all heat pumps work in one direction. You can't move cold around with any mechanism. Only heat can be moved. The difference is residential "heat pumps" just have a set of reversing valves so you can move heat from outdoors to indoors.
It’s the same principle, but in the US I expect a “heat pump” to run well in both directions where an “air conditioner” might not have a reversing valve at all, or won’t really defrost the outside coils in cold weather.
> they can run in reverse and cool your home, and are much more efficient at that than traditional ACs.
I'd love to see a source on that. There is very little technological difference between an air conditioner and a heat pump aside from refrigerant reversing valves that allow changing which end is the condenser and which the evaporator.
However there are air heat pumps which differ from the AC ran in reverse only in how the heat is distributed around the house. For example with warm water in the pipes not just blowing warm air around.
Compared to a traditional air conditioning unit, the reversing valve is the major difference. Your standard AC can only move heat from indoors to outdoors. A heat pump can do the reverse to warm your space. My basement heat pump is rated to provide heat even when it’s -20F outside.
> "Heat pumps use refrigerant to condition the air in your home by adding or removing heat through thermal exchange."
This is what air conditioners do, too.
> "Air conditioning is a cooling system that circulates cool air into an enclosed space, creating a comfortable atmosphere and improving indoor air quality."
This is what heat pumps do, too.
These are two sentences that describe the same process, just in different words.
The last quote is potentially relevant: a heat pump is an air conditioner that can run in reverse to provide heat in the winter, so you're running it in both situations, and thus for more time.
This. Heat pumps are just AC run backwards, and it doesn't take much to make an AC able to run in both directions. The only thing is if you need a lot more heating than you need cooling you may need a larger system. But because they're new a different, as well as in demand, you get price gouging on installation compared to an AC in a lot of places.
Strange article. It seems to imply that air-conditioners and heat-pumps are two different animals. But all air-conditioners are just heat-pumps. They just work one-way only. For a few extra bucks, the so-called 'heat-pump' merely has the capability to direct the hot and cold air-flows in the opposite direction.
(In other words, if you took that window-installed air-conditioner and reinstalled it to face the other way in autumn, it would blow the cold air outside in Winter and the hot-air inside.)
It moves existing heat from the outside to the inside of the house. It works exactly like an air conditioner, but in the other direction. (And some heat pumps are reversible so they can be used as both)
A heat pump is an air conditioner that can run in reverse. Put another way, an air conditioner is a marketing term for a specific kind of heat pump. Your correct that there is no inherit efficiency different. Perhaps what was meant is that they are much more efficient than traditional resistance heating?
So.. they work in two directions.
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