Pump up your home life
Home » The Good Guide » Heating & Insulation » Heating & Insulation » Heat pumpsMitsubishi Electric heat pumps are bringing the heat, even at –15°C
Some things in life seem like magic. I have no idea how television, wi-fi or love affairs work, but they are all great. For many of the 78,000 households in New Zealand which had a heat pump installed last year, the warmth of their home works just like magic too. They nestle back in their recliner watching the box, blissfully unaware of the wonderfully clever processes helping to keep their toes toasty.
Before writing this, I had no idea how heat pumps work either, so I went and found out. Basically, a heat pump has two bits, one inside and one outside, connected by a loop of pipe filled with a special type of gas called a refrigerant. When you want the heat pump to warm your home, the outside unit makes the refrigerant change from liquid to gas. This process draws heat from the outside air. The heat pump then moves high-pressure hot refrigerant gas to the indoor unit, where the gas condenses, releasing cosy warm heat. A heat pump can work in either direction, either warming or cooling your home.
The really magic part about this is that it's tremendously efficient. Typically, for every 1kW of electrical energy required to run the pump, up to 4kW of available heat energy is drawn in from outdoors. This makes for inexpensive heating and a relatively low impact on the environment. The Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority recently calculated that heating makes up about 29 percent of the average household's energy bill, and using heat pump technology could reduce this cost by up to two-thirds.
Consumer NZ rates heat pumps highly and recommends them as an energy-efficient home heating solution. Many Mitsubishi Electric units are efficient enough to carry the prestigious Energy Star mark. To add to the incredibly unobtrusive nature of this form of heating, and reduce the impact on your home environment even further, they have created New Zealand's quietest heat pump, the Mitsubishi Electric MSZ-GE25VA. It whispers along at 19 dBA.
One of the drawbacks of some systems is that they struggle on really cold mornings. Mitsubishi guarantees heating performance down to –15°C, which ensures adequate heating on even the coldest nights or mornings when you really need it.
Those of you down south might appreciate one of the company’s latest innovations: HyperCore technology. This allows some Mitsubishi machines to work at full capacity at that same minimum temperature, something no other heat pump is capable of.
Mitsubishi Electric’s Hypercore and Plasma Duo Deluxe ranges also include advanced air filtration systems, ideal for asthma sufferers or any of us concerned about indoor air quality. And its Inverter compressors auto-adjust to keep your room at the desired temperature. This gives energy savings of nearly one-third compared to fixed level machines, by reducing power wasted adjusting things up and down throughout the day.
Fiona Wild of Tawa replaced her old wood burner with a Mitsubishi Electric heat pump as a way to ensure her home was warm for her two young children, without the hassle.
“All I do is set the timer, then adjust the temperature occasionally as the weather changes. We’re just loving the warmth in winter now. What I like most is the fact that the house is already cosy when we get up in the mornings, which feels really healthy. We only need to use the heat pump for a few hours a day.”
And Mitsubishi Electric manufacturing factories have recently set themselves some bold environmental targets, including reducing carbon emissions from production and product usage by 30 percent by 2021, and to cut resource use by the same amount in that period.
Fresh ideas putting competitors in hot water?
A recent development is the use of this same technology to heat water. Mitsubishi Electric offers systems designed specifically to be tucked away discreetly under the floor, controlled with a seven-day timer from an LCD screen on the wall. They provide reliable, piping hot water all year round, even if the outdoor temperature drops to a bone-numbing –20°C.
Reassuringly, they use R410a refrigerant, which doesn't deplete the ozone layer when the unit is finally decommissioned, or in the unlikely event that it would ever leak. These underfloor units can also easily be hooked up to a heating system to warm the tiled areas of your home. You can also connect them to a hot water pump for a swimming pool or spa, significantly lowering heating costs and energy used.
Mitsubishi Electric is distributed in New Zealand by Black Diamond Technologies Limited. To find out more about the product range, including your nearest recommended installer, visit www.mitsubishi-electric.co.nz
