Thanks for all the great comments - I was torn about using ‘efficiency’ or COP, but efficiency is widely used in the industry and is much more understandable for potential video viewers, so I went for that and tried to explain it in the video! For anyone interested, Adam’s average COP for December has been 4.62!! (462%) which is crazy high.
CoP and wefficiency is not the same, simlar but not interchangeable, no matter how much easier it is for those with a poor understanding of physics. Also Kw is the wrong unit of electricty to use, KV should be used which is about 25% higher due to the heat pump being a reactive load.
I would've thought the biggest efficiency gain would be from storing heat during hot days and "storing cold" during cold days or a form of arbitrage. This way the pumps are working less overall and there is always less temperature difference at the target and more for the pump.
I have a hotel in New Zealand. Actually NZ’s highest hotel. When the walk in beer chiller blew up I installed the new compressor INSIDE the basement, instead of blowing the ‘waste’ heat out into space. The amount of heat now blown back into the building was vastly more than I expected! I then installed a hot water heatpump in that basement to scavenge that heat into hot water. I then duct the HWHP exhaust onwards into another section of the basement (it’s a BIG basement) The temp drop through the heatpump is huge (the exhaust duct is cold!) That cold exhaust air is also dry, thus the basement condensation problem is vastly improved. Win/win/win! Next I have the restaurant walk in freezer and walk in fridge….im definitely going to do the same. I might just win the COP race, methinks, maybe not with the refrigeration, but I figure the hot water is almost free of charge.
@@GeraldMMonroe multi head units, in opposition is best. (equal number of zones between opposing loads. IE west and east, or north and south.) You use a model that allows for reclaim heat mode.
Plumber and hearing technician here. If the domestic hot water tank tempereture is kept at 40 ⁰C the risk of being infected by Legionella will be very high. Make sure that the temperature is at least 55 ⁰C or 60 ⁰C. Sure, it will be more expensive but it is better to stay alive.
if the flow rate is high enough (the water if not stagnant) its not likely. and considering that you'll be using only from the tank, it will get empty every day
interesting mix, hearing technician aye. Pretty much every heat pump heating system has a legionella cycle which runs 1x a week to eliminate this problem. Ive been running my heatpump for years at 45c over night.
The usual technique is to program the system to boost the hot water temperature to 65 C once a week. That's offered enough to keep the water bacteria free.
@@martontichi8611 dangerous advice that: now explain why hotels occasionally get their systems infected. Sterilise the system to 65 C once per week. And if you don't then don't expect me to visit....
Yeah, that makes more sense, on multiple levels. No idea why they went upside down. Fortunately it doesn't detract from the important information in the video.
Heat geek seem to really know what they’re doing. However @Ziroth should’ve mention that the only way to improve COP is to decrease the temperature rise. Every aspect of the pyramid is in a sense trying to decrease inflow temperature. Usage control avoids heating demand spikes, which in turn decreases the inflow temperature spikes. Correct pipings means higher flow rate, lowering the energy usage of the pump and the inflow temperature. Weather compensation lowers inflow temperature during spring and autumn. Hot water requires the highest temperatures, so sizing the storage tank is just decreasing the inflow temperature again. Large surfaces can use lower inflow temperatures, so floor heating can use lower inflow temperatures than small radiators. A COP of 8 is impressive, but far from the max. I’ve seen heat pumps using lake water and floor heating, 20C source to 35C end, in September get to COP of 10.
The COP of 8 for September is a bit sad, since it implies that the heat pump did run for heating at high outside temperatures. Which could be avoided, with improved insulation. Higher SCOPs are typically achieved with less insulated homes. I prefer lower SCOP but overall less electricity used for my heat pump.
yepp you are 90% right, tho its not ALL about temperature. There is also the factor as you mentioned as starting cycles, when the compressor starts its not efficient, so you wanna avoind that and also the flow rate is also about having less energy for the waterpump. Tho the lake and groundbased Heatpumps have great COPs, but we are talking about SCOP. In summer my heatpump also has a COP of about 20-25, even better than Lake or groundbased Systems because the air is warmer than the water or ground. But then it comes to winter, and the air is colder. So you cant compare the COP to the SCOP, because the COP is only a snapshot of your whole heating season
@@rogerphelps9939 You've obviously never installed any, temperature glide of performance isnt a constant, and is based on gas type and saturation temperatures. At 5.c COP is no more than 4x, unless CO2 or other NON domestic refrigerants are used
I don't think there is any place in North America where you can find 20C lake water. Just north of where I live, lake water ranges from about 5C to 15C.
I have a hotel in New Zealand. Actually NZ’s highest hotel. When the walk in beer chiller blew up I installed the new compressor INSIDE the basement, instead of blowing the ‘waste’ heat out into space. The amount of heat now blown back into the building was vastly more than I expected! I then installed a hot water heatpump in that basement to scavenge that heat into hot water. I then duct the exhaust onwards into another section of the basement (it’s a BIG basement) The temp drop through the heatpump is huge (the exhaust duct is cold!) That cold exhaust air is also dry, thus the basement condensation problem is vastly improved. Win/win/win! Next I have the restaurant walk in freezer and walk in fridge….im definitely going to do the same. I might just win the COP race, methinks.
Correct me if I’m wrong: the only part in your system that actually moves heat from the outside environment to your inside environment is the heat pump and that part give you a COP of only around three. The rest of the system - the piping optimization, the heat exchanger optimization, all that, is just to minimize the systematic losses. In another word, the heat pump is your engine and the rest optimizations are your drive trains gear boxes all that. Therefore the most you can get is the amount that can be actually produced or in this case moved by your engine (your heat pump) So explain this to me: how can you get a systematic COP that is actually higher than the COP of your heat pump? Did you actually get 8 kWh of usable heat by consuming 1 kWh of electricity? Or did you invent some new fancy ways to define systematic COP?
@@Netherlands031 It's really simple: heat pump COP depends on temperature difference between the two heat exchangers (outside air and warm water in the heating circuit) which is called deltaT. The higher the deltaT, the lower the COP. All the advice he gives boils down to reducing deltaT. Correct choice of radiators and pipes, smart control etc, allow using lower temperature hot water in the circuit. Running the heat pump at lower power for longer is like having larger heat exchangers, again reducing deltaT.
COP is really only the heat pump. To measure the whole system you would need to have sensors inside and outside every external surface, plus some method of monitoring air leakage.
Similarly I was once told by an HVAC guy (about AC) that you want to size your units appropriately so that you are running smaller units near continuously rather than having larger units turning on and off all day..
I would like to know how larger inverter units fare as they can run at a low speed constantly and should in theory be more efficient due to getting more total heat transfer out of their heat exchanges. Or perhaps it's offset by more losses from a larger pump?
The larger units are going to be more efficient running at lower speed compared to the smaller unit running at mid/higher speed especially if they are both lower end units (with lower seer) for example, if the room is called for a 1ton unit, having a 1.25 ton unit is going to be more efficient. but too much oversizing can have some negative impact on comfort.
@@mikaelahyakuya3485 I don’t know there were multiple speeds. Just units sized appropriately for the space running for longer periods vs. larger units turning on and off all day. I understand that turning on and off creates a high energy load and causes more wear.
@@Samqdf The problem with larger units is that they cannot throttle (modulate) low enough, and thus have to turn on/off/on during low demand. Usually they can only go to around 50%.
I have been aware of heat pumps for a long time, but it was Technology Connections video on heat pumps two years ago that made me aware of the latest advancements. I'm really interested in where we are going with this tech.
@@makatron My main takeaways from series was that powder is cheaper and better than pods, the importance of the little compartment for prewash and how little water it uses.
I live in Wisconsin with a 24K BTU Senville heat pump. This heats and cools my 1,500 sq ft old leaky farmhouse in the winter down to -35F (kicked off at -40F for a few hours one night 6 years ago). They advertise that it heats to -22F, but it goes lower than that. The issue is that there is less heat outside below zero to harvest when you need more in the house. So when that happens, I have a small diesel heater from Vevor that puts out 28K BTU (on high) for those super cold days too. The Senville uses about 1.9 kW/hr at .11c/kW, usually about $150/month to heat the house all winter plus a few gallons of diesel. Way cheaper than propane, which would cost me double.
I moved to NE Wisconsin last spring, bought a 1300 sqft house and replaced the propane furnace with a 24k btu Seville and a small 24k btu wood stove for backup. I'm glad I saw your comment. I was concerned that the 24k btu heat pump wouldn't be enough. The propane furnace was 70k btu!
the problem that isn't how heat pumps work, yes they exchange heat on the outside and the closer the delta as in the the temp of the low pressure gas and the outside temperature the less it warms up and the more work the compressor has to do to add heat to that gas when it is compressed to a high pressure liquid. the higher the temp of the returning gas is, the compressor adds a fixed amount of heat to the gas when compressing it, so the hotter the returning gas, the higher the temp of the compressed liquid gas and conversely the lower the temp of the returning gas, the lower the temp of the compressed liquid gas, as it has to heat up that gas from a lower starting point. strangely enough, as long as the temp outside is higher than the starting cold gas is, adding more external heat exchangers / radiators, with the longer dwell time and greater surface area, it will bring the temperature of the gas up more, meaning a higher temperature inside. this works much like adding more surface area on the inside will allow the heated side to add more energy to the inside, raising the temperature faster.
I live in Quebec, installed a 12k BTU tosot. I measured it heats to 20k BTU. 1500W will heat my 1500sqft house. When it's cold like -35C it still heats but more like 10k BTU. Plus it has to defrost every hour, so not as efficient. But it averages over 3 COP.
Try getting a diesel generator and running the heatpump off that, as well as diverting the waste heat from the engine into the heatpump using a duct, you will save even more money.
Adam is great, met him a couple of times, he's very approachable and grounded. The software HG have created is fantastic, love the innovative use of the iPad's LiDAR to perform a heat loss survey, fascinating to watch in action :) It's worth mentioning that CoP is instantaneously and the 8.0 value mentioned is exactly this, and does really reflect the typical efficiency of the system.
Ha! I recently started an experiment with an ancient 500 watt window a/c unit, with all manner of of vent tubing and fans to try and make a heat pump out of it. Like London right now, the humidity outside my house (Portland Oregon USA) is over 80% and at such low winter temperatures the Tc radiator frosts up in just a few minutes and efficiency drops to the point that I have to cycle it 'ON' for two hours and then 'OFF' for 4 hours. Lots of fun collecting data with 4 wifi thermometers. Thanks for the video! It's convinced me that I'm probably going to have to dig a thermal well like they have up in Drake Landing near Calgary Canada. Maybe I'll get 1000% efficiency!
Nuclear Engineer here, a nuclear power plant puts out about 4000 MW of heat for only about 4 MW electricity input into the pumps for a heating COP of 1000. Further gains can be made with the ESBWR, which is about 5000 MWth output, and the only pump electricity is the feed water pumps.
Hi @@Max24871, I am saying a BWR “efficiency” as defined in the video is 100,000% COP, that is 1000 heat unit outputs per unit of electricity input. You are considering the thermal efficiency of the plant, which is the more closely related to the efficiency of the turbine, which is yes, about 1 unit of electricity output per 3 thermal energy inputs. To further expand on the subject, the 2 of 3 units heat that aren’t converted to work are rejected to the atmosphere. If these units were used for district heating, the “efficiency” of this system would be heat output used / pumping energy to distribute the heat, which would depend, but probably again, around 100,000%. It’s just how efficiency is defined. Engineering is fun like that
I'm a professional comfort advisor for an energy based HVAC contractor we do boilers geothermal hydronic heat pump water heaters tankless water heaters and of course we do heat pumps and we're using Daikin heat pumps I'll tell you what 800% cop is probably doable on some installations but the cost to performance are cost to value ratio is thousands of percent more than a standard heat pump installation which will get you between 300 and 400%. I can heat and cool home for between 12:00 and $30,000 but if I double the COP it's going to go from $40,000 to $250,000 depending on the installation. That's just residential prices We also do commercial and multifamily so well this is very interesting and I'm glad Adam has a lot of time to geek out on stuff because guys like him do help the industry I don't think I could make a living even though I'm in one of the highest income areas in America I'm in Seattle and we are pushing conversions to heat pumps like crazy here. The problem with converting from gas to heat pumps in this area is the vast majority of the homes don't have the electrical service they need to upgrade to heat pumps so that adds another 50 to 100% to the cost of installing the heat pump
What level of electrical service do you need? Is the "vast majority of the homes don't have the electrical service they need to upgrade to heat pumps" older construction (ie 1940's/1950's) with 100 to 125amp service? Interested in your perspective as a Kenmore WA resident.
@@toddwright662 in that area, AC is not common, so 100A service would have been overkill until recently. Even in areas to the east where AC is common, they still can't support electric backup heat. I always recommend gas backup here. Since no manufacturer makes a gas backup HP package unit, that makes it dead on arrival for 99% of my customers.
@@toddwright662 If you can run central air, you can run a heat pump, but not the backup heat. Even in, e.g., Wisconsin, backup heat is only needed a few days a year, but it's still needed.
Two years ago I experimentally added two 7kW air conditioning units to my 2,000 liter buffer tank. I made my own coaxial heat exchangers which work quite well for the first try. Once every day the heat pumps are automatically started and fill the buffer tank up to 57°C and this water is then used in a normal central heating system with radiators. Problems begin when the temperature is below 5°C as the units start to freeze. Defrosting is a big waste of energy and time and sometimes it has a problem to catch up. I will try to run the heat pumps at a lower power for a longer time and will see how it will go. I have a fireplace with a heat exchanger also connected to the buffer tank and when it's really cold I rather fire this up. I grew up by the fireplace and the warmth it produces is still somehow different and cosier then that from the heat pump. Thanks for the great video.
Yes a fire is completely different - best is heating + a fire... :) Do you have time of day max demands, if so you could time the HP to preheat prior to that time. Also the larger the heat exchangers the better, the best being when the temp of refrigerant and water is the same. As noted in the video they "oversized" the coil in the HW tank for this reason.
That's why heat pumps reverse flow to defrost, so it keeps a high efficiency instead of using a less efficient source of heat. My heat pump defrost every hour when it's -30C outside.
@@ianloy1854 At this time of year we have around 0 or slightly positive temperatures in Celsius thru the day but at night it falls to -5 to -10°C so I run the heat pump thru the day. If I heat the 2000 liter buffer tank to 57°C it lasts a full day. I heat my house with it and a part of my workshop, together some 170 m2. Wood helps a lot in very cold winters. I will try to run the HP on lower power for longer time but I use mostly radiators for heating and I need some 50°C to be effective. I must do some more tests to see what will work the best.
@@purpleblueunicorn Wow, it must be a really good HP and well insulated house for this to work at -30C. We don't get so low, -20 max for a week or so but not every winter.
@@slavric it's a 2000$ 12k btu tosot hyper heat mini split that do 20k BTU when it's over 10C. At -30C it outputs 10k BTU. Uses 1500-2000W at max power. Only downside is heat distributions throughout the house, not it's good enough and efficient!
I have Vailliant arotherm heatpump. 800% is wishfull thinking in real-life scenarios with dhw. I currently have a scop of 6,6 (with dhw). Which i think is absoluty amazing. Did the install myself, watched almost every heat geak and urban plumber video there is. Complete open system with 2x underfloor heating manifolds. Flow is king, know your heat loss and size the system accordingly. Keep the system as simple as possible!
@@thetroopersk Fully opened system with underfloor heating (16mm, 10cm apart) and large bore supply/return pipes all weather controlled. Did not use the resistive heating thing vailliant specifies. Made sure i have plenty system volume for defrosts. Theres plenty other ppl getting these scops on heatpumpmonitor.
