Can Air Source Heat Pumps cool your home?

Air source heat pumps are one of the best ways to heat your home and hot water dependably, comfortably, and without having to worry about gas in your home. You’ll also won’t have to worry about emissions as heat pumps produce no CO2 making them an environmentally friendly solution for your home. 

But can home heat pumps also cool your home? Some can, but this function comes with particular downsides that mean they’re not always desirable for all areas. 

Here is what you need to know:

• Air source heat pumps move heat
• Can I get an air-to-air heat pump?
• What’s the alternative?

The most important piece of information is that heat pumps move energy from one place to another (read all about how they work here) – in much the same way that a fridge keeps itself cold by taking heat from inside the fridge and releasing it outside. Heat pumps work in the same way; they extract heat from the outside air and transfer it to the central heating for your home. 

Using a heat pump to cool your home would mean effectively reversing the process of transferring heat from one place to another. However, not all heat pumps can do this.  It all depends on your home, specific requirements, and what can be achieved. The work that is required to ensure your heat pump cools your home as well as heating it is a lot more details and potentially disruptive. For example, you will need to insulate ALL of your exiting pipework in the house to protect against condensation and the system will not work with underfloor heating and traditional radiators. 

These are all things that you will need to give a lot of consideration to before going ahead. 

You can get an air-to-air heat pump; however, you may want to avoid air-to-air heating in the UK for several reasons.

The government BUS grant (which is currently very generous) doesn’t cover air-to-air heat pumps.

This is because the intention of the BUS grant is to reduce overall energy consumption across the country, but switching to air-to-air systems means that energy consumption essentially increases as homeowners use electricity to heat their homes in the winter and use more electricity to cool their homes in the summer.

Secondly, almost all UK homes are heated through water-based central heating – so switching your heating system for a cooling system means you need to pull up all your floors to remove the heating pipes and/or install bulky ducting or multiple in-room units around your home.

Thirdly, air-to-air systems can only heat or cool your home – which is great for the ambient temperature but this means you need a completely different system to heat your water for showers, baths, sinks, etc.

In turn, this means further increases energy consumption and installation costs while also making maintenance more complex; after all, you’ll now have to organise the maintenance of two systems.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, they’re not usually necessary in UK domestic properties because of our climate. While we may get a few weeks of high heat, our summers rarely get as scorching as they do in places like California, Greece, or southern Spain. So, it’s a great deal of work and a significant investment to refit a home’s heating for the sake of a few hot days a year.

Air-to-water heat pumps like the ones we install can be used for cooling too however, this cannot be done with underfloor heating or traditional radiators due to condensation. Therefore, we need to replace these with fan convectors, these are a similar size to radiators but require power for the fan inside and a condenser drainpipe that needs to go outside. Another consideration is that ALL pipework within your house must be insulated to prevent condensation from forming and causing dampness issues within your home.

Heating your home with water-based central heating has worked perfectly well since Roman times, so why change that? What you can change is the source of your heat. 

Make the switch from gas to an air-to-water heat pump – these replace your gas boiler with a super-efficient and dependable way to heat radiators and tap water, and they can be powered by zero-carbon tariffs for a truly green home.