Does heating with air conditioning make sense? Simply explained

Heating with an air conditioner may seem paradoxical to you. After all, as the name suggests, it is primarily an appliance designed for cooling. But in fact, in some cases, it can also be used for heating.

Heating with an air conditioner: in this case it goes

Only special split air conditioners can actually heat your rooms effectively.

• Generally, split air conditioners are air conditioners that are permanently integrated into the building. The operating principle is that of a heat pump. For cooling, heat is extracted from the indoor air and transferred to the outdoor air via a heat exchanger.
• For this reason, this principle can also be easily reversed. A heat pump for heating extracts heat from the outside air and supplies it to the inside air accordingly.
• But this does not mean that an air conditioner can replace a complete central heating system for your building. This is because the latter is normally provided with much less heating capacity than heat pumps, which are primarily intended for heating.
• Depending on how cold it gets at the maximum in your region, you can use the air conditioner for longer instead of other heating methods. This is because up to about 5 degrees Celsius, air conditioners work relatively efficiently for heating, even more efficiently than oil or gas heaters.
• This is why they are most suitable for the transitional seasons such as October, November, March and April. But even then, air conditioners would tend to be suitable only for the one room they are meant for. Heating all the rooms in your house by leaving the doors open with just one or two air conditioners works poorly and drives up electricity costs.
• Thus, in our latitudes, an air conditioner should rather be regarded as a supplementary heater. With its use, the consumption of fossil fuels can be well reduced, provided you purchase green electricity, but it is not a substitute, at least in the climate as it prevails in Germany.