A better system would be an insulated underground water tank about one or two cubic meters in volume that stores the grey water from showers, clothes washing and dishwashing. The heated grey water would be temporarily stored in this tank and a heat pump would remove the heat from that stored water with switching to the outside air as needed similar to the heating and cooling modes of a heat pump. A water pump would also enable the grey water to be recirculated back into the toilets for flushing thus reducing overall water intake from a well or municipal source by as much as 30%. The sewage outflow to the municipal or septic tank would also be reduced with extra water available for lawn watering etc. A system for retrieving waste heat from solar panels could also be added to this system. This sort of hybrid system would offer an even better alternative to existing air to air heat pumps since it reduces the household incoming water usage and the outflow to the sewage system and thus the overall energy usage in water and sewage treatment systems.
@@andan2293Broadly the same as pure water, though I'd need convincing variables from contaminants such as salinity or pH weren't too detrimental to the installation to make such systems economic.
Something similar is done on a community level in Germany (afaik there are two projects that did this). Obviously it's with sewage and not grey water since those are not separated on this level, but they use water-water heat pumps to extract heat from the sewers for a local heating network.
As a refrigeration technician I can't see a COP of 5.5 in the systems shown in this video (air to water) more likely 3.5 maybe 4... the most efficient syatems are water to water inverter systems as water is denser than air with more concentrated heat energy and they would be around COP 5, newer Co2 systems which work under immense pressure get close to 6 (air to air systems). Finally the thumbnail mentions 800% yeah, pull my other leg!😂
Defo some heat geek snake oil about. High COP does not always translate as a warm house or lowest possible running costs. I have managed to reduce my bills at the expense of a top trump cop. The cheapest heat pump to run is one that isn't on.
Built a new house in 2020 with a heat pump, underfloor heating, and 2000 litre hot water tank. The system is controlled by a computer which measures outside and inside temperature, in/out water temperature, plus a lot more. It uses heating cuvers to adjusted the house charateristics to control heating requirments. One item he did not mention with the hot water it needs to be raised to over 60c for (i can't remember if it was 12 or 24 hours once a month) . This is important to kill any bacteria in the system, such as legionnaires. In our system this is done by the controller via an emersion heater in the tank which raises the temp from 40 to 60c. Reaction time of the underfloor heating is something like half a day, but the conttoller anticipates heating requirement. As the house stays within 1c of set temperature it's never been an issue. A problem is heatpumps do not work well in badly insulated and/or drafty houses. Which becomes a issue when fitting them in older housing stock. Without first undertaking a lot of additional insulation work. The lower water temperature means the heat leaks away as it tries to heat the house. Solutions are to create a bigger radiator area (in my house the entire floor) or use hotter water (gas boiler solution). In a leaky house, a bigger radiator area would require a bigger heat pump to supply enough warm water to heat the house. My system is connected to 220v 16amp, 3.5wk supply, and delivers on aversge 12kw of heating energy. The house is 900m³ (22 x 10m), fully insulated (200mm plus). 12kw is the same size as the gas bo 0:01 iler l used to heat a semi-detached house with half the volume 10 years ago.
We have an old heat pump system, which isn't so efficient, and when it gets down to around -4 C to -5 C or so and colder, it doesn't work so well. Thankfully our climate is fairly moderate most of the time, and it is somewhat rare for it to get well below the above, though it does occasionally get to and near it. We have a lot of trees on our property, hence there is a lot of free fuel lying around which is too small, sometimes too wet, or the like for the woodstove (which we don't use much, since we would have to purchase wood most of the time). So I bought a relatively inexpensive outdoor smokeless camp fire pit. Large enough that it will run for a few hours or so. On those semi rare, particularly chilly nights (-4 C and colder), I put the smokeless camp fire pit/stove near the outdoor condenser unit (a few feet away * ). I then take a foam with an IR reflector on it, and wrap it around the fire pit/stove and the condenser unit so that the heat from the stove will be better directed towards it, but with plenty of space on all sides so that the fan/suction is not interfered with and so the foam doesn't over heat. Creates a sort of semi insulated box, which warms up much of the condenser unit (but since the fan is running almost constantly during these times, it never gets hot). I put a very large pot of water with a cover/lid on top of the smokeless stove. Right before I go to bed (I'll usually stay up later than usual these nights), I light it up. Occasionally the wood is too wet, so I will buy some cheap pellets (like pine pellets sold for horse bedding) and/or put a little charcoal on top to help dry out the wood. (These systems burn top down generally). * Note, I put a stainless steel, fairly fine _mesh screen over the top_ (it rests on a grille, and the pot of water rests on the screen which rests on the grille which rests on the stove, so no chance of the screen going anywhere, even with very strong wind). It acts like a spark arrestor screen. There is very little chance of this system causing a house or yard fire with this set up, though technically it may not be the most legal set up. A regular inside wood stove is far more dangerous with things like creosote build up/potential chimney fires imo. The stove is only "relatively near" metal. I clear the ground of leaves and debris near the stove. I've watched it burn for hours (I also take it camping) and haven't once seen a spark fly out of it with the screen on top (nor does anything come out from below). One of these days, I'll probably bury some large copper pipes in the ground down around 10 feet, filled up with highly thermally conductive material most of the way (3 different sized silicon carbide powders/granules), and then wrap the lower part of these pipes with "heat pipe" type copper tubing (copper tubing with some water and wicking material sealed up inside and all under a vacuum). Both the large copper pipes and copper heat pipe tubing will be well insulated in key areas (as it nears the surface and until it contacts the condenser unit). The heat pipe copper tubing will wrap around certain parts of the outdoor condenser unit, so that it will be constantly exchanging energy with the deeper ground. This should take off some of the strain in the peak of summer and winter. I don't have the money or land to set up a conventional ground thermal exchange system, with an underground water tank, long piping underground, or the like. When you don't have a lot of money and resources, you have to think outside of the box and come up with alternative solutions. Methinks mai Highland Scottish ancestors would be proud. If I actually had sunlight on my property, I would be using Solar heating and heat pump boosting instead. But just not enough consistent sun around.
In the summer, when it gets very hot, I just hose down the condenser unit with our well water as well as spray the roof when I can. Humidity is often more of a factor than pure heat, so at night (when it is most humid, least hot, and electricity is a bit cheaper) I'll turn up the temp on the central a bit, and run a dehumidifier. The dehumidifier is more efficient than the the central AC at removing moisture (and is energy star rated), and running it at night only helps to not overwhelm the AC during the day when it can already struggle. I figure every little bit helps. When my system does finally go, we'll probably invest in a much more efficient heat pump system than we have.
There is an excellent paper on solar hot water systems carried out in Poland: Energy efficiency of a solar domestic hot water system, Miroslaw Zukowski In Darwin (in the tropics) solar hot water systems were fitted to almost all houses since the 1960's as gas wasn't available and local electricity was very expensive (initially oil fired power station).
My first company, 1988, had all of these principles, a simple product & we had all this knowledge (+more tbh).Nobody cared. Amazing to see folks that probably weren’t even born then be so enthusiastic, & good luck to them! Happy to talk to anyone
Love the way they explain how things impact efficiency. They don’t focus on modifying inside the machines but instead they give an “outline” for new in the field (me)
Its an ironic situation, that forty years ago, I designed a fully integrated house, which included a comprehensive heating, ventilation, and insulation system to reduce heating costs. The house was to be factory built and standardised designs to reduce costs, including pre installed electrical, water and heating installations. Government Building Regulations would not, then, allow the design on their current building construction ideas. I hoped to find a new market to keep a failing company alive, to no avail.
Replacing the expansion valve with a piston expander would increase COP +1. Manufacturers don't do it because it would increase cost of a given heat-pump. I don't think even the better systems do it.
very advanced comment! not many people will even understand this unless they are a HVAC engineer, i considered adding a scroll to expand the gas in my homebrew design.
Large CO2 pumps use expansion turbines coupled to the compressor shaft as I understand it - same principle as a gas turbine. Recovering energy during decompression is always a good thing in theory, but not always the easiest thing to implement.
@@ChrisDay-sx4lv , thanks! It depends on many factors, and an assumption about how efficient the expander is. For a piston expander then it needs to have complex valve gear, effectively a pneumatic engine, whereas the compressor can work with one way valves. But I definitely like your idea of using a scroll expander - would work well on same shaft as scroll compressor. But a small turbo expander with recovery generator would be easy to retrofit to existing designs. Maybe putting a "Turbo" badge on a heat pump would be worth something to the market?
@@bringiton8989 , agreed. That's why heat pump development engineers are told not to do it. But, it should be a consideration - the problem is how to make the market aware of the benefit in selecting a more expensive heat pump for higher COP. Then the engineer's job is how to keep the cost down with volume, and the reliability up with testing.
My 10 year old Daikin Altherma does all the things that you've mentioned. It adjusts all the time via the inverter the 2 compressors and the inner circuit temperature alongside with 10+ sensors. Heat pumps are the future and the cheapest heating method.
So I had a $9000 heat pump system installed by a professional company. I ran it for two years now and from the figures I see it will take over 20 years to pay for itself. Heat pumps seem to be cost effective only in areas with high electricity costs.
Fuck the environment. We get substituted cheap electricity so let's burn that coal directly right? Also must "professional" companies have little to no idea of how to install heat pumps so they run efficient. Mostly using big tanks and mixing warm water with the water for the radiators.
I had to replace my HVAC system a couple of years ago (I have a friend in the business). In inquired about heat pump setups and even tankless hot water heaters (when I had to replace that unit the previous year) and he wasn't overly convinced of them, at least yet. We get hot summers and cold winters here so the places selling heat pump systems still require you to use a gas furnace in the winter, so you're likely only using the heat pump for 3 seasons. The significant cost rarely makes financial sense, at least yet. I spent about the same as you (I think it was $9200) for higher end (higher efficiency) gas furnace and AC units from Carrier and added a HEPA filter system to help keep the air clean.
Depends, higher electricity costs do play a big role. It also depends on climate. I replaced an old 10 seer unit at my house myself for about $4000 to a 20 seer unit. But even that is somewhat misleading. Because this new unit actually performs well at lower temps. The old unit NEEDED backup heat strips to function under 35F or so. The new unit doesn't even have heat strips installed. it's been run as low as 8F or -13C and works great.
@@jeffer1101 Depends on what your electric rate is. Where I live electricity is 9 cents a KWH with final actual bill cost (they get you on the additional shit) is 15 cants. Summers are sweltering, winters mild. Even with those (supposedly) ideal heat pump conditions my electric bill changed maybe $3-4 a month lower after I put in the new system.
@@glasslinger Where I live, we can't use a heat pump on its own, you must use an additional (traditional) heat source for the winter. Maybe some day, the heat pumps will improve for the really cold temps in winter, but it doesn't appear we are there yet. My friend said heat pumps (here) aren't worth it. You'll never recoup your costs on them.
I constantly get laughed out of the kitchen when I boil water for peas/carrots and then pour the used hot water into the dishes to warm them up before throwing it away.
Weather compensation, modulating controls, and over sizing of radiators (and hot water cylinder) also make condensing gas boilers more efficient. Lower flow temperatures from a gas condensing boiler make it work more efficiently, and extract energy from the process of condensation, itself.
COP 8 is great achievement in technical perspective, but what about "financial efficiency" ?... Is it worth to invest in a highly efficient heat pump system instead of better insulation?
Depending on the materials your house is built of and the location insulation in one form or another should be the place to start when you want to save money on heating.
Over 20 years? Hell yea, over 10 years, depends, over 5 years is very hard. Anyhow it will influcence the property price greatly, it is an IT factor that can make a property jump from old and neglected to the renovated and in demand category.
It's not either/or - more insulation = lower heat loss = lower required flow temperature = more efficiency. It's a virtuous cycle and you have to consider it as an integrated system. As for payback, it's situation specific - complicate the question further with solar panels, batteries and time of use tariffs if you really want to leave yourself confused.
@@TheEsseboy Yes IT is fancy and fashonable, but I think, IT is the most quickly amortizing component, so it is better to add value by foundamental investments, improvemnts in your property.
My fairly new panasonic heatpump is rated at 5.7 SCOP. I don't know how you can say that "a decent heatpump from a leading brand" gives you only 2.5 SCOP, that seems very low these days. Anyways, efficiency purely in energy terms is one thing, and you explain it well. But count in fluctuating electricity prices during the day, and some degree of start-stop heating makes sense. Boost the temp a bit before the price goes up in the morning, then coast past the high cost hours at a lower power level, using the the thermal mass of the house. Then boost the heat again around lunchtime, and repeat the cycle at dinner time. It can be done so gently that it isn't really noticeable, but it still saves energy cost, and it helps the entire energy grid be more efficient. I do this both for house heating and water heating, thanks to an off the shelf smart home computer and a power supplying company that provides good software solutions for it. It helps their company as well. When their customers optimise for cost efficiency like this, it enables them to buy cheaper power in the marketplace. Further more, it reduces/delays the need to build beefier power lines, saving cost there too.
A lot of very good points and interesting information. However, please do not refer to COP as efficiency; in an engineering context, both are very specific terms that are related but not interchangeable and not treating them as such has lead to bad faith arguments to try and discredit critics of 'over unity' claims.
@fetB he is a nerd. I am a nerd. We really only speak nerd and as I suspect you don't speak our language it becomes rather difficult to explain something to you. Why not go away and learn nerd, it's the world's most powerful language. Where are you? I'm in Gloucestershire and would be delighted to teach you the basics.
@@fetB efficiency is usable work output over total energy input and that includes free thermal energy from the outside and fans moving heat source medium. Coefficient of performance is usable work over paid energy (electricity to run the compressor and fans). The only way to get efficiency over 100% is to have an error in math or assumptions. IIRC in Germany condensing boilers had "efficiency" over 100% because their theoretical ideal boiler didn't condense steam in the exhaust gas which condensing boilers do as the name implies.
@@fetB I considered explaining it but wasn't sure if it would just be adding dead weight to my comment or not, and decided it would be safer if it was needed and someone could ask rather than it not being needed and my comment becoming a wall of text. Shortest way I can describe it is that efficiency refers to the amount of energy extracted from a single source (heat engine) while COP refers to the amount of energy moved to a single output from multiple sources (heat pump) In particular, the COP of a heat pump is the inverse of it's efficiency if it were to be ran as a heat engine. As a consequence, because efficiency is always less than one, the COP of a device will always be greater than one. Think of it like this, when we talk about COP, it's as if we are putting a boat into a stream and propelling it, and instead of measuring the resulting boost, we are measuring the boost PLUS the motion from the water.
Weather compensation is sometimes call "outdoor reset" It raises water temp to compensate for cold weather. Ideally there would be 4 outdoor sensors cause each side of the house will have different demand. There is an optimum point balance between the cost of circulation pump power and cost of heat pump power. The warm water should hit perimeter circulation circuits first cause exterior walls is where the higher demand will be -- similar to how in a forced air system registers are placed below windows.
A factor of 8 (or 800%) is completely unrealistic in almost every real world scenarios. Most modern heat pump reach a factor of 3-5 depending on environmental factors (out of the box). Any further "considerations" are likely very cost intensive and destroy any ROI considerations (in terms of electricity savings).
Yeah, I don't get it. I barely ran my heat pump in September and I live in Quebec. I used 85kwh for the whole of September, that's 5$ of electricity. My cop was probably high and the heat pump wasted some energy cycling, but who cares. With his system it would have run the whole time instead of cycling and saved 0.2$?
Very suspect article. If the heat pump has a COP of 3, I don't see how using larger pipes etc. is going to add the additional 5kW of heat to give you a COP of 8.
One more thing that could be done: The efficiency of heat pumps is higher when the temperature difference is smaller. If you use an air heat exchanger (not an underground heat exchanger), you get way better efficiency during the day when it is 5-10° warmer than at night. If your house is well insulated and has lots of thermal mass inside, you could get away with not heating at all in cold nights, thereby avoid running at the most inefficient time.
