Heat Pump Size Really Matters When It Comes to Cooling Properly

A heat pump can be a highly efficient means of ensuring year-round comfort in your South Florida home. However, heat pump size is an important factor in efficient performance, especially when it comes to keeping summertime heat and humidity at bay. To ensure maximum comfort and economy, make sure your contractor performs a cooling and heating load calculation to determine the size and type of equipment that will best serve your needs.

Heat pumps work to keep your home at comfortable temperatures throughout the year, avoiding the need for separate heating and cooling systems. During summer, a heat pump works like a central air conditioner to keep your home comfortable. With the use of refrigerant, the heat pump will absorb heat from your home and carry it outdoors to the condensing unit, where it will be dispersed into the outside air. That cooling process also helps dehumidify the home, with moisture from the indoor air condensing on the evaporator coil and draining away through the condensate drain. During cooler weather, the cycle is reversed, bringing heat in from outdoors to warm the home.

Heat pump size is crucial to performance and efficiency, so make sure that your contractor is using load calculations, not rough estimates, to size your equipment. A heat pump that’s too small for the load it’s expected to carry will run much more than necessary, using more energy than it should, and isn’t likely to keep your home cool and comfortable. Installing a heat pump that’s too large can waste a lot of energy, too, since it will have very short run cycles. Stopping and starting repeatedly for short cycles uses more energy than longer, properly timed cycles, and causes excess wear on system components. Additionally, since moisture and airborne particulates are only removed from the air when the system is running, short cycles mean both higher indoor humidity and degraded air quality.

For more information on cooling and heating load calculations or the impact of heat pump size on home comfort and energy efficiency, please contact us at NisAir Air Conditioning and Heating. We’ve been serving Martin, Palm Beach and Indian River counties since 1973.