Despite the climate crisis some places (like Canada) are still building houses with fossil fuel based heating systems, and this needs to change. Gas companies and their planet-killing kin have used regulatory capture to ensure their desire to change the climate continues. However, their best efforts to force customers to use dead dino juice people are turning away from old style furnace for new high tech heat pumps.
Heat pumps sound like magic since they somehow extract heat from cold winter air. Thankfully, the Guardian has put together a nice visualization of how heat pumps work. The gif above is not from their english language site.
Whereas gas boilers burn gas to produce heat, heat pumps do something more complicated. Sometimes described as working like a “fridge in reverse”, they use a mixture of evaporation and condensation to transfer heat from outside to inside a building. In a cold winter, it can be hard to understand how these devices work.