Before moving south, I’d never heard of a heat pump. I spent the majority of my life in the northeast, where the weather gets extremely cold in the winter. We see temperatures down to negative twenty-five, and the windchill makes it feel even colder. It takes an incredibly powerful heating system to keep the house comfortable. When I’d finally had enough of wearing a wool coat for nine months out of the year and spending hours shoveling snow, I packed up and headed south. I moved just far enough that I’ll never need to worry about below-freezing temperatures again. Now, for most of the year, I require air conditioning. The heat and humidity can be brutal. The winters don’t last long, but there are conditions in the low forties. My current house is equipped with an electric heat pump. Rather than burn fossil fuels to generate heat, this type of system works by moving existing heat between the indoors and outdoors. It avoids the drawbacks of the combustion process, including greenhouse gasses, fumes and carbon monoxide. There is ambient heat available in the air, even during colder weather. The heat pump pulls this heat out of the air and compresses it into a higher temperature and then supplies it into the house. The process is exceptionally energy efficient and environmentally friendly. The heat pump costs a lot less to operate than the furnace. Most of the time, we run the heat pump in cooling mode. It reverses the flow of refrigerant to pull heat out of the house and deliver it outdoors.