You are thinking in the right direction, but in practice it is not worth it. You indeed do get higher COP during the day. The problem is if you only produce heat half of the time (or less), you have to transfer it to the house twice as fast (or more) and that means you need system temperatures twice (or more) higher, relative to desired room temperature. E.g. for 21°C and floor heating typically the system temperature will not go over 35°C (14°C delta). To get the same amount of heat in half the time you would need 28°C delta, or 49°C system temp, which is almost guaranteed to negate any daytime temperature gains.
No need to keep the water hot enough to kill the legionella, the right intervall is key to safety and energy efficiency. Configure the system to heat up once a week ov 60° Celsius, 70° if you are paranoid. The other 6 1/2 days can be below without any risk.
Just programme in a legionnaire cycle that adjusts to usage. If the hot water is used often there is often no need for one. It won't take much in the way of a flow sensor and a small programme to work out if the water has been standing too long and bring it up to a high temperature to kill pathogens on those occasions.
The new studies of SIA for norm 385 show that most of the legionella don’t occur in the hot water tank, but the pipes. According to the norm, you have to heat up the whole hot water system to above 60 degrees at least once a week, not just the storage tank
The REAL genius of the minisplit design is that all of the parts are proprietary. There are no generic parts for these units, so they can charge whatever they like for the parts, and they are the only game in town. Brilliant.
@@SuperS05 sounds like someone makes money repairing old systems.....and a 24000btu 21 seer minisplit is 1200$....and will save its value in energy let alone equipment cost far far sooner than its service life....dang. mfw some moron reccomends i blow 20k+ on some dorky 4ton lennox 20 seer central air unit or something. think about the math 4 tons 2400$. install. 4 hours maybe, super simple. throw a little gasket on, torque to spec, vacuum, release. hur dur. money doubles every 8 years in market installed cost is 1/4? service life idk 15 years, grossly outdated by then anyway and losing money in efficiency so if it lasts even idk 5 years its paid for itself lol. minisplits - where they work admittely which is alot of places. makes you realize what a joke your average hvac installer is. commercial is a different beast, more complicated systems and humidity are a thing yes i know. but if you just want to cool a room or slap a bandaid on an ole weird house holy hell they cant be beat. thus their popularity overseas motel casettes - classy version of a window unit are also nice. no hvac needed to install that just plug er in.
Heat pumps are efficient and also i colder climates, and their efficiency has improved over the years. We replaced our 12 year old extraction air heatpump to a air to water heat pump in Jan-23. It is a Mitsubichi designed to still have positive COP at least down to -15 to -20. I live in Sweden where the average temperature over the years is at around +8C. We heat 170m2 and usually never go below 21,5C indoors. On top we heat a garage 35m2 +35m2 atic to 10-15C +all hot water for the household. Our consumption including cooking, lights etc in 2024 was 15800 kWh, and such a low consumption despite elecric floor heating in two bathrooms. The house has water borne floor heating with clever individually controlled temp in each room from a company named Uponor. So for all still sceptic about heat pump. Buy an extra blanket, or a heat pump😊
So, how well does SCOP deal with the reality that a lot of people only turn their heating on between some time in Oct and an equivalent date in early Spring ? I have always seen an averaged COP as irrelevant to my needs, I want to know what COP will be achieved when the outside temp falls below - say - 12 deg C with a particular focus on the result below 5 C.
That's exactly what SCOP covers - average efficiency over the heating season. Total energy out/ total energy in. Manufacturers publish all the steady state efficiencies in their data books if you want to know what it does at - 2, +5 etc
Good mention of there being latent heat down to 0 degrees Kelvin, think it's good to add some further context that 0K is -273C/-460F to give an indication of how much heat there still is in the air even when outside temperatures are below 0C/32F.
*ENGINEER HERE* *You and the rest of the Heat pump brigade NEED to STOP saying things like 300% EFFICIENCY.* Every engineer learns that you cannot get above 100% efficiency for any thermodynamic process and it's called the *Laws of Thermodynamics.* This is why Heat Pumps use *COEFFICIANT of PERFORMANCE (CoP)* which is *NOT* the same thing as efficiency its a measure of performance. *AND THERE IS A VERY SERIOUS ISSUE HERE with people misusing the word efficiency and confusing the general public.* Right now there are all sorts of claims being made by various people over the efficiency of various power generation systems and how we use electricity. How do you think we can explain to the general public the efficiency of a nuclear power station is 36% and that's good or that gas turbines are about 46% and that's good or that combined cycle gas turbines are around 64% and that's good when you are claiming heat pumps are 300% *WHICH IS ADVERTISING JARGON?*. As an engineer I recently WASTED several days recently explaining to a client that ChatGPT was WRONG about an energy issue because ChatGPT can't tell the difference between FACTS and ADVERTISING JARGON. FYI - the issue was over grid stability and that certain dc-ac inverters are labelled as "pure sine wave inverters" and the fact is that NO inverter produces a technically pure clean sine wave output. (Go look at the Wikipedia page for power inverters). Its just *ADVERISING JARGON.* This particular piece of advertising jargon is about to come slamming into every society that has substantial amounts of renewables feeding into their grids via dc-ac inverters. Its a major issue in Ireland which now has a lot of wind power. The channel Real Engineering did a fantastic video on the subject. I doubt the flywheel solution will work because that fly wheel will still need a power input that wasn't explained. What the Real Engineering video highlights is the substantial difference between energy sources and how they pump energy into the grid. All through the fossil fuel era this was never a problem because all those massive steam turbines with their inertia did the job. Its actually the one thing projects like Hinkley Point C have going for it, but the pro-nuclear lobby are so stupid they don't understand or realise this.
CoP is used in thermodynamics to distinguish "moving heat" from "creating heat". Theoretically 1 (100% efficiency) is the highest CoP you can have for creating heat, but when moving it, energy efficiency can be higher than 100% which is why they use CoP ratio rather than efficiency percentage. In layman's use, they are essentially interchangeable, even if that is incorrect. Even MIT uses the term 300% to describe CoP3 so no use raging about it because nobody really cares about the difference.
@@TheGalifrey *BULLSHlT* Sorry but its a violation of the second law of thermodynamics which basically is _"Entropy always increases and therefore 100% thermal efficiency is IMPOSSIBLE in any process."_ And as for MIT they aren't perfect and can be just as wrong as anyone else. Its advertising jargon NOTHING MORE.
@@tonywilson4713 Wow, testy Tony is not wrong! Probably young has not spent 66years coming to grips with the fact the world is awash with bullshit. It is indeed frustrating.
Well said and very valid on the use of wording.. I too am an engineer, live in a 130 yr old house with solid walls. I run gas for heating and hot water. which has worked very well for over 45 years. Yes it's inefficient but an ASHP would never achieve the 300% efficiency without investing £20-30K in an entire new system with massive disruption to the entire structure. Payback time would be off the scale. Keep banging the drum about the misuse of the word efficiency when discussing ASHP.
Very little talk about temperature uplift. We have air sources with COPs up to 16, but thats because it’s lifting water from 30 degrees up to 35 degrees. Trying to produce heat pump heat at 90C is a very different thing to producing heat at 30-40C.
Search Electrostatic cooling. Same process applies to heating when reversed. It's been use in military industrial complex for quickly removing heat in thickness from parts.
I installed an 80 gallon hybrid water heater instead of a 50 gallon unit for the same reasons. It's easier to keep 30 more gallons hot than otherwise. Short usage burst don't put as much stress on the heat pump due to water volume.
either they needed 50 or 80. they have normal elements inside unless you buy the dorky gas replacement ones >> no idea why you wouldnt just rewire the 15A/120V to 15A/240V as its supposed to be a dedicated outlet, and has to be anyway for the heatpump anyway. the 240V replacement ones have 7kw of elements and the same 2000watt heat pump or whatever.
Exactly it's just click bait, 400-500% scop is about as good as it gets give or take, you may see the occasional cop8 in warm weather but this is drastically offset in winter
@@stevencalvert9454This is why I use my heat pump tumble dryer all year round. I used to dry my clothes outside in the summer But then I was like "Wth am I doing? This is a few pennies at best. Why waste time" So you probably wouldn't need say your heat pump in terms of an ASHP in the summer but such a COP is useful for tumble dryers and tbh electric vehicles too
theyre already cheaper.... the issue the boomers are saying is the lows dont work and were down to -10F now. power is like 55-70% efficient to your house commercial power is .02$/kwh or so, youre paying for dist, the only reason nat gas might win is the dist costs are being subsidized for consumers vs the electrical wiring. and cop 2.5-3 acs are 300% efficient so youre getting more energy out by far than burning the gas in your house. the only artificialities are gas prices or distribution pricing. commercial companies .02$/kwh and pay for wiring. how gas works for them idk consumers free wire .15$/kwh where i am gas, no idea i dont have it but guessing same setup, 0$ upfront and pay per btu etc. california is tired of paying for their useless gas system so getting rid of it slowly needs to happen in the south more, its done. coldest were every going to see is high 20s for a few hours a year >>
I find the most efficient heat pump is not buying one, but instead wearing an Australian or NZ merino wool jumper whilst their exchange rate is so low. This is effectively retaining heat better in your body, not heating the space around you, which is relatively inefficient. I don't know why the wool industry isn't making the argument.
Cold hands, runny nose, dry eyes, condensation on the walls, do I need to say more? Dropping the temperature inside is not good, anything below 19-20 C other than for bedtime is bad for you, especially elderly, children and sick people.
@@benholroyd5221 Well, in my country, there's no snow, but we still have heat pumps. Subsidised by govt no less, when they were overpriced. After the Chinese entered the market, the price collapsed. Before that, there was a bit of a racket to keep prices high.
One more thing - our little factory has a couple of heat exchangers that heat water with the waste heat from the cool and freezer rooms. And a second thing - as compressed (hot) gas is decompressed for the cold side, a big ~~10-25% of energy is literally LOST. Large commercial systems have little impeller turbo-like decompression generators that recover much of this energy. I worked on commissioning LNG plants, which are partially giant heat pumps - we had decompression generators up to (if I remember correctly) about 32 MW. That's a 110,000V generator 4 stories high. All from decompressing gas.
I like the technology but I got one installed by one of these grant firms. They had no clue. All rushed. Still costing me a tonne and struggling to heat the house. I have to light the open fire some days.
Unfortunately, any unregulated "gold rush" attracts it's share of cowboys who'll go bust before remedying the mess they've made. If it's any consolation, Local Authorities (forced by statute to go for lowest bidders, if lacking the specific expertise to justify decisions to HMG) are in the same boat. If you've acquired anything which you could have done with *ahead* of your awful experience, what would be your 'top tips'?
@TheHoveHeretic Honestly it would be dont use a grant firm and don't be bullied into being rushed to meet grant deadlines. I tried to get details before instalation day but there was zero communication, then they came in, put radiators anywhere, tank is in the wrong place then went bust before doing the insulation. I think just self fund as although it will cost more you will have control and time to do things properly.
@@UnwittingSweaterIF this story is genuine, why have you just left it like that instead of trying to get it resolved? That makes no sense when it's costing you money. You can contact a Heat Geek accredited engineer to come and have a look at it. The Urban Plumber channel has loads of videos where he fixes other installs. So it can be done.
@mikeypc3592 There are many reasons why I haven't got it fixed but the main one is I'm selling up. Up to the next person to decide if they want to keep and fix or remove.
I love what Heat Geeks and you are doing around efficiency .. but many installers, at least in my region, a critical piece is often missing IMO .. and that is the economics of how these installs are designed. I recently did some trouble shooting on a system in my area and aside from the usual mistakes (oversized heat pump, too many zones, buffer tank used, etc.), the designer and installer also did not account for how the utility company billed the client. The utility in question billed separately for energy (kWh) and power (kW). This heat pump had 9 kW of resistance elements to boost output under certain conditions .. even though the site had a gas boiler as a backup. In this case the resistance elements needed to be turned off completely so that cheaper gas (in this case) could be used as the "peaker". I saved the client about $5,000/yr by a simple adjustment to his settings. If Heat Geeks here are listening .. please include some videos and information to help installers install not the most efficient system .. but the most economical options. Not everyone wants to pay for the best efficiency .. the perfect is the enemy of the good.
The average heat pump in heat mode, commercially available for less than a kings ransom, will get 300% efficiency on a good day, and it goes down from there as outside temperature drops until if it is cold and humid enough the coil ices and then it defaults to resistance heating at 100% efficiency. My gas furnace runs at about 95% efficiency in all weather conditions. However here in Missouri the cost of natural gas, converting BTU to KWH is about 1/6 the cost of electricity. So to get equal cost for a unit of heat into my house, a heat pump would have to average about 600% efficiency. Net, I pay noticeably less than half to heat with gas. These videos always talk about efficiency, not $ per unit of heat delivered to the house and ignore capital cost. Good luck trying to sell me a heat pump.
Obviously there’s the issue of carbon emissions that you don’t mention in this. Either way it’s not all individual change but macro change. If they had a 50% efficient Nat gas plant and you had a 2.5x heat pump we’d all be saving fuel and energy cost, but it takes time to adopt new infra
I live in Missouri as well and the gas cost is not that cheap. I pay Spire ~$1.25-1.30/CCF + fees. That's about 4.2 cents/kwh. If your furnace is 95% efficient thats about 4.4cents per kwh of heat in your home. Ameren winter electric rate is 6.27 cents/kwh after 750kwh, which you will always blow past with a heat pump on top of your usual electric needs. To break even with the 4.4 cents of natural gas you would only need a COP of 1.43. That's achievable even on the coldest days with modern heat pumps. There's alot of cold specific heat pump models out now that get ~1.9 COP at -5F, which is about as cold as it ever gets in winter. For most of the winter, late fall, and early spring, you'll be heating your home when its 25F+ outside where the heat pump is able to run at a COP close to 3.0 or more. That's twice the break-even cost efficiency of the gas furnace for the majority of the heating season, and break even at worst for 1-2 days per year. I can look at my HVAC usage on my phone with the Ecobee app. Its been in the 50s and 40s, and cloudy all this week over christmas and my furnace is running only 2-3hr PER DAY. Its cycling on for 15min and then off for over an hour, and then on for 15min, and then off.
First of all, 300% efficiency is about the lower end of what you can expect, not the higher end. My system runs at 400% SCOP. You are completely neglecting the emissions from your gas based heating system, which hurt both the air quality and our climate. Heating with gas should be much more expensive, and heating with electricity should be much cheaper. Unfortunately in most countries the tax laws are completely backwards and gas is actually taxed less than electricity, which is bonkers if you ask me
Videos often don't talk about cost per unit of delivered heat because it depends on utility rates which are different everywhere. I also live in an area where heat pump heating costs more than gas heat but plenty of people have cheaper electricity, more expensive gas, or no gas. I'm also going to point out that common units seem to consistently get a COP of 3 or better whenever it is above freezing outside. Personally I'd most likely go for a "dual fuel" heat pump + gas heat if specifying a new system. On warmer days when the heat pump works better use that, on colder days when heat pump is noticeably more expensive switch to gas. Or if one malfunctions use the other one instead of being left with no heat.
There are many ways to heat a home, and insulate it. Seeing someone try new things is always exciting. This system has too many flaws still unfortunately to be something that people will "flock" to, with refrigerant as a major concern. The idea of getting heat and sending cooler air to the warming earth is certainly intriguing. I still think that going toward a more natural way of keeping a home temperature under control should be first utilized. We can build more efficient homes that what is traditionally built, especially in America. Why not take advantage of the earth's ability to keep us both warm and cool? And still keep the land our home is on is a really good idea with the population rising and housing shortage. Your roof is essentially the earth, so you got your grass patio right there...or grow a garden or whatever you want. Hope to see more innovations soon. I like where this is going.
