My husband and I lived the first sixty years of our lives in the far north.
We never really liked the long and severe winter weather.
Every fall, we dreaded the need to start up the furnace and pay such huge energy bills. We weren’t happy spending the majority of our lives hiding inside, breathing the same stale air for months at a time. The only time we spent outside was to shovel the driveway or scrape the ice off the windshield of the car. We needed to dig out the mailbox and remove the weight of the snow from the deck. When we retired, my husband and I were eager to move down south. We hoped to find an area with mild winters and tolerable summer heat. We wanted to be able to handle our year round temperature control needs with an electric heat pump. A heat pump works by simply moving existing heat from one location to another. During the summer, it operates similarly to a conventional air conditioner. It extracts heat out of the house and uses refrigerant to pump it outside. In the winter, the heat pump literally reverses the whole operation. It finds ambient heat in the outdoor air, compresses it to a higher temperature and delivers it inside. Because the system doesn’t burn fossil fuels to generate heat, it creates no greenhouse gases. There’s no worry over combustion byproducts, no hot surfaces or fumes. It’s wonderfully safe, clean, quiet and environmentally friendly. While an electric heat pump is quite expensive to purchase and install, it is a worthwhile investment because of exceptional energy efficiency. It costs very little to run and quickly pays for itself.