How This New Heat Pump is Genius

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AC units should be heating our water Edit: The waste heat from when an AC or Refrigerator is running, should be routed to and recovered/stored in the hot water heater

SOMEONE CONTACT TECHNOLOGY CONNECTIONS RIGHT NOW!!! Edit: Y'all, the running gag is that Technology Connections keeps circling back to heat pumps.

Our heatpump is a normal non cascading pump using the groundwater as heat source. It has a COP of 5-6 over the year and heats our water up to 60°C and works for almost every outside temperature because the groundwater temperature doesn't fluctuate that much

The whole heat pump conversation (especially resistance to them) is fascinating to me because we have been using them in Virginia for decades. I'm 43 years old and every house I've ever lived in has had a heat pump. I only recently found out that heat pumps are not the norm everywhere else.

In the early 2000s, a company called Hallowell International based in Maine developed a '2-stage' heat pump that did pretty much this exact thing. It had two different compressors as well as a heat recovery loop which would divert friction heat from the compressors into the refrigerant in heating mode. We had one of their systems and it performed very well, able to heat our house for about the same dollar cost as the gas furnace it replaced, which was unheard of in 2006! (We're in snow country, and it definitely gets cold here.) Unfortunately, the company didn't survive, mainly due to quality and durability issues with their control boards. Our system eventually died from a bad control board, which we couldn't replace. We ended up replacing it with a variable speed drive heat pump from Amana. Its good to see people are still tinkering with the concepts though!

today the temp is over 42C inside and outside it is over 44C here in India. Traditional air conditioners can't handle this load- We had power blackout twice today. Two stage heat pumps must become cheaper so that it is affordable.

This is how freeze dryers work. They have to get the internal temperature down to about -40F, which is too much for a single system to handle. So you use them in tandem to create a greater difference in temperature.

I used to work on controls for cascaded refrigeration units for use in medical and scientific applications. Once you have a second stage, it's pretty crazy what kinds of temperature gradients you can have. IIRC, one of them I worked on was a -150C system. Heat pump is love. Heat pump is life.

you know your an odd ball when you see "the prefect heat pump" and get excited. lol love your show broski.

Complex systems are only beneficial if reliable. As a home builder that delivers around 300 homes a year… we are seeing a 38% failure rate of hybrid water heaters. We had a 0% failure rate with electric, 3% failure rate with gas and a 6% failure rate with tankless.

yo dawg, I heard you like heat pumps...

I'm a manufacturers rep for hydronic equipment, and part of what we do is design and sell Air-to-Water Heat Pump systems for radiant heating and radiant cooling. And we need this!!! Looks like it will have built-in buffer tanks, and can cool to pretty ridiculous OA temps. Depends on how big they will be....but I'm looking forward to seeing them in the future. Thank you for all the entertainment!

We have 2 air source heat pumps, about 10 and 6 years old, on our home. We live in CT these days and oil is our primary heat source. We have consistently saved about 1/3 to 40% of our oil usage for heating, thus saving hundreds of gallons of oil each year while saving money, as the net cost of electricity is less than the oil for those BTUs. I am an engineer, and compare our oil cost * efficiency of our furnace to our heat pumps and electricity costs. It's a no brainer for saving money, and we still have the oil for days below about 30F. 25F to 40F roughly, depends on the oil price and electric price that year, is our break even point.

We are going for a geothermal Heat Pump (with floor heating) and passive cooling for our new house. Pretty nice as the temperature of the ground is a stable 3-4c and that means the COP is like 4 year around. Its also much more quiet than air-to-air heat pumps and does not need to "de-ice". In the summer we can use that "cold hole" to passively cool in the summer.

Superheat can be addressed by an accumulator it adds volume of fluid. this is done on refrigeration systems for food service where it has to operate in the winter where returning refrigerant has a large amount of liquid with the gas. The accumulator stores the return fluid and gas mixture in a tank filling from the bottom and supplying gas from the top of the tank to the compressor. There are sensors that detect if the liquid in the tank is to high.

Thanks for sharing. My heat pump units are nearing end of life. Great to see options for replacing them.

Thanks Matt. A cascade heat pump is just a scheme to get a heat pump to work at all in very cold climates and is not about increasing efficiency. Cascading systems can get heat out of extremely cold air, but the quantity of the heat you get (BTUs) is on the small side (i.e., super cold air does not have a lot of heat content, a very rough analogy is an alternator coil which steps up electrical voltage, but the amperage goes way down). To make the cascade trick work, you need an oversized heat pump at the coldest end of the cascade to produce a whole bunch of moderate warmth. Then the next heat pump can pump/turn that large amount of moderate warmth into the warmth you need for your house. Remember, each heat pump in the cascade costs extra money and the first cascade heat pump, being larger, costs more (need to confirm that the outfit you talked to up-sizes heat pump #1, the coldest one). Why go to all of the expense of a cascade when a ground water based heat pump works better. Extracting the heat out of 55°F ground water means a COP a bit greater than 4.0 on even the coldest days (job done). I'll bet the extra cost of the buried water coils is similar to the cost of the extra heat pumps in a cascade system (need to confirm this). A good non-cascade heat pump, like the Mitsubishi Hyper heat ductless mini-split, has a COP of 4 @ 48°F outside temp & a COP of 2 @ 5°F outside temp and can extract heat from air as cold as -13°F (-11°C), but the COP goes down to ~1 at this temp. BTW - the magic here is mostly an oversized heat exchanger. Costs - High COP only partially translates into dollars saved because the cost of electricity varies so much over the USA. My electricity costs ~17 cents per kWhr (I'm including every cost, like line transmission charges) and my separate high efficiency (95%) condensing gas boiler gas boiler runs on natural gas that currently costs ~12.7 cents per cubic foot (I'm including transmission charges too). The cost cross-over point is 47°F (i.e., cheaper to burn natl gas below 47°F outside temp). About 3 years ago, when I replaced my 25 year old just-A/C system with the Mitsubishi Hyper heat, the gas vs. heat pump cost cross-over point was ~32°F. My Mitsubishi ductless mini-split cost about 2X more than a traditional A/C-only system. I was OK with this because I got two systems in one and every room now has its own zone and I don't have to burn natl gas for about 40% of the winter when the outside temp is 47°F or warmer (min temp in my area is ~5°F). The old A/C was and the current gas boiler based heat is one giant zone for the whole house. Gas heats my hot water year round.

This is definitely something to keep my eye on, for when we expand the house. Right now we have window units (cut through the walls, rather than stuck in a window) in each area of the home. This has had the added benefit of individualized temperature control.

We use cascading systems for negative 80 Celsius. Freezes and negative 20 Celsius. It's the same principle we just taken multiple little compressors with different freons with different glide and boiling points. I'm just staging them and using the medium. From the fluid as its transfer, instead of the air outside