13:30 - So, the record performance was achieved in the mildest possible heating month? I'm shocked. Well not that shocked. The problem with this sector is that no one cares about the tech. People want heat for cheap. And talking about financial supports at the end is another clue that this stuff still doesn't makes financial sense in the current market on it's own. 5-8x and it still needs subsidies? wow... Advanced LIDAR analysis just sounds like another expense. If you can't already tell I'm very jaded by all this stuff. 😅 Low and slow sure does rhyme nicely but if people walk into a cold house they want it warm now, not in a few hours. The experience is often undervalued there.
The thing with low and slow and weather compensation, is you aim to do as little change to the house temperature as possible, as it's a lot more efficient (and slightly more efficient with a gas boiler) to trickle the heat into the house before it gets cold and maintain the temperature. I'm staying at my dads at the moment in the UK on a thermostat controlled gas boiler, and there are definitely times where the house doesn't feel as warm as the thermostat says. When we travelled here, his heating had been at 16C away temperature, and even after an hour it still wasn't warm, so it's not like gas boilers give the instant heat to the home that people think it does. After my dad has visited my home multiple times in winter that I heat low and slow with heat pumps (using air 2 air, so isn't completely on weather compensation), he agrees that it's far more comfortable.
Mine 1st rule as a HVAC-R tehnician : Never use same machine to heat domestic hot water and to cool/heat your home. Combine for example monobloc unit for floor heating/ceiling cooling and for domestic water you can use combi boiler with r134 or r290 and if you can, put few solar panels in extra spiral of boiler and that's it. And program well your hot water recirculation pump, those are energy eaters
My project team recently rejected a heat pump option fora major project because for our application, experience showed heat pumps to be very unreliable. You have to look at the whole picture to assess costs, not just system efficiency. EVs are another good example of this.
I've seen somewhere on a construction side a really really huge digging machine and then i asked what's the purpouse for this machine and the operator told me that this machine, 18m tall, dig a deep hole around 150m and 50cm wide ( some customers demands way over that number ) and at the bottom is actually 25-30c. They dug 8 of them and installed only 25kW heat pump for a rather big, really big structure. 4 floors, each floor has 470m2. I don't know much about how efficient it was but this operator told me that heating with gas will cost 13x more than heating with this system and electricity. Throughout the year, the earth 200m deep will remains at nearly constant temperature above 20c so they " pre-heating " the " wasted heat " so the refrigerant stays above ambient temperature thus, gaining more efficiency. It is also more expensive and that particullar thing cost between 400-750k depends on the soil underneath and how many holes you want but they always come with some aknownledged person who tell you exactly how many holes your appliance need. So for the regullar house, they dig only 1 hole also 200m deep and it's enough to boost the efficiency of the heat pump even higher.
okay now run the numbers vs air sourced against the cost of those holes >>. then again cant do that anyplace below -10F currently either 200m is 600ft here and thats like a freaking stupid 20,000$ well. thats never paying off anywhere in the entire USA. >> 1400$USD will buy 21seer24000btu -10F capable of decent brand easily lasts 8 years. 2800/5000 will buy 4tons and get it installed this system couldnt possibly ever pay for itself >>. unless you were in like northern freaking alaska or some crap
If anything, these examples of improving efficiency for heat pumps would improve the efficiency and effectiveness of boilers exponentially. Proves heat pumps are an expensive exercise. Another way of transferring wealth from the average person to the richer person - many are saying that this is forcing people to buy more expensive and less effective high cost items under the guise of helping "climate control".
Improve boiler efficiency, yes. Improve it exponentially, no. Compare burning gas at 1500C, extract the heat down to 60C (including condensing water) vs cooling and condensing to 40C - you've getting another couple of percentage points efficiency, I suspect.
Instead of one massive heat storage unit, use 4-8 separate storage units daisy chained in line to extract the heat gradually, also run the coldest leg through a slab floor to to return the working fluid at under 70 degrees f. Run the store/extract heat lines in opposite directions, this will allow heat input from several sources, (strait solar in summer, heat pump in winter). Put the the evaporator in a small green house and run it only when the temp is elevated,(store heat in the day , extract at night).
Exactly. And they are nearly useless in very cold temperatures unless you have a ground based unit and the expense and property required are impractical for most.
This has certainly made the most of the system with the heatpumps currently available. Heatpumps are made down to a size and a price and as a result they have limited performance the C O P drops dramatically once the ambient outside temperature drops below 4 degrees C and the defrost cycles cut in. The colder the weather gets the lower performance of the heatpump . Changing from a water based system to a refrigerant system with a compressor modified for the application would improve things and the use of fan driven fin blocks instead of radiators makes it more room friendly. Using the superheat to top off the hot water temperature makes the system more domestically friendly. Bob.
Ziroth: SCOP or COP of a heat pump system should be discussed with the local weather in mind. England winter average temperature may be 5 degC. A heat geek system may achieve COP of 5.5. However, once the temperature goes down to -10degC as you may encounter in North America, the COP will invariably go down.
The secret to any excellent heat pump is not just the unit itself - but the whole system, which includes the way of how heat is distributed away from the heat pump and into the home. That's something Heat Geeks stress all the time and it's why retrofitting heat pumps is such a challenge.
No it doesn’t work like that The “800% efficiency” refers to a Coefficient of Performance (COP) of 8. This means the heat pump can deliver 8 units of heat for every 1 unit of electrical energy consumed.
Excellent info. One major problem with hot water is the loss of heat in traveling to the taps and the consequential over use of water as it runs while waiting for the hot to arrive. There needs to be some way of accessing the hot water as close to the point of use, as well as recycling grey water.
For so long as there's some connection between content and commercial and it's not the sort of rip-off crap claiming to have found a way around the laws of thermodynamics (as many space heater ads claim), I'm more exercised with the alley-cat morality of UA-cam advertising, which is becoming more intrusive by the week.
I’m sorry it feels this way - Partners like Anker help pay for my teams salaries and keep a roof over my head, there is no way I could support myself (let alone anyone else) on UA-cam revenue alone! And in case it wasn’t clear, HeatGeek had no involvement with this video apart from the interview. They are just doing really great work in my opinion that I was excited to share. Is there any way you would prefer to see sponsors incorporated into videos in the future? Cheers, Ryan
Last year i basically took his way of thinking and applied it to my boiler system. I used AI to write a bunch of strategy codes. Taking information from outside vs inside. Crazy efficient compared from last year. Basically doesn’t shut off but I’m able to control water flow and tank temp settings on the fly.
This what is explained at @9:45 I implemented with my gas boiler at home over 15 years ago... the maintenance guy told me it was bad practice... but then he was also working for the gas company. It is the same with radiators, I had fans blowing through them to dissipate the lower temperature heating faster... I used to be ridiculed and now you can buy these fans for quite a steep price at the DIY store...
I have a heat recovery system on my balanced air ventilation system and I discovered it is common for these systems to be designed to work against a single setpoint called "comfort temp". This is the temperature they try and adjust against when regulating "heat recovery" during winter and "cold recovery" during summer. Turns out that is a really really stupid way of doing it as any other heat source, like a wood-fire or sunshine in a large window surface, run the risk of triggering a surplus energy situation where the system just tosses out the extra heat instead of recirculating it to all the rooms in the house so it can be retained in the walls for when the surplus energy is no longer available. You may have set the comfort temp low to conserve energy and avoid the electric auxiliary heating in the ventilation from triggering too much (allowing a heatpump to deliver most of the energy for the house instead) only to have the system work against you like this. Alternatively you set the target higher and when your aux heating is no longer providing heat the system burns a lot of electricity to try and achieve this silly temperature goal. After asking multiple vendors it turns out this problem just hasn't been in the design-goals of the software running the systems as they only care about ticking the boxes required for government grants/supplements for installs.
Add a 2nd heat pump to your return and use that to heat the hot water tank. It’ll make the system more efficient (diff in temp), can also be used to cool the house in the summer by grabbing a couple degrees off the rads
Top tip, don't dry clothes on radiators, lower the flow temperature but keep system running not on a time clock. Keep RH below 65, the EcoAir 122 simple is a desiccant dehumidifier which uses 350 watts (for heating) and extracts 7 ltr water. Can be used to dry clothes and in the bathroom so latent heat in the moist air is recovered . Gas, Elec or heat pump keep the humidity down, 13 room house I use much less gas and electricity when running dehumidifiers.
Tardo thermostat seems to handle relay based boilers in a very unique way, where it actually modulates a boiler that can’t modulate, it turns the boiler with on and off times of 5 to 15 mins depending on how fast temperature is dropping and outside weather report) if you use a EU wireless receiver (or wire the radio thermostat directly to boiler) you can use opentherm or bus to modulate the boiler output (the uk/world wireless receiver doesn’t have the data pins for opentherm/bus control)
Keeping the water temperature in a bolier at 40 degrees celcius will definetly help with the overall efficiency. However, there is a good reason for keeping it at least at 60 degrees celcius or even higher and that is the prevention of harmfull bacteria development like Legionella, especially when having a higher capacity boiler as the water flow will be lower.
With my GSHP I have a mixture of underfloor, 15mm and microbore piping to radiators. I just open up the lockshield valves and let the thermostatic valves do the work. SCOP is close to 4 and instantaneous COP is rarely below 3.
In the UK, Heat pumps make a LOT of sense. Here is Canada SCOP is a pretty useless number given the variances his daily temperatures - Summer external temps can be 40 degree C and winter and even hit minus 40 Deg (although rare in the southern part of Canada). At these extremes (especially cold), the Heat pump COP degrades to the level of 1:1 (almost but slight less efficient than a resistance heater and must be supplemented). In addition the capacity of the system to move thermal energy also degrades so a system that might be rated for 60,000 BTW might only have capacity to move 24,000 BTU (or less) at the lower external temperatures. SCOP is a useless term as it “averages” all of these extremes - effectively hiding very critical design considerations. (And cost as well if electricity prices are seasonally or demand adjusted for example, if really cold and electricity demand/prices are high - the extra electricity consumption could offset the cost savings during more moderate operating conditions).
If you constructed an insulated housing around the outside heat pump. you could connect an Earth tube to the enclosure and keep the air around the heat pump at a steady ground temperature all winter. Around here, the ground temperature is about 60 degrees. It seems the heat pump would run far more efficiently if the surrounding air temperature never dropped below the ground temperature. All that is required for Earth tubes is a small fan to force air into the enclosure. This would also work in the hot summer.
Good discussion... I am always careful where we install the pump. We keep them raised off the ground in a sheltered area and usually put a mini roof over the pump if we don't have one. Air sorce...
9:30 this is a great point, having on/off only thermostats is too basic. I imagine its also much more comfortable to keep a consistent indoor temperature than to constantly swing a few degrees
The reason is to not short-cycle pumps which kills the longevity of them. A much better design would be to run a system at variable pressure to maintain the target temps, but the only drawback being the refrigerant may fall outside its efficiency zone.
Multi-head split units in the house is far more efficient and 800% cheaper. Heat pumps start at $15k to 40k. To do it right you mist replace everything in the central heating system.. the commend about 40c in the heating tank is suicide from legionnaires disease growimg in your tank then shower ing in it. 38c water tanks in hospitals killed people years ago. Water in tank must hit above 60c to pasteurise the water. Heat pumps don't save money compare to current gas prices vs eletric prices. You still have to run an electric element in the water heater to bring the water up from 40c to +60c. Only reason they want everyone on heat pumps is to reclaime the gas to run the peaking power plants in the future. You can miss out on installation cost if you by a 80c output rated heatpump and hook it up to an exsiting old style central heating system. The efficiency of the heat pump is the key driver of where your COP will sit, 800% isn't groundbreaking, but fail to mention the total installation cost to get it = replace everything and x4 oversize to make it run on sub 35c circulating temperatures. Look at some of the C02 gassed heatpumps they can run in all conditions with 80c output temps down to -20c outside air temperatures Life hack, put the maximum sized radiators in every room and thermal valves on them all, lower your boiler temperatures and halve your gas bill, save $40k on a heatpump that will probably burn a compressor out in 5 to 8 years.
Technically what they are minimizing is the pressure difference between the low and high that the compressor has to make in order to meet the system goals, plus the pump and fan electric costs. Some things they didn't mention: heating your hot water at the warmest point of the day, using the hot water at the coldest time, having the opposite in cooling seasons (a cold water sync). Optimizing for time of use differentials in power rates.
I think home heat pumps are a fantastic idea for new builds and refurb properties. However, it’s a lot more difficult to hit those efficiency goals on an average house where the ripping up floors and replacing piping isn’t possible. I think this is where the horror stories come from. Plenty of bad installs out there. Great video by the way. 👍
Electricity in the UK (on a standard tariff) is about 4x the cost of Gas. To reach the break-even point you may have to replace your pipework, water cylinder and radiators which could cost up to £20k. For most people, you are better off spending the money on insulation and glazing - which will always give a cost benefit.
A clear commercial hidden under tech discussion... heat pump efficiency is defined by used refrigerant and by delta between the temperatures. Heat recirculation is another great add on if home is built in the way to capture the heat instead escaping trough ceiling and roof... so it is correct that systemic approach may maximise the efficiency especially by adapting the home to it, but no way to go beyond physics behind the heat pump.
Thanks for all the great comments - I was torn about using ‘efficiency’ or COP, but efficiency is widely used in the industry and is much more understandable for potential video viewers, so I went for that and tried to explain it in the video!
For anyone interested, Adam’s average COP for December has been 4.62!! (462%) which is crazy high.
CoP and wefficiency is not the same, simlar but not interchangeable, no matter how much easier it is for those with a poor understanding of physics.
Also Kw is the wrong unit of electricty to use, KV should be used which is about 25% higher due to the heat pump being a reactive load.
@@iareid8255surly you mean KVA. As you are paying for your electricity in KWh it would seam appropriate yo use that to me 🤷♂️
Nobody cares bar the physicists and engineers.
I would've thought the biggest efficiency gain would be from storing heat during hot days and "storing cold" during cold days or a form of arbitrage. This way the pumps are working less overall and there is always less temperature difference at the target and more for the pump.
@@TheGalifreyDo you mean the very people who design and build heat pumps and the systems within which they work?
I have a hotel in New Zealand. Actually NZ’s highest hotel. When the walk in beer chiller blew up I installed the new compressor INSIDE the basement, instead of blowing the ‘waste’ heat out into space. The amount of heat now blown back into the building was vastly more than I expected!
I then installed a hot water heatpump in that basement to scavenge that heat into hot water.
I then duct the HWHP exhaust onwards into another section of the basement (it’s a BIG basement)
The temp drop through the heatpump is huge (the exhaust duct is cold!)
That cold exhaust air is also dry, thus the basement condensation problem is vastly improved.
Win/win/win!
Next I have the restaurant walk in freezer and walk in fridge….im definitely going to do the same.
I might just win the COP race, methinks, maybe not with the refrigeration, but I figure the hot water is almost free of charge.
We did the same thing for a hotel here where we gathered the exhaust heat from all the washing machines and dryers
@@powderchills9125 there is. Very common in anything larger then a couple of floors.
@@tomh1727 that's cool but it wouldn't be legal here without a bunch of paperwork, and expense. Not really worth the cost.
Did you put 1:1 mini splits on each room? That's going to have the most savings in terms of your costs as the owner.
@@GeraldMMonroe multi head units, in opposition is best. (equal number of zones between opposing loads. IE west and east, or north and south.) You use a model that allows for reclaim heat mode.
Plumber and hearing technician here. If the domestic hot water tank tempereture is kept at 40 ⁰C the risk of being infected by Legionella will be very high. Make sure that the temperature is at least 55 ⁰C or 60 ⁰C. Sure, it will be more expensive but it is better to stay alive.
if the flow rate is high enough (the water if not stagnant) its not likely. and considering that you'll be using only from the tank, it will get empty every day
@@martontichi8611 I don't go with "not likely" with a risk such as that.
interesting mix, hearing technician aye.
