• Psythik@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    No we have both, and they’re still heat pumps. The direction the heat pumped is irrelevant; the fundamentals are the same.

    • MindTraveller@lemmy.ca
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      2 months ago

      Yes, air conditioners and heat pumps are indeed the same thing. Americans just don’t call the two-directional heat pumps air conditioners for some reason. I guess they don’t believe you can condition air by making it hotter. In my country, we consider heating part of conditioning.

      • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de
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        2 months ago

        We call it HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning), and so do other countries that speak English for a reason. It’s different from heating in that air conditioning can also involve controlling air humidity/quality.

        Heating gets its own because until reversible heat pumps, it was a separate system that only heated the building (sometimes not even the air directly in the case of heated floors).