• 2 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 23 days ago
Cake day: July 15th, 2025
  • Iced Raktajino@startrek.websitetoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Do air source heat pumps use a lot of electricity when cooling?
    11·
    8 days ago

    Heat pumps move heat. In the summer, it’s pulling heat from inside and moving it outside and the opposite of that in the winter.

    Basically, the temperature differential is what makes the difference. The larger the differential, the more energy it has to use.

    In the winter, when it’s 30 degrees (F) outside, and you want it to be 70 inside, that’s 40 degrees it has to move. In the summer when it’s 90 degrees outside, and you want it at 70 inside, that’s only 20 degrees.

    Air source heat pumps, as the name implies, pull heat from (and exhaust heat to) the ambient air. When it’s really cold in the winter, there’s less ambient heat to move inside, so it has to run longer. Some (all?) heat pumps also have an auxiliary resistive heating element to make up the difference which lowers efficiency quite a bit.

    Granted, newer heat pumps can work well down to lower temperatures without having to engage the aux heat than the older ones I’m familiar with, but in a nutshell, that’s why they can potentially use less energy in the summer.

  • Iced Raktajino@startrek.websitetoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•In the cave
    6·
    21 days ago

    I’ve thought about doing this in my basement rec room to make it feel more “open”. Plan is to take a couple spare flat screens I’m not using, build a wood window frame around them, and put some curtains over them to further sell the effect.

    Just haven’t figured out a way to drive them besides sticking a raspberry pi on each one. That would also let me make them “real” windows if I want to feed in the camera views from outside.