Pretty much every heat pump heating system has a legionella cycle which runs 1x a week to eliminate this problem.
Ive been running my heatpump for years at 45c over night.
The usual technique is to program the system to boost the hot water temperature to 65 C once a week. That's offered enough to keep the water bacteria free.
@@martontichi8611 dangerous advice that: now explain why hotels occasionally get their systems infected.
Sterilise the system to 65 C once per week. And if you don't then don't expect me to visit....
I would have flipped the pyramid with the cop 2.5, the “normal” being the base and building off of that.
Excellent video!!!
Yeah, that makes more sense, on multiple levels. No idea why they went upside down. Fortunately it doesn't detract from the important information in the video.
Heat geek seem to really know what they’re doing. However @Ziroth should’ve mention that the only way to improve COP is to decrease the temperature rise. Every aspect of the pyramid is in a sense trying to decrease inflow temperature. Usage control avoids heating demand spikes, which in turn decreases the inflow temperature spikes. Correct pipings means higher flow rate, lowering the energy usage of the pump and the inflow temperature. Weather compensation lowers inflow temperature during spring and autumn. Hot water requires the highest temperatures, so sizing the storage tank is just decreasing the inflow temperature again. Large surfaces can use lower inflow temperatures, so floor heating can use lower inflow temperatures than small radiators.
A COP of 8 is impressive, but far from the max. I’ve seen heat pumps using lake water and floor heating, 20C source to 35C end, in September get to COP of 10.
The COP of 8 for September is a bit sad, since it implies that the heat pump did run for heating at high outside temperatures. Which could be avoided, with improved insulation. Higher SCOPs are typically achieved with less insulated homes. I prefer lower SCOP but overall less electricity used for my heat pump.
800% COP is easy with 5 deg temperature difference.
yepp you are 90% right, tho its not ALL about temperature. There is also the factor as you mentioned as starting cycles, when the compressor starts its not efficient, so you wanna avoind that and also the flow rate is also about having less energy for the waterpump.
Tho the lake and groundbased Heatpumps have great COPs, but we are talking about SCOP. In summer my heatpump also has a COP of about 20-25, even better than Lake or groundbased Systems because the air is warmer than the water or ground. But then it comes to winter, and the air is colder. So you cant compare the COP to the SCOP, because the COP is only a snapshot of your whole heating season
@@rogerphelps9939 You've obviously never installed any, temperature glide of performance isnt a constant, and is based on gas type and saturation temperatures. At 5.c COP is no more than 4x, unless CO2 or other NON domestic refrigerants are used
I don't think there is any place in North America where you can find 20C lake water. Just north of where I live, lake water ranges from about 5C to 15C.
I have a hotel in New Zealand. Actually NZ’s highest hotel. When the walk in beer chiller blew up I installed the new compressor INSIDE the basement, instead of blowing the ‘waste’ heat out into space. The amount of heat now blown back into the building was vastly more than I expected!
I then installed a hot water heatpump in that basement to scavenge that heat into hot water.
I then duct the exhaust onwards into another section of the basement (it’s a BIG basement)
The temp drop through the heatpump is huge (the exhaust duct is cold!)
That cold exhaust air is also dry, thus the basement condensation problem is vastly improved.
Win/win/win!
Next I have the restaurant walk in freezer and walk in fridge….im definitely going to do the same.
I might just win the COP race, methinks.
Brilliant
Skotel? Whakapapa?
Correct me if I’m wrong: the only part in your system that actually moves heat from the outside environment to your inside environment is the heat pump and that part give you a COP of only around three. The rest of the system - the piping optimization, the heat exchanger optimization, all that, is just to minimize the systematic losses. In another word, the heat pump is your engine and the rest optimizations are your drive trains gear boxes all that. Therefore the most you can get is the amount that can be actually produced or in this case moved by your engine (your heat pump)
So explain this to me: how can you get a systematic COP that is actually higher than the COP of your heat pump? Did you actually get 8 kWh of usable heat by consuming 1 kWh of electricity? Or did you invent some new fancy ways to define systematic COP?
yeah good question
It's rather misleading i agree. It would be more correct to refer to it as the total system COP.
@@Netherlands031 It's really simple: heat pump COP depends on temperature difference between the two heat exchangers (outside air and warm water in the heating circuit) which is called deltaT. The higher the deltaT, the lower the COP. All the advice he gives boils down to reducing deltaT. Correct choice of radiators and pipes, smart control etc, allow using lower temperature hot water in the circuit. Running the heat pump at lower power for longer is like having larger heat exchangers, again reducing deltaT.
@@pppjunk you didn't explain how he got a higher cop than the heat pump is specified for
COP is really only the heat pump. To measure the whole system you would need to have sensors inside and outside every external surface, plus some method of monitoring air leakage.
Similarly I was once told by an HVAC guy (about AC) that you want to size your units appropriately so that you are running smaller units near continuously rather than having larger units turning on and off all day..
I would like to know how larger inverter units fare as they can run at a low speed constantly and should in theory be more efficient due to getting more total heat transfer out of their heat exchanges. Or perhaps it's offset by more losses from a larger pump?
The larger units are going to be more efficient running at lower speed compared to the smaller unit running at mid/higher speed especially if they are both lower end units (with lower seer)
for example, if the room is called for a 1ton unit, having a 1.25 ton unit is going to be more efficient. but too much oversizing can have some negative impact on comfort.
@@mikaelahyakuya3485 So my hunch was right, good to know, thanks
@@mikaelahyakuya3485 I don’t know there were multiple speeds. Just units sized appropriately for the space running for longer periods vs. larger units turning on and off all day. I understand that turning on and off creates a high energy load and causes more wear.
@@Samqdf The problem with larger units is that they cannot throttle (modulate) low enough, and thus have to turn on/off/on during low demand. Usually they can only go to around 50%.
I have been aware of heat pumps for a long time, but it was Technology Connections video on heat pumps two years ago that made me aware of the latest advancements. I'm really interested in where we are going with this tech.
Same, that and the toaster video that changed my life.
@@makatron The dishwasher video did it for me.
@Entertainment- which one, I think there's at least one on dishwasher and a couple on detergents.
@@makatron My main takeaways from series was that powder is cheaper and better than pods, the importance of the little compartment for prewash and how little water it uses.
Ugh, TC is a bandwagoning moron. He should stick to old tech that he can't screw up.
I live in Wisconsin with a 24K BTU Senville heat pump. This heats and cools my 1,500 sq ft old leaky farmhouse in the winter down to -35F (kicked off at -40F for a few hours one night 6 years ago). They advertise that it heats to -22F, but it goes lower than that. The issue is that there is less heat outside below zero to harvest when you need more in the house. So when that happens, I have a small diesel heater from Vevor that puts out 28K BTU (on high) for those super cold days too. The Senville uses about 1.9 kW/hr at .11c/kW, usually about $150/month to heat the house all winter plus a few gallons of diesel. Way cheaper than propane, which would cost me double.
I moved to NE Wisconsin last spring, bought a 1300 sqft house and replaced the propane furnace with a 24k btu Seville and a small 24k btu wood stove for backup. I'm glad I saw your comment. I was concerned that the 24k btu heat pump wouldn't be enough. The propane furnace was 70k btu!
the problem that isn't how heat pumps work, yes they exchange heat on the outside and the closer the delta as in the the temp of the low pressure gas and the outside temperature the less it warms up and the more work the compressor has to do to add heat to that gas when it is compressed to a high pressure liquid.
the higher the temp of the returning gas is, the compressor adds a fixed amount of heat to the gas when compressing it, so the hotter the returning gas, the higher the temp of the compressed liquid gas and conversely the lower the temp of the returning gas, the lower the temp of the compressed liquid gas, as it has to heat up that gas from a lower starting point.
strangely enough, as long as the temp outside is higher than the starting cold gas is, adding more external heat exchangers / radiators, with the longer dwell time and greater surface area, it will bring the temperature of the gas up more, meaning a higher temperature inside. this works much like adding more surface area on the inside will allow the heated side to add more energy to the inside, raising the temperature faster.
I live in Quebec, installed a 12k BTU tosot. I measured it heats to 20k BTU. 1500W will heat my 1500sqft house. When it's cold like -35C it still heats but more like 10k BTU. Plus it has to defrost every hour, so not as efficient. But it averages over 3 COP.
Try getting a diesel generator and running the heatpump off that, as well as diverting the waste heat from the engine into the heatpump using a duct, you will save even more money.
Thanks I have noticed the same results
Adam is great, met him a couple of times, he's very approachable and grounded. The software HG have created is fantastic, love the innovative use of the iPad's LiDAR to perform a heat loss survey, fascinating to watch in action :)
It's worth mentioning that CoP is instantaneously and the 8.0 value mentioned is exactly this, and does really reflect the typical efficiency of the system.
Ha! I recently started an experiment with an ancient 500 watt window a/c unit, with all manner of of vent tubing and fans to try and make a heat pump out of it. Like London right now, the humidity outside my house (Portland Oregon USA) is over 80% and at such low winter temperatures the Tc radiator frosts up in just a few minutes and efficiency drops to the point that I have to cycle it 'ON' for two hours and then 'OFF' for 4 hours. Lots of fun collecting data with 4 wifi thermometers. Thanks for the video! It's convinced me that I'm probably going to have to dig a thermal well like they have up in Drake Landing near Calgary Canada. Maybe I'll get 1000% efficiency!
Nuclear Engineer here, a nuclear power plant puts out about 4000 MW of heat for only about 4 MW electricity input into the pumps for a heating COP of 1000. Further gains can be made with the ESBWR, which is about 5000 MWth output, and the only pump electricity is the feed water pumps.
You're saying efficiency is 0.1% but that can't be true. A basic boiling water reactor should be >30% efficient in converting heat to electricity.
Hi @@Max24871, I am saying a BWR “efficiency” as defined in the video is 100,000% COP, that is 1000 heat unit outputs per unit of electricity input.
You are considering the thermal efficiency of the plant, which is the more closely related to the efficiency of the turbine, which is yes, about 1 unit of electricity output per 3 thermal energy inputs.
To further expand on the subject, the 2 of 3 units heat that aren’t converted to work are rejected to the atmosphere. If these units were used for district heating, the “efficiency” of this system would be heat output used / pumping energy to distribute the heat, which would depend, but probably again, around 100,000%.
It’s just how efficiency is defined. Engineering is fun like that
Until we all have personal nuclear power plants, isn't your topic irrelevant? Or am I missing something here? ;)
I'm a professional comfort advisor for an energy based HVAC contractor we do boilers geothermal hydronic heat pump water heaters tankless water heaters and of course we do heat pumps and we're using Daikin heat pumps I'll tell you what 800% cop is probably doable on some installations but the cost to performance are cost to value ratio is thousands of percent more than a standard heat pump installation which will get you between 300 and 400%. I can heat and cool home for between 12:00 and $30,000 but if I double the COP it's going to go from $40,000 to $250,000 depending on the installation. That's just residential prices We also do commercial and multifamily so well this is very interesting and I'm glad Adam has a lot of time to geek out on stuff because guys like him do help the industry I don't think I could make a living even though I'm in one of the highest income areas in America I'm in Seattle and we are pushing conversions to heat pumps like crazy here. The problem with converting from gas to heat pumps in this area is the vast majority of the homes don't have the electrical service they need to upgrade to heat pumps so that adds another 50 to 100% to the cost of installing the heat pump
What level of electrical service do you need? Is the "vast majority of the homes don't have the electrical service they need to upgrade to heat pumps" older construction (ie 1940's/1950's) with 100 to 125amp service? Interested in your perspective as a Kenmore WA resident.
Plus the electric car plugged in.
Dude. Inhale.
@@toddwright662 in that area, AC is not common, so 100A service would have been overkill until recently. Even in areas to the east where AC is common, they still can't support electric backup heat. I always recommend gas backup here. Since no manufacturer makes a gas backup HP package unit, that makes it dead on arrival for 99% of my customers.
@@toddwright662 If you can run central air, you can run a heat pump, but not the backup heat. Even in, e.g., Wisconsin, backup heat is only needed a few days a year, but it's still needed.
Blessings! We need to continue making all this knowledge and process to make these technologies for everyone. The golden age is almost here.
Two years ago I experimentally added two 7kW air conditioning units to my 2,000 liter buffer tank. I made my own coaxial heat exchangers which work quite well for the first try. Once every day the heat pumps are automatically started and fill the buffer tank up to 57°C and this water is then used in a normal central heating system with radiators. Problems begin when the temperature is below 5°C as the units start to freeze. Defrosting is a big waste of energy and time and sometimes it has a problem to catch up. I will try to run the heat pumps at a lower power for a longer time and will see how it will go. I have a fireplace with a heat exchanger also connected to the buffer tank and when it's really cold I rather fire this up. I grew up by the fireplace and the warmth it produces is still somehow different and cosier then that from the heat pump. Thanks for the great video.
Yes a fire is completely different - best is heating + a fire... :) Do you have time of day max demands, if so you could time the HP to preheat prior to that time. Also the larger the heat exchangers the better, the best being when the temp of refrigerant and water is the same. As noted in the video they "oversized" the coil in the HW tank for this reason.
That's why heat pumps reverse flow to defrost, so it keeps a high efficiency instead of using a less efficient source of heat. My heat pump defrost every hour when it's -30C outside.
@@ianloy1854 At this time of year we have around 0 or slightly positive temperatures in Celsius thru the day but at night it falls to -5 to -10°C so I run the heat pump thru the day. If I heat the 2000 liter buffer tank to 57°C it lasts a full day. I heat my house with it and a part of my workshop, together some 170 m2. Wood helps a lot in very cold winters. I will try to run the HP on lower power for longer time but I use mostly radiators for heating and I need some 50°C to be effective. I must do some more tests to see what will work the best.
@@purpleblueunicorn Wow, it must be a really good HP and well insulated house for this to work at -30C. We don't get so low, -20 max for a week or so but not every winter.
@@slavric it's a 2000$ 12k btu tosot hyper heat mini split that do 20k BTU when it's over 10C. At -30C it outputs 10k BTU. Uses 1500-2000W at max power. Only downside is heat distributions throughout the house, not it's good enough and efficient!
Super cool! Really well made, enjoying these style of authentic deep dives.
I have Vailliant arotherm heatpump. 800% is wishfull thinking in real-life scenarios with dhw. I currently have a scop of 6,6 (with dhw). Which i think is absoluty amazing. Did the install myself, watched almost every heat geak and urban plumber video there is. Complete open system with 2x underfloor heating manifolds. Flow is king, know your heat loss and size the system accordingly. Keep the system as simple as possible!
I dout your scop of 6,6 whith a vaillant heatpump I don't beleave a scop more than 4,5
i have 10kw...
and scop over 6 ??
how ??
@@thetroopersk Fully opened system with underfloor heating (16mm, 10cm apart) and large bore supply/return pipes all weather controlled. Did not use the resistive heating thing vailliant specifies. Made sure i have plenty system volume for defrosts. Theres plenty other ppl getting these scops on heatpumpmonitor.
How did you measure it?
A better system would be an insulated underground water tank about one or two cubic meters in volume that stores the grey water from showers, clothes washing and dishwashing. The heated grey water would be temporarily stored in this tank and a heat pump would remove the heat from that stored water with switching to the outside air as needed similar to the heating and cooling modes of a heat pump. A water pump would also enable the grey water to be recirculated back into the toilets for flushing thus reducing overall water intake from a well or municipal source by as much as 30%. The sewage outflow to the municipal or septic tank would also be reduced with extra water available for lawn watering etc. A system for retrieving waste heat from solar panels could also be added to this system. This sort of hybrid system would offer an even better alternative to existing air to air heat pumps since it reduces the household incoming water usage and the outflow to the sewage system and thus the overall energy usage in water and sewage treatment systems.
