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"Our power bill just arrived. I never knew water heating was costing us that much. This thing will pay for itself in no time"

"This thing is  so  cheap  to  run; WE  used  to  use  gas. Three  months cylinder rental is  equivalent  to a  year's  running  cost  for  our  new  eccotherm."

Uses  less  electricity  in  a year  than   solar  water heating

Uses less power than a hair drier

 

Latent  Heat  -  Secret  to Eccotherm Success

There are numerous explanations that  attempt to  describe heat pump operation, often  using crude comparisons with reversible fridges, air conditioners and  even bicycle pumps, but all these fall  well short of the mark in their understanding of the real process that is involved.

 A  much better  explanation involves  a property of  matter  called latent heat which is the energy that is absorbed by a substance  when there is  no change  in its temperature. This occurs for instance when ice melts or water boils.  It   takes a lot more energy  for  such  a  change  to  occur than  to  increase  it's  temperature.. For example, 539 times  more energy is  needed to  boil  water  than  to raise it's   temperature  by  just one  degree and that's  why a  steam burn is  so much more painful than one from boiling water. All that extra energy condenses(unboils) and  goes into your  skin.

 A heat pump  uses this  powerful  property of latent heat  where  a  special substance called a working fluid(refrigerant) changes repeatedly back and forth from liquid to  vapour, absorbing  vast amounts  of energy  as it boils and unboils.

Refrigerants are chosen to have boiling points  well  below the temperature of their surroundings so  they  can absorb  energy  when  they  are vapourised. A  typical boiling temperature  can be  as low  as minus forty degrees  centigrade,  so  even on a freezing day the refrigerant "thinks" things  are relatively tropical.  Some electrical energy  is used to move the refrigerant  around the  heat  pump  circuit  and  most  of  this  as  well  as  the  energy  that the  Eccotherm  aborbs  from  the   outside air appears  as  the  heat  in  your  water.