A Geothermal Heat Pump can cut your energy bill by up to 70%
Intelligent Heat and Power offers a variety of affordable solutions that can reduce your energy bill by as much as 70%. A typical New England home burns an equivalent of between 600 and 1000 gallons of #2 heating oil per year. A 70% savings compared to $5 a gallon of heating oil could mean as much as $3500 savings per year!
So, How do you figure?
It all starts with the efficiency of the systems. Fossil fuel burning systems are rated in %AFUE (Annual Fuel Utilization Efficiency). This is the percent of heat extracted from the fuel you burn. For example, a gallon of heating oil contains 138,690 BTU(British Thermal Units) per gallon. Burned in a furnace of 95% efficiency you only get 131,755 BTU of heat, and that cost you $5 for one gallon of oil.
Geothermal Heat Pumps are rated in two ways for the same piece of equipment if they are capable of cooling as well as heating. Since, technically, efficiency cannot exceed 100% we use a different term to describe the amazing performance of a heat pump. In the heating mode, heat pumps are rated in COP (Coefficient of performance). In the cooling mode, we use the SEER (Seasonal Energy Efficiency Rating) to rate the performance of the heat pump.
For a COP of 4.5, this means for every watt of electricity we put into the heat pump, it can deliver 4.5 watts of heat from the ground. So to compare against the furnace model above, we want to calculate the cost of 131,755 BTU from the heat pump to compare against the furnace. To get the equivalent number, we divide the 131,755BTU by the COP of the system (4.5) to get 29,279 BTU input. Since we use electricity to provide that power we need to convert that last number to kilowatt-hours (kWh) since that is how the electric company charges us. 29,279 BTU equals 8.58kWh and at a rate of $0.14 per kWh we get $1.20 for the same amount of heat as a $5 gallon of heating oil. That is a savings of 76%!
Click here to contact us, go green today!