Eco Friendly
 Selected for the Waitakere Eco Home over all forms of heating and other brands of air conditioning.
- No pollution
- No electric elements
"The aim of the eco-friendly home project was to create a family environment which was kind to nature, 'healthy' and sympathetic to the lifestyle of its occupants.
Heat pumps - a cool way to heat your home for less.
Water heating and space heating account for more than 60 per cent of a home's energy cost which makes them the best place to look for savings.
But that's difficult. Conventional electrical heating is already 100 per cent efficient. If you put one kilowatt of electricity into an electric heater, you get one kilowatt of heat out. So, as long as the heat isn't being wasted, most people would assume the only way to make savings is to turn the heater down.
Not any more. The eco-friendly home introduces a new type of electrical heating that is actually 375 per cent efficient. The Inverter heat pump in the eco-friendly home actually pumps out over three times more energy, in the form of heat, than they consume. Impossible? Not at all. The pump simply transfers the heat from somewhere else. They pump warmth from the air outside into the house - hence the term 'heat pump'.
Unlike conventional heaters, the power isn't converted into heat, it is only used to power the pump that circulates the liquid through the system. The same principal is at work in your refrigerator. The heat pump in your fridge extracts the warmth from inside the fridge and releases it outside which is why the back of your fridge is warm. And it continues to work even when the inside is colder than the outside.
The heat pump warms the eco-friendly home the same way. Even on bitterly cold days, its heat exchanger unit can extract 'warmth' from cold air outside and transfer it into a heated room, just as your fridge keeps extracting heat from your freezer even when it's below zero. The heat pump can still warm your home when the air outside is 10 degrees below zero!
And best of all, heat pumps can be flicked into reverse to provide cooling in summer. Say air conditioner to most people and they will think of big noisy boxes, but they are a thing of the past. A modern inverter domestic air conditioner runs as quietly as a desktop fan. At around 32 decibels, it's quiet enough to hear a pin drop.
Malcolm Miller from Absolute Air-conditioning and Refrigeration Limited in Auckland, says the heat pump uses the electricity needed to run a one-bar heater and converts it into the heat output of a four-bar heater. That makes the running costs less than half that of gas or traditional electric heating.
Heat pumps cost more to install than conventional electric heaters but they pay for themselves with running costs that are about half those of gas or electric heating and less than a fifth of an LPG heater. Heating in winter, cooling in summer, they also filter the air to remove irritants like pollen and dust - and they work as dehumidifiers. That saves the cost of buying several different units, making a domestic heat pump air-conditioner a very cost effective package for a forward looking homeowner.
"It works out at about $200 a year for the average home compared to up to $800 a year for gas or traditional electric heating," he says.
The heat pump is also less harmful to the environment. It doesn't produce any carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming. Carbon dioxide and other gas and water vapour emissions are often regarded as a major drawback of solid fuel and gas heating.
Reproduced with permission from the Eco-Friendly Home Booklet
We are now working with Walder City on their Sustainable Living Centre - Wolveton Rd, New Lynn
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