Furnaces and Heat Pumps - Texas Central Air

What you need to know about Furnaces, HVAC and Heat Pumps

Furnaces

A furnace is a unit or device that produces heat

The word furnace is what people normally call their home heating system.

Usually, a home heating system is made up of a central furnace (known either as a boiler furnace or a heater)

Your home furnace can be fueled by natural gas, LPG (Liquified Petroleum Gas), fuel oil, coal or wood. The two most common modern furnaces are the gas furnace, and the LPG furnace.

Furnace components

The furnace components can be divided into three categories
1. The burners, heat exchanger, draft inducer, and venting.
2. The controls and safety devices.
3. The blower and air movement.

It is important to have a licensed furnace technician for your furnace installation, furnace replacement, and/or furnace troubleshooting. Annual furnace cleaning, with a change of furnace filters, is necessary to ensure that your home heating system works efficiently.

Heat Pumps

In an HVAC system, a heat pump usually refers to a device that includes a reversing valve with optimized heat exchangers**. This allows the direction of heat flow to be reversed.(sometimes the heat blows in and the cold air out and and other times, the hot air out and the cooler air in)

The reversing valve switches the direction of refrigerant through the cycle and therefore the heat pump may deliver either heating or cooling to a home or building.

Up North, in the cold climates, the default setting of the reversing valve is heating. Here, in the Houston area, it would be cooling.

Because the two heat exchangers, the condenser and evaporator, must swap functions back and forth, they are optimized to perform adequately in both modes.

** (def) A heat exchanger is an instrument built for efficient heat transfer from one medium to another, whether the media are separated by a solid wall so that they never mix, or the media are in direct contact.

Heat exchangers are used mostly for air conditioning of homes, buildings and vehicles. This type of heat exchanger is commonly called air coils, or just coils due to their often-serpentine internal tubing.