When looking at heating solutions, there are lots of options –from a single room to a full home solution that involves running an air duct through each room and delivering air into the area.
A single room solution can be anything from a wood fireplace to an electric fan. But if you’re looking at a whole home solution, you can zone in with either the reverse cycle or ducted system.
It really depends on what the temperature is outside –to what’s the most efficient at the time, which makes it a little bit difficult because you know you can’t have both. A reverse cycle system is working to take the temperature outside and extract every little bit of heat that it can from the air outside and deliver that air in through the fan coil.
If it’s really cold outside this system’s going to work harder to achieve the same result as opposed to gas ducted heating, which will give you constant heat, no matter what the temperature is outside.
Reverse cycle is great in areas like Sydney where it never gets really cold especially further to the coast. As you move further out west in Sydney it does really get cold.
If you’re in a double brick home that stays in the shadow for most of the mornings in winter, the house is cold. The best way to heat up a cold house really fast is with gas ducted heating. If you’re looking at just having a constant temperature, if it was 15 degrees and you want to take it to 22 degrees, which is a nice comfortable temperature to live in, then reverse cycle air conditioning is a really nice and efficient way to heat in that form.
Both system uses energy, but it’s the type of energy and the type of technology being used that’s important. It has to be the most appropriate for your environment or for the area that you live in. So if you are in areas such as Melbourne and Canberra and other areas in the mountain that’s really cold and constantly below seven degrees, you’d be really looking at gas ducted heating as an option.
Further to that, you got natural gas ducted heating versus LPG. LPG is a little bit more expensive energy source to use. But still, if you really are in a cold environment, it’s still using the efficiency of gas and that capability to deliver heat no matter what the temperature is outside. So even in LPG areas, it is still a benefit sometimes to have gas ducted heating. It just really depends on where you are and how cold it is.
So have you decided yet? You might want to check out our next article about using natural gas for a gas ducted heating system.
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