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Posted by doener 5 days ago

Heat pump sales rise across Europe(www.pv-magazine.com)
271 points | 215 commentspage 2
AtlasBarfed 5 days ago|
Governments should have been full bore pushing subsidies and cost breaks for phevs, home solar, evs,and hear pumps for the last decade.

Covid was the wakeup call that globalization was dying a slow death, and the first trump that world cop America was also on the way out.

Oil dependence in a top level national security concern of the last 150 years (hey, what really triggered WW1?), yet the primary means for independence has been politically suppressed for 50 years.

How soon would we have has better PV, better batteries, better heat pumps with proper subsidies and research starting with the 70s oil shocks?

secretsatan 5 days ago||
Reading comments here i think many are missing something, all of our summers are getting longer and hotter, we didn’t need air conditioning before.

It’s not just heating anymore, now places need active cooling too.

eur0pa 5 days ago||
Must be nice having more than 3kW available at the breaker
carlosjobim 5 days ago||
A significant proportion of the European population will only ever talk about heat pumps when they are in a social setting which allows for free conversation. And they haven't shut up about it for about 20 years now. It used to bore me to death.
seydor 5 days ago||
in the south, a lot of people opt for split Airconditioning instead of heatpumps. Cheaper and much easier to install/maintain
quickthrowman 4 days ago||
A heat pump is a condensing unit with a reversing valve. Or, a condensing unit is a heat pump without a reversing valve.

Carrier article: https://www.carrier.com/residential/en/us/products/heat-pump...

thinkcontext 5 days ago|||
Do the places you are referring to not require heat? If so I don't see why having a separate heating and cooling system would be cheaper to maintain than a single system. Come to think of it I don't see why a heatpump would be more expensive to maintain than split AC. I guess there is some extra circuitry to make sure it doesn't ice up in the winter and maybe backup resistance heating builtin.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5 days ago||
Most split A/Cs can also heat.

"Heat pump" can mean many things, from essentially "split A/C" (air-air heat pumps) to ground-source heat pumps, using floor heating for the output, warm water production from the heat pump, etc.

masklinn 4 days ago||
Split ACs which can heat but are not billed as heat pumps will very often use resistive heaters.
tgsovlerkhgsel 4 days ago||
The ones I saw all promised heat output significantly higher than the electrical input in heating mode, so I'm sure they were actually heat pumps.
dyauspitr 5 days ago|||
Split units are heat pumps right? They heat and cool. What’s the catch? They don’t have a very high range of operation?
shellfishgene 5 days ago|||
That's the same thing, no?
crote 5 days ago|||
It needs some extra valves to switch the flow of coolant around, but yes.
dzhiurgis 5 days ago||||
Some refrigerants are more suited for cold climates, some of which require very high pressures.
masklinn 5 days ago||||
In the same way that an electric motor and a generator are the same thing.
triceratops 5 days ago||
In an EV they literally are.
masklinn 5 days ago||
Yes?

But without the few bits and bobs of extra control for handling that condition they are, effectively, not.

Same for AC and heat pumps.

triceratops 5 days ago||
EVs have regenerative breaking and so come with those bits and bobs.
masklinn 4 days ago||
But not all electric motors are paired such. Which is the point: a heat pump and an AC are "the same thing" at the gross level, but that doesn't mean all ACs have all the bits and bobs necessary for them to act as heat pumps.
gosub100 5 days ago||||
I think they mean "air exchange" (split AC) vs "heat pump" (dig into the earth to draw/eliminate heat). Not saying that's the right definition though. I am guessing at an auto-correction of what they meant.
ericd 5 days ago|||
Dug into the ground, we usually call a "ground source heat pump", or less accurately, "geothermal". The normal split systems are "air source heat pumps". AC is a heat pump without a reversing valve.
ane 5 days ago||||
A heat pump is not necessarily dug into the earth. Rather, the flow of the heat pump is moving heat (thermal energy) from outdoors to indoors or the other way around in an air conditioner.

Depending on the direction of the coolant flow, you get either a indoor heating or cooling unit. This is best demonstrated by going in front of the outdoor unit of a heat pump, when they are cooling, the outdoor unit generates heat because it's compressing gas, which then is then expanded when it reaches the indoor unit, generating cold. Exactly like a refridgerator.

dzhiurgis 5 days ago|||
There's also air-to-water retrofits for houses where you had centralised gas/wood heaters and water radiators.
seydor 5 days ago|||
split a/c (heat/cooling) is dirt cheap compared to the cost of heat pump installation
jagermo 5 days ago|||
it makes sense combined with solar, I think. Hot weather usually means a lot of solar energy you can ideally use to cool your home. I still wonder why there isn't as much PV activity in Greece. I see solar water heaters on nearly every roof, but not solar energy.
ericd 5 days ago||
Why would it be easier to install/maintain? It's basically the same machine.
wxw 5 days ago||
That's a neat proxy measurement to track.
infecto 5 days ago|
I am probably simply confused but what’s the proxy measurement?
comrade1234 5 days ago|||
I assume a product related directly to another product. So when energy prices start to go up, invest in heat pump companies.
infecto 5 days ago||
Thats what I was guessing but was thrown off because it is a pretty natural nth order effect. Gas prices go up, more efficient cars get sold.
hervature 5 days ago||||
Heat pump sales for energy costs.
NewJazz 5 days ago|||
More efficient hvac tech is a partial substitute for fuel.
mostafo 5 days ago|
They’re pretty efficient
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