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https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/241-heat-pumps-and...

Heat pumps use a small amount of energy to move thermal energy, but it's much more efficient than resistive heat. But if they can't move enough heat, they fall back to resistive heat to top it up.

Ohhhh, interesting. Right, that makes sense.

There's no waste heat with resistive heating, but heat pumps use electricity to move heat from outside to inside, and they can add more than 1J of heat using 1J of electricity.

The trick here is that with heat pumps, they aren't generating the heat, just moving it. As such, you can have, e.g. a 1 kW heat pump moving much more than 1 kW of heat. Wheras with a resistive heater, the best you can do is turn 1 kW of electric power into 1 kW of heat output.