Please do it, then make a video. I'll be waiting for an upload.
How much energy would be recoverable from the gray water?
@@andan2293Broadly the same as pure water, though I'd need convincing variables from contaminants such as salinity or pH weren't too detrimental to the installation to make such systems economic.
Something similar is done on a community level in Germany (afaik there are two projects that did this). Obviously it's with sewage and not grey water since those are not separated on this level, but they use water-water heat pumps to extract heat from the sewers for a local heating network.
Denser water means hight costs of pumping so, no, grey water from your septic won't help you and will introduce to potential health dangers.
As a refrigeration technician I can't see a COP of 5.5 in the systems shown in this video (air to water) more likely 3.5 maybe 4... the most efficient syatems are water to water inverter systems as water is denser than air with more concentrated heat energy and they would be around COP 5, newer Co2 systems which work under immense pressure get close to 6 (air to air systems). Finally the thumbnail mentions 800% yeah, pull my other leg!😂
In September, when temperature are almost equal outside and inside and you barely need the heat pump.
Yep... it's bullshit..... for every 1 KW you put in, you get 8 out...
Defo some heat geek snake oil about. High COP does not always translate as a warm house or lowest possible running costs. I have managed to reduce my bills at the expense of a top trump cop. The cheapest heat pump to run is one that isn't on.
Absolutely!!!
@@purpleblueunicorn lol, in September we need heat and AC in the same week. 25°C high, and a -10°c low can get interesting.
Built a new house in 2020 with a heat pump, underfloor heating, and 2000 litre hot water tank. The system is controlled by a computer which measures outside and inside temperature, in/out water temperature, plus a lot more. It uses heating cuvers to adjusted the house charateristics to control heating requirments. One item he did not mention with the hot water it needs to be raised to over 60c for (i can't remember if it was 12 or 24 hours once a month) . This is important to kill any bacteria in the system, such as legionnaires. In our system this is done by the controller via an emersion heater in the tank which raises the temp from 40 to 60c.
Reaction time of the underfloor heating is something like half a day, but the conttoller anticipates heating requirement. As the house stays within 1c of set temperature it's never been an issue.
A problem is heatpumps do not work well in badly insulated and/or drafty houses. Which becomes a issue when fitting them in older housing stock. Without first undertaking a lot of additional insulation work. The lower water temperature means the heat leaks away as it tries to heat the house. Solutions are to create a bigger radiator area (in my house the entire floor) or use hotter water (gas boiler solution). In a leaky house, a bigger radiator area would require a bigger heat pump to supply enough warm water to heat the house.
My system is connected to 220v 16amp, 3.5wk supply, and delivers on aversge 12kw of heating energy. The house is 900m³ (22 x 10m), fully insulated (200mm plus). 12kw is the same size as the gas bo 0:01 iler l used to heat a semi-detached house with half the volume 10 years ago.
We have an old heat pump system, which isn't so efficient, and when it gets down to around -4 C to -5 C or so and colder, it doesn't work so well. Thankfully our climate is fairly moderate most of the time, and it is somewhat rare for it to get well below the above, though it does occasionally get to and near it.
We have a lot of trees on our property, hence there is a lot of free fuel lying around which is too small, sometimes too wet, or the like for the woodstove (which we don't use much, since we would have to purchase wood most of the time). So I bought a relatively inexpensive outdoor smokeless camp fire pit. Large enough that it will run for a few hours or so.
On those semi rare, particularly chilly nights (-4 C and colder), I put the smokeless camp fire pit/stove near the outdoor condenser unit (a few feet away * ). I then take a foam with an IR reflector on it, and wrap it around the fire pit/stove and the condenser unit so that the heat from the stove will be better directed towards it, but with plenty of space on all sides so that the fan/suction is not interfered with and so the foam doesn't over heat. Creates a sort of semi insulated box, which warms up much of the condenser unit (but since the fan is running almost constantly during these times, it never gets hot).
I put a very large pot of water with a cover/lid on top of the smokeless stove. Right before I go to bed (I'll usually stay up later than usual these nights), I light it up. Occasionally the wood is too wet, so I will buy some cheap pellets (like pine pellets sold for horse bedding) and/or put a little charcoal on top to help dry out the wood. (These systems burn top down generally).
* Note, I put a stainless steel, fairly fine _mesh screen over the top_ (it rests on a grille, and the pot of water rests on the screen which rests on the grille which rests on the stove, so no chance of the screen going anywhere, even with very strong wind). It acts like a spark arrestor screen. There is very little chance of this system causing a house or yard fire with this set up, though technically it may not be the most legal set up. A regular inside wood stove is far more dangerous with things like creosote build up/potential chimney fires imo. The stove is only "relatively near" metal. I clear the ground of leaves and debris near the stove. I've watched it burn for hours (I also take it camping) and haven't once seen a spark fly out of it with the screen on top (nor does anything come out from below).
One of these days, I'll probably bury some large copper pipes in the ground down around 10 feet, filled up with highly thermally conductive material most of the way (3 different sized silicon carbide powders/granules), and then wrap the lower part of these pipes with "heat pipe" type copper tubing (copper tubing with some water and wicking material sealed up inside and all under a vacuum). Both the large copper pipes and copper heat pipe tubing will be well insulated in key areas (as it nears the surface and until it contacts the condenser unit). The heat pipe copper tubing will wrap around certain parts of the outdoor condenser unit, so that it will be constantly exchanging energy with the deeper ground. This should take off some of the strain in the peak of summer and winter. I don't have the money or land to set up a conventional ground thermal exchange system, with an underground water tank, long piping underground, or the like.
When you don't have a lot of money and resources, you have to think outside of the box and come up with alternative solutions. Methinks mai Highland Scottish ancestors would be proud.
If I actually had sunlight on my property, I would be using Solar heating and heat pump boosting instead. But just not enough consistent sun around.
In the summer, when it gets very hot, I just hose down the condenser unit with our well water as well as spray the roof when I can. Humidity is often more of a factor than pure heat, so at night (when it is most humid, least hot, and electricity is a bit cheaper) I'll turn up the temp on the central a bit, and run a dehumidifier. The dehumidifier is more efficient than the the central AC at removing moisture (and is energy star rated), and running it at night only helps to not overwhelm the AC during the day when it can already struggle.
I figure every little bit helps. When my system does finally go, we'll probably invest in a much more efficient heat pump system than we have.
Absolutely love this. Such a great interview with Adam, and nice angle on need for behaviour change too!
There is an excellent paper on solar hot water systems carried out in Poland:
Energy efficiency of a solar domestic hot water system, Miroslaw Zukowski
In Darwin (in the tropics) solar hot water systems were fitted to almost all houses since the 1960's as gas wasn't available and local electricity was very expensive (initially oil fired power station).
Heat pump leader boards? That's an excellent idea!
My first company, 1988, had all of these principles, a simple product & we had all this knowledge (+more tbh).Nobody cared.
Amazing to see folks that probably weren’t even born then be so enthusiastic, & good luck to them!
Happy to talk to anyone
What was the problem? Did you offer a product that was not in demand?
Love the way they explain how things impact efficiency. They don’t focus on modifying inside the machines but instead they give an “outline” for new in the field (me)
Its an ironic situation, that forty years ago, I designed a fully integrated house, which included a comprehensive heating, ventilation, and insulation system to reduce heating costs. The house was to be factory built and standardised designs to reduce costs, including pre installed electrical, water and heating installations. Government Building Regulations would not, then, allow the design on their current building construction ideas. I hoped to find a new market to keep a failing company alive, to no avail.
Love it, the inner nerd is amused 10/10
Replacing the expansion valve with a piston expander would increase COP +1. Manufacturers don't do it because it would increase cost of a given heat-pump. I don't think even the better systems do it.
very advanced comment! not many people will even understand this unless they are a HVAC engineer, i considered adding a scroll to expand the gas in my homebrew design.
Large CO2 pumps use expansion turbines coupled to the compressor shaft as I understand it - same principle as a gas turbine. Recovering energy during decompression is always a good thing in theory, but not always the easiest thing to implement.
I’m listening..
@@ChrisDay-sx4lv , thanks! It depends on many factors, and an assumption about how efficient the expander is. For a piston expander then it needs to have complex valve gear, effectively a pneumatic engine, whereas the compressor can work with one way valves. But I definitely like your idea of using a scroll expander - would work well on same shaft as scroll compressor. But a small turbo expander with recovery generator would be easy to retrofit to existing designs. Maybe putting a "Turbo" badge on a heat pump would be worth something to the market?
@@bringiton8989 , agreed. That's why heat pump development engineers are told not to do it. But, it should be a consideration - the problem is how to make the market aware of the benefit in selecting a more expensive heat pump for higher COP. Then the engineer's job is how to keep the cost down with volume, and the reliability up with testing.
My 10 year old Daikin Altherma does all the things that you've mentioned. It adjusts all the time via the inverter the 2 compressors and the inner circuit temperature alongside with 10+ sensors. Heat pumps are the future and the cheapest heating method.
Excellent video. people just think about the device itself, but there are so many other factors. Thanks for talking sense.
So I had a $9000 heat pump system installed by a professional company. I ran it for two years now and from the figures I see it will take over 20 years to pay for itself. Heat pumps seem to be cost effective only in areas with high electricity costs.
Fuck the environment. We get substituted cheap electricity so let's burn that coal directly right? Also must "professional" companies have little to no idea of how to install heat pumps so they run efficient. Mostly using big tanks and mixing warm water with the water for the radiators.
I had to replace my HVAC system a couple of years ago (I have a friend in the business). In inquired about heat pump setups and even tankless hot water heaters (when I had to replace that unit the previous year) and he wasn't overly convinced of them, at least yet. We get hot summers and cold winters here so the places selling heat pump systems still require you to use a gas furnace in the winter, so you're likely only using the heat pump for 3 seasons. The significant cost rarely makes financial sense, at least yet. I spent about the same as you (I think it was $9200) for higher end (higher efficiency) gas furnace and AC units from Carrier and added a HEPA filter system to help keep the air clean.
Depends, higher electricity costs do play a big role. It also depends on climate. I replaced an old 10 seer unit at my house myself for about $4000 to a 20 seer unit. But even that is somewhat misleading. Because this new unit actually performs well at lower temps. The old unit NEEDED backup heat strips to function under 35F or so. The new unit doesn't even have heat strips installed. it's been run as low as 8F or -13C and works great.
@@jeffer1101 Depends on what your electric rate is. Where I live electricity is 9 cents a KWH with final actual bill cost (they get you on the additional shit) is 15 cants. Summers are sweltering, winters mild. Even with those (supposedly) ideal heat pump conditions my electric bill changed maybe $3-4 a month lower after I put in the new system.
@@glasslinger Where I live, we can't use a heat pump on its own, you must use an additional (traditional) heat source for the winter. Maybe some day, the heat pumps will improve for the really cold temps in winter, but it doesn't appear we are there yet. My friend said heat pumps (here) aren't worth it. You'll never recoup your costs on them.
Simply fascinating. Great video.
things like this make me more hopeful for the future ngl :)
The possibilities coming with decarbonising are mind-blowing. So are the economic changes which ought to come with it.
Nice to meet you today Ryan!
You too Todd, looking forward to the next one!
I constantly get laughed out of the kitchen when I boil water for peas/carrots and then pour the used hot water into the dishes to warm them up before throwing it away.
Weather compensation, modulating controls, and over sizing of radiators (and hot water cylinder) also make condensing gas boilers more efficient. Lower flow temperatures from a gas condensing boiler make it work more efficiently, and extract energy from the process of condensation, itself.
COP 8 is great achievement in technical perspective, but what about "financial efficiency" ?... Is it worth to invest in a highly efficient heat pump system instead of better insulation?
Depending on the materials your house is built of and the location insulation in one form or another should be the place to start when you want to save money on heating.
Over 20 years? Hell yea, over 10 years, depends, over 5 years is very hard. Anyhow it will influcence the property price greatly, it is an IT factor that can make a property jump from old and neglected to the renovated and in demand category.
It's not either/or - more insulation = lower heat loss = lower required flow temperature = more efficiency. It's a virtuous cycle and you have to consider it as an integrated system.
As for payback, it's situation specific - complicate the question further with solar panels, batteries and time of use tariffs if you really want to leave yourself confused.
@@TheEsseboy Yes IT is fancy and fashonable, but I think, IT is the most quickly amortizing component, so it is better to add value by foundamental investments, improvemnts in your property.
@@bringiton8989 Of course it is not either/or, I just asked because they did not mention the cost in the video... and I am an economist myself...
My fairly new panasonic heatpump is rated at 5.7 SCOP. I don't know how you can say that "a decent heatpump from a leading brand" gives you only 2.5 SCOP, that seems very low these days.
Anyways, efficiency purely in energy terms is one thing, and you explain it well. But count in fluctuating electricity prices during the day, and some degree of start-stop heating makes sense. Boost the temp a bit before the price goes up in the morning, then coast past the high cost hours at a lower power level, using the the thermal mass of the house. Then boost the heat again around lunchtime, and repeat the cycle at dinner time. It can be done so gently that it isn't really noticeable, but it still saves energy cost, and it helps the entire energy grid be more efficient. I do this both for house heating and water heating, thanks to an off the shelf smart home computer and a power supplying company that provides good software solutions for it. It helps their company as well. When their customers optimise for cost efficiency like this, it enables them to buy cheaper power in the marketplace. Further more, it reduces/delays the need to build beefier power lines, saving cost there too.
A lot of very good points and interesting information. However, please do not refer to COP as efficiency; in an engineering context, both are very specific terms that are related but not interchangeable and not treating them as such has lead to bad faith arguments to try and discredit critics of 'over unity' claims.
and you couldnt be bothered to explaim what the difference is?
@fetB he is a nerd. I am a nerd. We really only speak nerd and as I suspect you don't speak our language it becomes rather difficult to explain something to you. Why not go away and learn nerd, it's the world's most powerful language. Where are you? I'm in Gloucestershire and would be delighted to teach you the basics.
@@pauldowney6856 lol
@@fetB efficiency is usable work output over total energy input and that includes free thermal energy from the outside and fans moving heat source medium.
Coefficient of performance is usable work over paid energy (electricity to run the compressor and fans).
The only way to get efficiency over 100% is to have an error in math or assumptions. IIRC in Germany condensing boilers had "efficiency" over 100% because their theoretical ideal boiler didn't condense steam in the exhaust gas which condensing boilers do as the name implies.
@@fetB I considered explaining it but wasn't sure if it would just be adding dead weight to my comment or not, and decided it would be safer if it was needed and someone could ask rather than it not being needed and my comment becoming a wall of text.
Shortest way I can describe it is that efficiency refers to the amount of energy extracted from a single source (heat engine) while COP refers to the amount of energy moved to a single output from multiple sources (heat pump) In particular, the COP of a heat pump is the inverse of it's efficiency if it were to be ran as a heat engine. As a consequence, because efficiency is always less than one, the COP of a device will always be greater than one.
Think of it like this, when we talk about COP, it's as if we are putting a boat into a stream and propelling it, and instead of measuring the resulting boost, we are measuring the boost PLUS the motion from the water.
Weather compensation is sometimes call "outdoor reset" It raises water temp to compensate for cold weather. Ideally there would be 4 outdoor sensors cause each side of the house will have different demand. There is an optimum point balance between the cost of circulation pump power and cost of heat pump power. The warm water should hit perimeter circulation circuits first cause exterior walls is where the higher demand will be -- similar to how in a forced air system registers are placed below windows.
A factor of 8 (or 800%) is completely unrealistic in almost every real world scenarios. Most modern heat pump reach a factor of 3-5 depending on environmental factors (out of the box). Any further "considerations" are likely very cost intensive and destroy any ROI considerations (in terms of electricity savings).
