Thermal pump belongs among alternative energy sources. It works on the same principles as ordinary home fridges. The heat exchanger on the back side of a fridge is heating up your kitchen. This way it gets rid of heat, which it converted from a lower level (about +3 şC inside the fridge) up to a higher level (about 30şC on the surface of the heat exchanger). Thermal pump is nothing else than a big fridge, which takes off the heat not from food but from a different source of heat. This can be e.g. the earth in our garden or in the surrounding of the house, air, river, lake, well, bore or waste heat. A thermal pump can warm the water up to 55 şC. With this water you can heat up, warm up the hot utility water in your boiler or the water in your swimming pool.

The point of this solution is following: with each kWh of electric energy, which the pump uses up, it produces 2,5 – 4,5 kWh of thermal energy. If the thermal pump was installed in a family house with a floor space of 180 square metres. and a 12 kW boiler, than it would be sufficient to have a 4,5 kW boiler and the rest (7,5 kW) would be supplied by the pump (2,6 kW input) e.g. from a hundred-metre-deep bore. This way 63% of energy would be saved.

Heating up with thermal pumps became an inherent part of ecological problems´ solution. One of the countries, where ecology is one of the main interests of all inhabitants, is Sweden. There the thermal pumps have been produced since the year 1970. Over 200.000 of them were installed just in this country. Thanks to this Sweden saves 13 terrawatthours of electric energy. This is the output of 2 blocks of a nuclear power station, and it wasn’t necessary to build them.

Common thermal pumps are able to supply the output of 4-130 kW.