Forgotten 1970s Era heating/cooling TECH - in 2022.

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This forgotten 1970s Era Heating/Cooling TECH might just have been invented, and promoted by inventors on the Autism Spectrum - mostly in Europe.

Story: 'Heat Pumps: What They Do and Why They’re Hot Now.'

LINK: https://www.theverge.com/23301515/heat- ... ng-cooling

REFERENCE: An additional STORY on the comeback of 'heat pumps' requires sign-in subscription. Hard-copies of the 9/14/2022 Fortune magazine STORY may be in library holdings.

- Climate Change and the Energy Crisis are Powering the Comeback of a 1970s Technology Now Being Installed in 40% of New U.S. Homes.

STORY: https://fortune.com/2022/09/14/heat-pum ... te-change/

I wouldn't call it forgotten as my early 80s condo only had that for heat as there was no gas in the building. My folks' house built in the late 90s also used it as primary heat, with gas hot water as a backup. The two AC replacements in 2000s also had a heat pump. It was upgraded to primary direct air gas heat in 2016, as gas here is considered far superior.
My 2017 house is equipped with direct air gas heat as primary, though I do have a heat pump in my AC unit.

It's really hard to call it forgotten as it's on everyone's mind when talking AC, within the past 20+ years.

Last edited by r00tb33r on 18 Dec 2022, 1:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I wouldn't call it forgotten, too.
It's been promoted and commonly installed here for the last 15 years at least.

Heat pumps have been forgotten here in the United States (up until now) - yet progressed in Eupore, and Asia since the 1970s.

I heard about the water type in the early 1980s for getting cheap hot water. The idea was to put old central heating radiators (painted black) on a house roof to soak up the sun, put water through them, and then the heat pump would suck the heat out of the warmed water and give the user a (smaller volume of) hot water. Said to be quite effective even in England on a cloudy non-summer day I've wanted something of the kind ever since but the city council probably wouldn't like it.

Early 1970s I recall the old houses used ovens and wood fired fireplaces for central heating of homes in Australia

That's not heat pump, that's solar heating.
Sporadically installed in Poland, I saw most of it around Lublin. The black heaters need to be insulated by several layers of air and glass to work in the winter, so it's not much cheaper than solar panels but a lot more costly to install.
Still, in my climate, the main issue is snow.

Heat pump works similarily to a fridge (you notice fridges have hot radiators?), cooling some water, ground or air outside to get over 100% efficiency of heating inside. If you reverse the process (some heat pumps are reversible), you can use it as an air conditioner of regular efficiency with air, or taking some advantage of lower temperatures underground when using ground water.

I could have sworn the gizmo that transferred the heat from the warm water to the hot was called a heat pump when I read about the idea back then. But yes, the solar heating system I described is different to what's probably meant in this topic, which seems to be about a gizmo that sucks heat from the cold air outside and uses it to heat the warm air in a living space. But is the gizmo different? It strikes me that in both cases heat is taken from a cooler fluid and pushed into a warmer one - i.e. a heat engine in reverse, a refrigerator mechanism.

Yes, a heat pump is something that "pumps" the heat to make something already hot even hotter while something already cold becomes even colder.
Fridges and "regular" air conditioning work on the same principle.

However, in the case of a solar heater, the "gizmo" does not take heat from cold air but from hot solar radiation.
It needs insulation from the cold air to work efficiently.

^
Yes it does.

More than 1M without power as massive winter storm wreaks havoc across U.S.

At temperature this low it becomes inefficient.

I'm just glad I've got direct air gas heat.

Heating/cooling systems that work on the heat pump principle have been popular in Australia for as long as I remember. They're usually referred to as "split systems" as there are two visible boxes, one on the wall inside and the other outside the house. As a previous apartment dweller I had one installed that had one outside box and a unit on the wall in each room through the apartment. Now that I live in a house I've got one in each room that's linked through the wall to the outside box so there is minimal distance between the two. These units are about 20 years newer than the installation in the apartment and the energy efficiency of them has drastically improved over this time.

Over this 20 years the refrigerant gas has changed to one that is much less damaging to the environment should it leak. They have also changed to an "inverter" type compressor that's powered by DC power, this inverter principle means that the compressor runs continuously and is constantly varied as required. In the old ones the compressor would noticeably cycle between being on and off. This cycling used more electricity and put more strain on the unit. My new DC inverter units are also linked to the house's solar setup and most of the energy they use comes from this rather than the electricity grid. Overall I've been very pleased with my split systems and look forward to what other improvements may happen over the coming 20 years.