In Louisiana, we don’t just love our AC. We require it for most of the year! Air conditioning is a necessity and not a luxury. However, during a few months in the winter, heating is a necessity as well. Does that mean we need both an air conditioner and a furnace? And what about our poor old ducts, doing such a big job for so many years?
The simplest solution to all these concerns is a ductless mini split with a heat pump. It can provide everything you need, all year round, and do so more efficiently than anything you’ve ever experienced. Mini splits aren’t just for air conditioning, and a ductless heat pump system has amazing benefits when you use it for heating. Here are the details.
Duct Leaks
In the average American home with ductwork, nearly one-third of the air we pay to heat and cool never makes it to the vents and into our living spaces. No, it is lost along the way! Ductwork doesn’t last forever, and being behind walls and out of sight allows it to deteriorate with nobody noticing. Cracks, holes, and tears allow the heated and cooled air to escape.
Ductless systems prevent these problems by avoiding ducts altogether. If your home is older and never had ducts, or if your ducts are in less-than-ideal condition, you can have a ductless mini split installed much more quickly and cost-effectively than you can have an entire system of ducts installed or replaced.
Heat Pumps for Cooling
A heat pump is just like an air conditioner. Outside, there’s a unit that contains the compressor. It keeps the refrigerant under pressure and moving through the coils. When you have a mini split, those coils separate when they reach the house, and an independent refrigerant line heads to each air handler in the home.
In that air handler, the refrigerant in the coils evaporates, becoming a gas. This absorbs a great deal of thermic energy—heat—from the air around the coil. The newly-cold air is blown directly out of the vent, right where it was created. The refrigerant flows back to the outdoor unit and condenses into a liquid, and that thermic energy is lost, which is to say, the refrigerant cools down.
Heat Pumps for Heating
The special trick of the heat pump is performed by a component called the reversing valve. It can change the direction that this whole process flows in! Instead of carrying heat out from inside, it can now carry heat in from outside! And this is where the most impressive efficiency happens.
Producing heat from nothing is extremely energy-intensive. The way the heat pump avoids using so much energy is by simply moving heat instead of producing it! Even in quite chilly temperatures, the ice-cold refrigerant can soak up warmth from outdoors and release it inside to warm your home. At best, for every one unit of energy a furnace consumes, it creates one unit of heat. But a heat pump can create four—yes, it can be four times as efficient!
It’s about time you consider ductless heating in Calhoun, LA!
Contact Mike Smith Heating & Air Conditioning, LLC. We provide “Professional grade service.”