Well, the closer you run the water to room temperature the higher the COP, just like your frige will draw less power the hotter you set it to.
@@TheEsseboy LOL, I can switch the fridge off, then it doesn't consume any power. As I said before, realistic scenarios!!!
9
Yeah, I don't get it. I barely ran my heat pump in September and I live in Quebec. I used 85kwh for the whole of September, that's 5$ of electricity. My cop was probably high and the heat pump wasted some energy cycling, but who cares. With his system it would have run the whole time instead of cycling and saved 0.2$?
Very suspect article. If the heat pump has a COP of 3, I don't see how using larger pipes etc. is going to add the additional 5kW of heat to give you a COP of 8.
One more thing that could be done: The efficiency of heat pumps is higher when the temperature difference is smaller. If you use an air heat exchanger (not an underground heat exchanger), you get way better efficiency during the day when it is 5-10° warmer than at night. If your house is well insulated and has lots of thermal mass inside, you could get away with not heating at all in cold nights, thereby avoid running at the most inefficient time.
You are thinking in the right direction, but in practice it is not worth it. You indeed do get higher COP during the day. The problem is if you only produce heat half of the time (or less), you have to transfer it to the house twice as fast (or more) and that means you need system temperatures twice (or more) higher, relative to desired room temperature.
E.g. for 21°C and floor heating typically the system temperature will not go over 35°C (14°C delta). To get the same amount of heat in half the time you would need 28°C delta, or 49°C system temp, which is almost guaranteed to negate any daytime temperature gains.
I would definitely keep the water hotter for safety from Legionnaires disease.
Neat though otherwise, thanks for the video!
No need to keep the water hot enough to kill the legionella, the right intervall is key to safety and energy efficiency. Configure the system to heat up once a week ov 60° Celsius, 70° if you are paranoid. The other 6 1/2 days can be below without any risk.
Just programme in a legionnaire cycle that adjusts to usage. If the hot water is used often there is often no need for one. It won't take much in the way of a flow sensor and a small programme to work out if the water has been standing too long and bring it up to a high temperature to kill pathogens on those occasions.
The new studies of SIA for norm 385 show that most of the legionella don’t occur in the hot water tank, but the pipes. According to the norm, you have to heat up the whole hot water system to above 60 degrees at least once a week, not just the storage tank
Geeks proud to be geeks - love it
The REAL genius of the minisplit design is that all of the parts are proprietary. There are no generic parts for these units, so they can charge whatever they like for the parts, and they are the only game in town. Brilliant.
When the odu or idu goes bad, you have to replace both because they “communicate”. Junk! Ripoff!
Yeah it is paying off my house, I don't mind. Let people keep recommending proprietary stuff. I have given up trying to say otherwise.
in america sure. in china its basic AF. theyre largely clones lol.
@@USA-GreedyMenOfNoIntegrity i mean you dont. just buy another unit and then you have the spare OU/ IU. or buy same brand or same clone brand.
@@SuperS05 sounds like someone makes money repairing old systems.....and a 24000btu 21 seer minisplit is 1200$....and will save its value in energy let alone equipment cost far far sooner than its service life....dang.
mfw some moron reccomends i blow 20k+ on some dorky 4ton lennox 20 seer central air unit or something.
think about the math
4 tons 2400$. install. 4 hours maybe, super simple. throw a little gasket on, torque to spec, vacuum, release. hur dur.
money doubles every 8 years in market
installed cost is 1/4? service life idk 15 years, grossly outdated by then anyway and losing money in efficiency
so if it lasts even idk 5 years its paid for itself lol.
minisplits - where they work admittely which is alot of places.
makes you realize what a joke your average hvac installer is.
commercial is a different beast, more complicated systems and humidity are a thing yes i know. but if you just want to cool a room or slap a bandaid on an ole weird house holy hell they cant be beat.
thus their popularity overseas
motel casettes - classy version of a window unit are also nice. no hvac needed to install that just plug er in.
Heat pumps are efficient and also i colder climates, and their efficiency has improved over the years. We replaced our 12 year old extraction air heatpump to a air to water heat pump in Jan-23. It is a Mitsubichi designed to still have positive COP at least down to -15 to -20. I live in Sweden where the average temperature over the years is at around +8C. We heat 170m2 and usually never go below 21,5C indoors. On top we heat a garage 35m2 +35m2 atic to 10-15C +all hot water for the household. Our consumption including cooking, lights etc in 2024 was 15800 kWh, and such a low consumption despite elecric floor heating in two bathrooms. The house has water borne floor heating with clever individually controlled temp in each room from a company named Uponor. So for all still sceptic about heat pump. Buy an extra blanket, or a heat pump😊
So, how well does SCOP deal with the reality that a lot of people only turn their heating on between some time in Oct and an equivalent date in early Spring ? I have always seen an averaged COP as irrelevant to my needs, I want to know what COP will be achieved when the outside temp falls below - say - 12 deg C with a particular focus on the result below 5 C.
That's exactly what SCOP covers - average efficiency over the heating season. Total energy out/ total energy in.
Manufacturers publish all the steady state efficiencies in their data books if you want to know what it does at - 2, +5 etc
SCOP is just the whole 365 days. I don't care what a particular day costs, i care what my yearly bill (and therefore my monthly payments) are.
Good mention of there being latent heat down to 0 degrees Kelvin, think it's good to add some further context that 0K is -273C/-460F to give an indication of how much heat there still is in the air even when outside temperatures are below 0C/32F.
*ENGINEER HERE*
*You and the rest of the Heat pump brigade NEED to STOP saying things like 300% EFFICIENCY.*
Every engineer learns that you cannot get above 100% efficiency for any thermodynamic process and it's called the *Laws of Thermodynamics.* This is why Heat Pumps use *COEFFICIANT of PERFORMANCE (CoP)* which is *NOT* the same thing as efficiency its a measure of performance.
*AND THERE IS A VERY SERIOUS ISSUE HERE with people misusing the word efficiency and confusing the general public.*
Right now there are all sorts of claims being made by various people over the efficiency of various power generation systems and how we use electricity. How do you think we can explain to the general public the efficiency of a nuclear power station is 36% and that's good or that gas turbines are about 46% and that's good or that combined cycle gas turbines are around 64% and that's good when you are claiming heat pumps are 300% *WHICH IS ADVERTISING JARGON?*.
As an engineer I recently WASTED several days recently explaining to a client that ChatGPT was WRONG about an energy issue because ChatGPT can't tell the difference between FACTS and ADVERTISING JARGON. FYI - the issue was over grid stability and that certain dc-ac inverters are labelled as "pure sine wave inverters" and the fact is that NO inverter produces a technically pure clean sine wave output. (Go look at the Wikipedia page for power inverters). Its just *ADVERISING JARGON.* This particular piece of advertising jargon is about to come slamming into every society that has substantial amounts of renewables feeding into their grids via dc-ac inverters.
Its a major issue in Ireland which now has a lot of wind power. The channel Real Engineering did a fantastic video on the subject. I doubt the flywheel solution will work because that fly wheel will still need a power input that wasn't explained. What the Real Engineering video highlights is the substantial difference between energy sources and how they pump energy into the grid. All through the fossil fuel era this was never a problem because all those massive steam turbines with their inertia did the job.
Its actually the one thing projects like Hinkley Point C have going for it, but the pro-nuclear lobby are so stupid they don't understand or realise this.
CoP is used in thermodynamics to distinguish "moving heat" from "creating heat". Theoretically 1 (100% efficiency) is the highest CoP you can have for creating heat, but when moving it, energy efficiency can be higher than 100% which is why they use CoP ratio rather than efficiency percentage. In layman's use, they are essentially interchangeable, even if that is incorrect. Even MIT uses the term 300% to describe CoP3 so no use raging about it because nobody really cares about the difference.
@@TheGalifrey *BULLSHlT*
Sorry but its a violation of the second law of thermodynamics which basically is _"Entropy always increases and therefore 100% thermal efficiency is IMPOSSIBLE in any process."_
And as for MIT they aren't perfect and can be just as wrong as anyone else. Its advertising jargon NOTHING MORE.
@@tonywilson4713you lost me at *BULLSHIT*
@@tonywilson4713 Wow, testy Tony is not wrong! Probably young has not spent 66years coming to grips with the fact the world is awash with bullshit. It is indeed frustrating.
Well said and very valid on the use of wording.. I too am an engineer, live in a 130 yr old house with solid walls. I run gas for heating and hot water. which has worked very well for over 45 years. Yes it's inefficient but an ASHP would never achieve the 300% efficiency without investing £20-30K in an entire new system with massive disruption to the entire structure. Payback time would be off the scale. Keep banging the drum about the misuse of the word efficiency when discussing ASHP.
Less click baity than your usual content. Worth the click.
Very little talk about temperature uplift. We have air sources with COPs up to 16, but thats because it’s lifting water from 30 degrees up to 35 degrees.
Trying to produce heat pump heat at 90C is a very different thing to producing heat at 30-40C.
which is why he stated that a large enough buffer tank is important :)
Search Electrostatic cooling. Same process applies to heating when reversed. It's been use in military industrial complex for quickly removing heat in thickness from parts.
Thats why COP 8 was measured in September... I guess outside temp was 19C inside 20C....
@@julianzurn1428 the temperature in that buffer is the critical part
Peak COP is meaningless. That is why they talk SCOP
I installed an 80 gallon hybrid water heater instead of a 50 gallon unit for the same reasons. It's easier to keep 30 more gallons hot than otherwise. Short usage burst don't put as much stress on the heat pump due to water volume.
either they needed 50 or 80. they have normal elements inside unless you buy the dorky gas replacement ones >> no idea why you wouldnt just rewire the 15A/120V to 15A/240V as its supposed to be a dedicated outlet, and has to be anyway for the heatpump anyway.
the 240V replacement ones have 7kw of elements and the same 2000watt heat pump or whatever.
800% efficient is an insult to everyone’s intelligence.
Exactly it's just click bait, 400-500% scop is about as good as it gets give or take, you may see the occasional cop8 in warm weather but this is drastically offset in winter
@@stevencalvert9454This is why I use my heat pump tumble dryer all year round. I used to dry my clothes outside in the summer
But then I was like "Wth am I doing? This is a few pennies at best. Why waste time"
So you probably wouldn't need say your heat pump in terms of an ASHP in the summer but such a COP is useful for tumble dryers and tbh electric vehicles too
@@waqasahmed939 🤣🤣 never thought about that mate, misses still out there every summer hanging stuff out
I think it’s click baity but also good to think about the highest levels one might strive for.
800% "for space heating in September"......what?
I don't even turn mine on until the end of October 🤦
Wow! This is great! It's estimated a coefficient of 5 would be needed in the U.S. for heat pumps to beat natural gas in costs.
theyre already cheaper....
the issue the boomers are saying is the lows dont work and were down to -10F now.
power is like 55-70% efficient to your house
commercial power is .02$/kwh or so, youre paying for dist, the only reason nat gas might win is the dist costs are being subsidized for consumers vs the electrical wiring.
and cop 2.5-3 acs are 300% efficient so youre getting more energy out by far than burning the gas in your house.
the only artificialities are gas prices or distribution pricing.
commercial companies .02$/kwh and pay for wiring.
how gas works for them idk
consumers
free wire .15$/kwh where i am
gas, no idea i dont have it but guessing same setup, 0$ upfront and pay per btu etc.
california is tired of paying for their useless gas system so getting rid of it slowly
needs to happen in the south more, its done.
coldest were every going to see is high 20s for a few hours a year >>
I find the most efficient heat pump is not buying one, but instead wearing an Australian or NZ merino wool jumper whilst their exchange rate is so low. This is effectively retaining heat better in your body, not heating the space around you, which is relatively inefficient. I don't know why the wool industry isn't making the argument.
That only works up to a point though.
When your pipes start freezing and bursting, perhaps you need to turn some heating on.
Cold hands, runny nose, dry eyes, condensation on the walls, do I need to say more? Dropping the temperature inside is not good, anything below 19-20 C other than for bedtime is bad for you, especially elderly, children and sick people.
@@benholroyd5221 Well, in my country, there's no snow, but we still have heat pumps. Subsidised by govt no less, when they were overpriced. After the Chinese entered the market, the price collapsed. Before that, there was a bit of a racket to keep prices high.
@@benholroyd5221 or just move to Florida. You still have freedom of movement. 😀
One more thing - our little factory has a couple of heat exchangers that heat water with the waste heat from the cool and freezer rooms.
And a second thing - as compressed (hot) gas is decompressed for the cold side, a big ~~10-25% of energy is literally LOST. Large commercial systems have little impeller turbo-like decompression generators that recover much of this energy. I worked on commissioning LNG plants, which are partially giant heat pumps - we had decompression generators up to (if I remember correctly) about 32 MW. That's a 110,000V generator 4 stories high. All from decompressing gas.
I like the technology but I got one installed by one of these grant firms. They had no clue. All rushed. Still costing me a tonne and struggling to heat the house. I have to light the open fire some days.
Unfortunately, any unregulated "gold rush" attracts it's share of cowboys who'll go bust before remedying the mess they've made. If it's any consolation, Local Authorities (forced by statute to go for lowest bidders, if lacking the specific expertise to justify decisions to HMG) are in the same boat.
If you've acquired anything which you could have done with *ahead* of your awful experience, what would be your 'top tips'?
@TheHoveHeretic Honestly it would be dont use a grant firm and don't be bullied into being rushed to meet grant deadlines. I tried to get details before instalation day but there was zero communication, then they came in, put radiators anywhere, tank is in the wrong place then went bust before doing the insulation.
I think just self fund as although it will cost more you will have control and time to do things properly.
@@UnwittingSweaterIF this story is genuine, why have you just left it like that instead of trying to get it resolved? That makes no sense when it's costing you money. You can contact a Heat Geek accredited engineer to come and have a look at it. The Urban Plumber channel has loads of videos where he fixes other installs. So it can be done.
@mikeypc3592 There are many reasons why I haven't got it fixed but the main one is I'm selling up. Up to the next person to decide if they want to keep and fix or remove.
I love what Heat Geeks and you are doing around efficiency .. but many installers, at least in my region, a critical piece is often missing IMO .. and that is the economics of how these installs are designed. I recently did some trouble shooting on a system in my area and aside from the usual mistakes (oversized heat pump, too many zones, buffer tank used, etc.), the designer and installer also did not account for how the utility company billed the client. The utility in question billed separately for energy (kWh) and power (kW). This heat pump had 9 kW of resistance elements to boost output under certain conditions .. even though the site had a gas boiler as a backup. In this case the resistance elements needed to be turned off completely so that cheaper gas (in this case) could be used as the "peaker". I saved the client about $5,000/yr by a simple adjustment to his settings. If Heat Geeks here are listening .. please include some videos and information to help installers install not the most efficient system .. but the most economical options. Not everyone wants to pay for the best efficiency .. the perfect is the enemy of the good.
Sit back and laugh, they are😅😅😅😅
The average heat pump in heat mode, commercially available for less than a kings ransom, will get 300% efficiency on a good day, and it goes down from there as outside temperature drops until if it is cold and humid enough the coil ices and then it defaults to resistance heating at 100% efficiency. My gas furnace runs at about 95% efficiency in all weather conditions. However here in Missouri the cost of natural gas, converting BTU to KWH is about 1/6 the cost of electricity. So to get equal cost for a unit of heat into my house, a heat pump would have to average about 600% efficiency. Net, I pay noticeably less than half to heat with gas. These videos always talk about efficiency, not $ per unit of heat delivered to the house and ignore capital cost. Good luck trying to sell me a heat pump.
