this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
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I suspect the reason for that was that the pumps used in car ACs are not really very powerful. They were alright for cooling the car down, but for heating heat up in a cold environment you need a fair amount of throughput, they work if you have the throughput, but you need it to be there.
They work by pulling ambient heat out a large part of the outside and dumping it into the small inside. You need many times the contents of the interior to warm up if it's a cold day outside. Thus you need a lot of air and if you want it to happen in a reasonable time frame you need quite a powerful little motor. The ones on houses are fine because they're huge anyway.
It uses the same amount of energy to create cold as it does to create heat.
Well it's about temperature differences, those are larger in winter I guess. On the other hand there is a lot more radiative heat load in summer...
There's a "sweet spot" for temperatures, so if a compressor and heating agent works well in summer, it won't work well in winter.
Heart pumps don't create heat, they move it.
They also need to be able to get the cold side colder than the outside air so once it gets too cold they don’t really work. There can also be some problems with condensation but when they do work they’re great.