many, like freon, propane, CO2, even air itself.

So, we send liquid freon out into the cold air outside, even cold it boils the fluid as the cold air is hotter than the boiling point of the freon, so now it is a gas. In a heat pump, that happens in the coil outside.

Remember how the lid on a pot that has boiling water in it gets water drops on the inside of the lid? Similarily, we send the gas that we boiled from the liquid in the outside coil (called the evaporator since it evaporates the liquid) to the inside coil by way of compressor.

Recall that when you pump a bicycle tire the bottom of the pump gets warm -that is what the compressor does, it compresses the cold gas, which then gets hot.
Now we get to the part like the lid of the pot, which is like the coil inside the house. We blow the room air in the house thru that coil (which gets hot inside due to the hot gas) and the room air gets warmer and we blow that out the ducts to heat the house.

Again, just like the water drops inside the lid of the pot with boiling water, the hot gas condenses to a cooler liquid. We then send that back to the evaporator and it all starts over again.

Simplistically, we boil a fluid outside, compress that cold gas to make it hot, cool it down using air from the house thereby heating the house. Since it got cool it liquifies, we send that liquid back outside to boil and start the process all over again.

Process called the vapor refrigeration cycle.
What it does is 'pump' heat from outside to the inside by cooling outside air and heating inside air. It takes less energy to compress the gas than the energy the process takes from the outside air to boil the freon and then gives up to the inside air, hence we get more heat than the energy put into the compressor.
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