Technology
We stock a range of cutting edge air-conditioning heat pumps to efficiently control the climate of your home.
These units use the latest technology to generate fresh, hot or cold air whilst using considerably less energy than other methods.
Mountain Fresh, Filtered Air
All our units come with anti-odour, dust, and pollen filters, making them a huge help to hayfever and allergy sufferers. You don’t need to keep windows open during those hot sweltering summer nights, and the air inside your home is constantly purified. Some of our units also come with an antibacterial ioniser function and a Titanium gold heat exchanger, which reduces bacteria & mould even further.
Exceptionally Efficient Technology
Almost all our units use highly advanced and efficient inverter heat-pump technology, qualifying them for the UK government’s 0% VAT relief for “Energy Saving Materials”. This initiative recognises that these units are incredibly energy efficient and can help reduce CO2 emissions to combat global warming. The highest performing units are A+++ rated.
Efficient Heating or Cooling
Domestic air conditioning units are generally thought of as cooling devices, but because our units use a highly efficient heat pump, they can be “reversed” to take heat from the outside and pump it into your home. Incredibly, they can do this even when the outside air itself feels cold. Heat pumps usually create around 3-4 times more kilowatts of heat than they consume in electricity.
Now for the Science!
Super Efficient Heating
You may be aware that some types of heat pumps are used to replace domestic central heating boilers – these are known as air-to-water heat pumps. While generally thought of as more energy efficient and environmentally friendly than gas or oil boilers, they can be very costly to fit and often require your radiators themselves to be changed to operate effectively.
Our combined air-con heat pump units are different – they operate air-to-air, meaning they warm and circulate the air in your rooms rather than water in the central heating system. This means they can be used to heat the specific rooms they are installed in completely independently from each other. They don’t take time to “warm up” and are more efficient because they don’t need to heat all the pipework and radiators before they can heat the room.
Why are heat pumps so efficient?
Modern technology allows us to extract energy from the outside air even if it feels cold to us. This energy is concentrated by the heat pump and transferred to the inside of our home. By doing this they use free energy that would otherwise be unused, and the best part is that they use less electicity to perform this function than the heat they generate, so for each kW of electricity they generate 3-4 kW of heat.
What are the figures?
Putting this into numbers; a typical gas-fired boiler could be expected to achieve a best COP (Coefficient of Performance) of 0.9 (i.e. 1kW input produces 0.9kW output) whereas an air-to-air heat pump can achieve a COP of between 3-4. In financial terms this means that you can save money because you need to purchase less energy to warm your home.
Environmentally Friendly Cooling
Old air conditioning units used CFC refregerants which were extremely harmful to the environment if released to the atmosphere. One kg (1kg) of CFC had the equivalent global warming effect of up to 14.4 tonnes of CO2 (14,400kg)!
Thankfully these types of refregerant are now banned and modern units use much more environmentally acceptable refrigerants. The best domestic systems use R290 which has a GWP (Global Warming Potential) of between 0.07kg and 3kg CO2 for each kg of R290.
Many modern units also use R32 which is an HFC-based refrigerant. Although it has a higher GWP than R290 it is much cheaper and therefore the units are cheaper to buy, however, R32-based systems are covered by the F-Gas regulations and can only be installed by an F-Gas qualified engineer following strict procedures.
The Cooling Team has full F-Gas cerfification and are fully authorised to install and maintain R32-based systems.