Heat pumps – what do they actually look like? What gets fitted inside my house? Why are there no proper pictures on the internet?
Cutting to the chase, heat pumps are UGLY and BIG. This is why you find lots of photos of happy smiling people in heat pump marketing, and not so many of the hardware actually installed. So I’m setting about finding pictures of heat pumps with some ‘human scale’ to them so you can see what you might be buying. This post is my first draft and I’m planning to update it as I find more and better illustrations.
All air source heat pumps (ASHPs) need a large box in the garden. This photo is an example.
Heat pumps always comprise at least two boxes – one in the garden to collect heat energy from the outside world, and one inside your house to deliver the collected heat. The size and appearance of the boxes varies widely. The more rooms your heat pump serves, the bigger the outside box will be.
Here is the outside box (called the ‘collector’) for an air-to-air heat pump serving three or four rooms. For a small heat pump serving just a single room, the outside collector will be a single fan version of what’s in the photo. (Photo reproduced from heatpumps.org.uk. Read the whole article here to see what I mean about the dearth of photos.)
This photo above gives an impression of the size of the interior unit that would heat, say, a modern well insulated five bed detached house. In addition, there will be a hot water cylinder, two expansion vessels and a perhaps a buffer unit (like a small HW cylinder), so a whole separate plant room is often allocated to a heat pump installation, rather than it all being in the kitchen, utility room or garage.
The photo above is from a marketing brochure published by ground source heat pump manufacture Nibe. The smaller photo on the right is a Mitsubishi product, the hot water cylinder that goes with their “Ecodan” range of air source heat pumps.
“Air-to-air” heat pumps have a wall unit fitted in each room which blows hot air. They are popular because besides heating, in hot weather they’ll blow out cold air into the room instead which to me seems wonderful. I’m still looking for a decent photo of the interior ‘warm or cool air blower’ box that goes in each room to do this, and which gives a realistic representation of just how big and ugly they are though (in my personal opinion)!
The market for heat pumps is developing rapidly and I’ll update this post from time to time as I discover more and better photos illustrating how heat pumps will really look, in real life installations.