A heatwave continues to grip large parts of Europe, with authorities in many countries issuing health warnings amid searing temperatures.
Southern Spain is the worst-affected region, with temperatures in the mid-40s Celsius recorded in Seville and neighbouring areas.
A new heat record for June of 46C was set on Saturday in the town of El Granado, according to Spain’s national weather service, which also said this month is on track to be the hottest June on record.
In France the government is helping people get Aircon by subsidising heatpumps, also way more carbon efficient than Gaz or fioul based central heating.
It depends on the kind of heatpumps, in a lot of cases the heatpump is installed to replace a boiler, reusing the radiators and hot water circulation already available.
Unfortunately in this case the heatpump cannot be used as AC.
Not as AC, but a reversible heat pump can use the heating system for cold water circulation.
It’s rather limited, because you run into condensation concerns, but it’s still a possibility. A place I used to work at did this. It wasn’t perfect, but took some of the edge off.
Even better: quite a few models allow the installation of an extra module that works as a split water circuit air cooler. So no condensation on radiators but cool air blown from an AC looking thing. Daikin and mitsubishi has such models (from memory).
On the other hand reversible heatpumps work great with floor heating.
Having a cool floor during a heatwave is amazing, plus no noise,
Does that work for ground source heat pumps too? Like could I literally cool my floor with one? For summer and light winter, my air to air unit is fine and air to water is great too, but when it’s like -25 or -30 out, the air source units start getting pretty inefficient.
Probably, it should be quite efficient as well.
How does this subsidy work? Asking for my dad, who lives in France.
The following webpage does the job of showing you all the available subsidies to get a heat pump fitted to replace a fossil fuel based furnace.
https://www.economie.gouv.fr/cedef/fiches-pratiques/quelles-aides-pour-linstallation-dune-pompe-chaleur
Use your favorite translation tool (or browser native tool) to get it in English.
Globally, you get help in the case of an air to water heat pump and not an Air to Air ones BUT, technically, on quite a few models, you can add , for a small price) an extra circuit that works as a water based split air cooler (so not proper AC, but damn quite close to it).