A heat pump is a device which applies external work to extract an amount of heat QC from a cold reservoir and delivers heat QH to a hot reservoir. A heat pump is subject to the same limitations from the second law of thermodynamics as any other heat engine and therefore a maximum efficiency can be calculated from the Carnot cycle. Heat Pumps are usually characterized by a coefficient of performance which is the number of units of energy delivered to the hot reservoir per unit work input.