What is the difference between a chiller and a heat pump?

A chiller and a heat pump both use the refrigeration cycle, but they do opposite jobs. A chiller removes heat from a process or space and rejects it outside, producing chilled water for cooling. A heat pump moves heat from one place to another to provide heating — and many industrial heat pumps can reverse to provide cooling too.

The key industrial advantage of a heat pump is energy recovery: instead of burning fuel to create heat, it moves existing heat (often waste heat from your process) to where it is useful, using far less electricity than resistance or gas heating.

Many plants run both — chillers for process cooling and heat pumps for water or process heating — and Reyds designs, installs and maintains both systems.