The heat pump revolution is here. This is what you need to know

theguardian.com:

Few climate technologies have ever had a moment quite like the one heat pumps are currently enjoying.

While the share of electric vehicles and induction stoves sales may be growing, they still represent a sliver of all cars and stoves sold respectively. US heat pump sales, though, surpassed those of gas furnaces last year as the tech of choice to keep homes comfortable.

The sudden rise of the heat pump may have you wondering: what actually are they, how do they work, and are there incentives that can help lower the price?

Calling it a “heat pump” is perhaps a bit misleading. That’s because heat pumps both heat and cool your home depending on the season. To do this, they use electricity rather than methane gas, cutting down harmful greenhouse gas emissions and public health and safety concerns.

“It sounds like magic,” said Vince Romanin, the founder of window heat pump startup Gradient. Spoiler: it’s just physics.

The short answer is they work by moving – pumping, if you will – heat from one place to another. It’s actually the same thing that air conditioners do: they pump heat out of your house and draw cool air in. If you’ve ever stood outside next to an air conditioner, you can feel that heat being pushed out. A heat pump can do that same task in summer, but in winter, it also has the ability to reverse the process and pull heat in from the outside into your home. Some heat pumps, called ground source heat pumps, use the ground outside a home as a place to pull or dump heat.

In many cases, yes. They’re wildly more efficient. It’s a lot easier to move heat around rather than creating it from scratch by lighting gas on fire and then blowing the resulting heat around. Romanin noted that heat pumps are 300% more efficient than