Obviously there’s the issue of carbon emissions that you don’t mention in this. Either way it’s not all individual change but macro change. If they had a 50% efficient Nat gas plant and you had a 2.5x heat pump we’d all be saving fuel and energy cost, but it takes time to adopt new infra
I live in Missouri as well and the gas cost is not that cheap. I pay Spire ~$1.25-1.30/CCF + fees. That's about 4.2 cents/kwh. If your furnace is 95% efficient thats about 4.4cents per kwh of heat in your home. Ameren winter electric rate is 6.27 cents/kwh after 750kwh, which you will always blow past with a heat pump on top of your usual electric needs.
To break even with the 4.4 cents of natural gas you would only need a COP of 1.43. That's achievable even on the coldest days with modern heat pumps. There's alot of cold specific heat pump models out now that get ~1.9 COP at -5F, which is about as cold as it ever gets in winter.
For most of the winter, late fall, and early spring, you'll be heating your home when its 25F+ outside where the heat pump is able to run at a COP close to 3.0 or more. That's twice the break-even cost efficiency of the gas furnace for the majority of the heating season, and break even at worst for 1-2 days per year.
I can look at my HVAC usage on my phone with the Ecobee app. Its been in the 50s and 40s, and cloudy all this week over christmas and my furnace is running only 2-3hr PER DAY. Its cycling on for 15min and then off for over an hour, and then on for 15min, and then off.
First of all, 300% efficiency is about the lower end of what you can expect, not the higher end. My system runs at 400% SCOP. You are completely neglecting the emissions from your gas based heating system, which hurt both the air quality and our climate. Heating with gas should be much more expensive, and heating with electricity should be much cheaper. Unfortunately in most countries the tax laws are completely backwards and gas is actually taxed less than electricity, which is bonkers if you ask me
Videos often don't talk about cost per unit of delivered heat because it depends on utility rates which are different everywhere. I also live in an area where heat pump heating costs more than gas heat but plenty of people have cheaper electricity, more expensive gas, or no gas.
I'm also going to point out that common units seem to consistently get a COP of 3 or better whenever it is above freezing outside.
Personally I'd most likely go for a "dual fuel" heat pump + gas heat if specifying a new system. On warmer days when the heat pump works better use that, on colder days when heat pump is noticeably more expensive switch to gas. Or if one malfunctions use the other one instead of being left with no heat.
There are many ways to heat a home, and insulate it. Seeing someone try new things is always exciting. This system has too many flaws still unfortunately to be something that people will "flock" to, with refrigerant as a major concern. The idea of getting heat and sending cooler air to the warming earth is certainly intriguing. I still think that going toward a more natural way of keeping a home temperature under control should be first utilized. We can build more efficient homes that what is traditionally built, especially in America. Why not take advantage of the earth's ability to keep us both warm and cool? And still keep the land our home is on is a really good idea with the population rising and housing shortage. Your roof is essentially the earth, so you got your grass patio right there...or grow a garden or whatever you want. Hope to see more innovations soon. I like where this is going.
13:30 - So, the record performance was achieved in the mildest possible heating month? I'm shocked. Well not that shocked.
The problem with this sector is that no one cares about the tech. People want heat for cheap. And talking about financial supports at the end is another clue that this stuff still doesn't makes financial sense in the current market on it's own. 5-8x and it still needs subsidies? wow... Advanced LIDAR analysis just sounds like another expense.
If you can't already tell I'm very jaded by all this stuff. 😅
Low and slow sure does rhyme nicely but if people walk into a cold house they want it warm now, not in a few hours. The experience is often undervalued there.
The thing with low and slow and weather compensation, is you aim to do as little change to the house temperature as possible, as it's a lot more efficient (and slightly more efficient with a gas boiler) to trickle the heat into the house before it gets cold and maintain the temperature.
I'm staying at my dads at the moment in the UK on a thermostat controlled gas boiler, and there are definitely times where the house doesn't feel as warm as the thermostat says. When we travelled here, his heating had been at 16C away temperature, and even after an hour it still wasn't warm, so it's not like gas boilers give the instant heat to the home that people think it does.
After my dad has visited my home multiple times in winter that I heat low and slow with heat pumps (using air 2 air, so isn't completely on weather compensation), he agrees that it's far more comfortable.
My GSHP has managed a SCOP of 7 in mild weather. No big deal and not relevant to real world operation.
Mine 1st rule as a HVAC-R tehnician : Never use same machine to heat domestic hot water and to cool/heat your home. Combine for example monobloc unit for floor heating/ceiling cooling and for domestic water you can use combi boiler with r134 or r290 and if you can, put few solar panels in extra spiral of boiler and that's it. And program well your hot water recirculation pump, those are energy eaters
My project team recently rejected a heat pump option fora major project because for our application, experience showed heat pumps to be very unreliable. You have to look at the whole picture to assess costs, not just system efficiency. EVs are another good example of this.
I've seen somewhere on a construction side a really really huge digging machine and then i asked what's the purpouse for this machine and the operator told me that this machine, 18m tall, dig a deep hole around 150m and 50cm wide ( some customers demands way over that number ) and at the bottom is actually 25-30c. They dug 8 of them and installed only 25kW heat pump for a rather big, really big structure. 4 floors, each floor has 470m2. I don't know much about how efficient it was but this operator told me that heating with gas will cost 13x more than heating with this system and electricity. Throughout the year, the earth 200m deep will remains at nearly constant temperature above 20c so they " pre-heating " the " wasted heat " so the refrigerant stays above ambient temperature thus, gaining more efficiency. It is also more expensive and that particullar thing cost between 400-750k depends on the soil underneath and how many holes you want but they always come with some aknownledged person who tell you exactly how many holes your appliance need. So for the regullar house, they dig only 1 hole also 200m deep and it's enough to boost the efficiency of the heat pump even higher.
okay now run the numbers vs air sourced against the cost of those holes >>.
then again cant do that anyplace below -10F currently either 200m is 600ft here and thats like a freaking stupid 20,000$ well. thats never paying off anywhere in the entire USA. >>
1400$USD will buy 21seer24000btu -10F capable of decent brand easily lasts 8 years.
2800/5000 will buy 4tons and get it installed
this system couldnt possibly ever pay for itself >>.
unless you were in like northern freaking alaska or some crap
If anything, these examples of improving efficiency for heat pumps would improve the efficiency and effectiveness of boilers exponentially. Proves heat pumps are an expensive exercise.
Another way of transferring wealth from the average person to the richer person - many are saying that this is forcing people to buy more expensive and less effective high cost items under the guise of helping "climate control".
Improve boiler efficiency, yes. Improve it exponentially, no. Compare burning gas at 1500C, extract the heat down to 60C (including condensing water) vs cooling and condensing to 40C - you've getting another couple of percentage points efficiency, I suspect.
i find it fabulous to use a giant pyramid as the illustration for your explanation on heat pumps, that seems suitable indeed.
For everyone... That 800% COP was only peak COP in September, so nothing special...
Instead of one massive heat storage unit, use 4-8 separate storage units daisy chained in line to extract
the heat gradually, also run the coldest leg through a slab floor to to return the working fluid at under 70 degrees f. Run the store/extract heat lines in opposite directions, this will allow heat input from several sources, (strait solar in summer, heat pump in winter). Put the the evaporator in a small green house and run it only when the temp is elevated,(store heat in the day , extract at night).
13:26 Heat pumps have that nasty property - COP is highest when heating is basically not required at all 😂
Exactly. And they are nearly useless in very cold temperatures unless you have a ground based unit and the expense and property required are impractical for most.
This has certainly made the most of the system with the heatpumps currently available. Heatpumps are made down to a size and a price and as a result they have limited performance the C O P drops dramatically once the ambient outside temperature drops below 4 degrees C and the defrost cycles cut in. The colder the weather gets the lower performance of the heatpump . Changing from a water based system to a refrigerant system with a compressor modified for the application would improve things and the use of fan driven fin blocks instead of radiators makes it more room friendly. Using the superheat to top off the hot water temperature makes the system more domestically friendly. Bob.
I recommend everyone to find the book titled The Hidden Path to Manifesting Financial Power, It changed my life.
Ziroth: SCOP or COP of a heat pump system should be discussed with the local weather in mind. England winter average temperature may be 5 degC. A heat geek system may achieve COP of 5.5. However, once the temperature goes down to -10degC as you may encounter in North America, the COP will invariably go down.
The secret to any excellent heat pump is not just the unit itself - but the whole system, which includes the way of how heat is distributed away from the heat pump and into the home. That's something Heat Geeks stress all the time and it's why retrofitting heat pumps is such a challenge.
So you get 8 times more energy than you put in?
its moving heat around, not so much creating it, that's why its efficient
No it doesn’t work like that
The “800% efficiency” refers to a Coefficient of Performance (COP) of 8. This means the heat pump can deliver 8 units of heat for every 1 unit of electrical energy consumed.
800% is 9 times more 🥰👍
Watch it again and this time .... *pay attention*
@@Random-95🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️ you just explained that it does indeed work just like that but using longer words
Excellent info. One major problem with hot water is the loss of heat in traveling to the taps and the consequential over use of water as it runs while waiting for the hot to arrive. There needs to be some way of accessing the hot water as close to the point of use, as well as recycling grey water.
Most would benefit from point of use hot water and ditch the tank.
Ziroth became an AD Channel. What a huge downfall
But this is cool thing
For so long as there's some connection between content and commercial and it's not the sort of rip-off crap claiming to have found a way around the laws of thermodynamics (as many space heater ads claim), I'm more exercised with the alley-cat morality of UA-cam advertising, which is becoming more intrusive by the week.
AD? Albus Dumbledore? Air Defense? Architectural Design? Anti-Diarrheal?
I’m sorry it feels this way - Partners like Anker help pay for my teams salaries and keep a roof over my head, there is no way I could support myself (let alone anyone else) on UA-cam revenue alone!
And in case it wasn’t clear, HeatGeek had no involvement with this video apart from the interview. They are just doing really great work in my opinion that I was excited to share.
Is there any way you would prefer to see sponsors incorporated into videos in the future? Cheers, Ryan
feel like you're just complaining to complain ngl
Last year i basically took his way of thinking and applied it to my boiler system.
I used AI to write a bunch of strategy codes. Taking information from outside vs inside. Crazy efficient compared from last year. Basically doesn’t shut off but I’m able to control water flow and tank temp settings on the fly.
This what is explained at @9:45 I implemented with my gas boiler at home over 15 years ago... the maintenance guy told me it was bad practice... but then he was also working for the gas company.
It is the same with radiators, I had fans blowing through them to dissipate the lower temperature heating faster... I used to be ridiculed and now you can buy these fans for quite a steep price at the DIY store...
I have a heat recovery system on my balanced air ventilation system and I discovered it is common for these systems to be designed to work against a single setpoint called "comfort temp".
This is the temperature they try and adjust against when regulating "heat recovery" during winter and "cold recovery" during summer. Turns out that is a really really stupid way of doing it as any other heat source, like a wood-fire or sunshine in a large window surface, run the risk of triggering a surplus energy situation where the system just tosses out the extra heat instead of recirculating it to all the rooms in the house so it can be retained in the walls for when the surplus energy is no longer available. You may have set the comfort temp low to conserve energy and avoid the electric auxiliary heating in the ventilation from triggering too much (allowing a heatpump to deliver most of the energy for the house instead) only to have the system work against you like this. Alternatively you set the target higher and when your aux heating is no longer providing heat the system burns a lot of electricity to try and achieve this silly temperature goal. After asking multiple vendors it turns out this problem just hasn't been in the design-goals of the software running the systems as they only care about ticking the boxes required for government grants/supplements for installs.
Fascinating stuff, I wish I had a mind that could think these things up 😊
Add a 2nd heat pump to your return and use that to heat the hot water tank. It’ll make the system more efficient (diff in temp), can also be used to cool the house in the summer by grabbing a couple degrees off the rads
Too expensive for HW. Better to use an element.
Top tip, don't dry clothes on radiators, lower the flow temperature but keep system running not on a time clock. Keep RH below 65, the EcoAir 122 simple is a desiccant dehumidifier which uses 350 watts (for heating) and extracts 7 ltr water. Can be used to dry clothes and in the bathroom so latent heat in the moist air is recovered . Gas, Elec or heat pump keep the humidity down, 13 room house I use much less gas and electricity when running dehumidifiers.
Tardo thermostat seems to handle relay based boilers in a very unique way, where it actually modulates a boiler that can’t modulate, it turns the boiler with on and off times of 5 to 15 mins depending on how fast temperature is dropping and outside weather report)
if you use a EU wireless receiver (or wire the radio thermostat directly to boiler) you can use opentherm or bus to modulate the boiler output (the uk/world wireless receiver doesn’t have the data pins for opentherm/bus control)
Keeping the water temperature in a bolier at 40 degrees celcius will definetly help with the overall efficiency. However, there is a good reason for keeping it at least at 60 degrees celcius or even higher and that is the prevention of harmfull bacteria development like Legionella, especially when having a higher capacity boiler as the water flow will be lower.
Great info. I hate that here in the US we use the most inefficient heating on the planet. This is the type of stuff more people should be researching!
With my GSHP I have a mixture of underfloor, 15mm and microbore piping to radiators. I just open up the lockshield valves and let the thermostatic valves do the work. SCOP is close to 4 and instantaneous COP is rarely below 3.
In the UK, Heat pumps make a LOT of sense. Here is Canada SCOP is a pretty useless number given the variances his daily temperatures - Summer external temps can be 40 degree C and winter and even hit minus 40 Deg (although rare in the southern part of Canada). At these extremes (especially cold), the Heat pump COP degrades to the level of 1:1 (almost but slight less efficient than a resistance heater and must be supplemented). In addition the capacity of the system to move thermal energy also degrades so a system that might be rated for 60,000 BTW might only have capacity to move 24,000 BTU (or less) at the lower external temperatures. SCOP is a useless term as it “averages” all of these extremes - effectively hiding very critical design considerations. (And cost as well if electricity prices are seasonally or demand adjusted for example, if really cold and electricity demand/prices are high - the extra electricity consumption could offset the cost savings during more moderate operating conditions).
If you constructed an insulated housing around the outside heat pump. you could connect an Earth tube to the enclosure and keep the air around the heat pump at a steady ground temperature all winter. Around here, the ground temperature is about 60 degrees. It seems the heat pump would run far more efficiently if the surrounding air temperature never dropped below the ground temperature. All that is required for Earth tubes is a small fan to force air into the enclosure. This would also work in the hot summer.
If you're wanting to do that I would suggest getting a proper ground source heat pump instead.
Good discussion... I am always careful where we install the pump. We keep them raised off the ground in a sheltered area and usually put a mini roof over the pump if we don't have one. Air sorce...
Sure this is a great video for people that have radiators.
Just central air here in the us now-a-days
9:30 this is a great point, having on/off only thermostats is too basic. I imagine its also much more comfortable to keep a consistent indoor temperature than to constantly swing a few degrees
The reason is to not short-cycle pumps which kills the longevity of them. A much better design would be to run a system at variable pressure to maintain the target temps, but the only drawback being the refrigerant may fall outside its efficiency zone.
Multi-head split units in the house is far more efficient and 800% cheaper. Heat pumps start at $15k to 40k.
To do it right you mist replace everything in the central heating system.. the commend about 40c in the heating tank is suicide from legionnaires disease growimg in your tank then shower
ing in it. 38c water tanks in hospitals killed people years ago. Water in tank must hit above 60c to pasteurise the water. Heat pumps don't save money compare to current gas prices vs eletric prices.
You still have to run an electric element in the water heater to bring the water up from 40c to +60c.
Only reason they want everyone on heat pumps is to reclaime the gas to run the peaking power plants in the future.
You can miss out on installation cost if you by a 80c output rated heatpump and hook it up to an exsiting old style central heating system.
The efficiency of the heat pump is the key driver of where your COP will sit, 800% isn't groundbreaking, but fail to mention the total installation cost to get it = replace everything and x4 oversize to make it run on sub 35c circulating temperatures. Look at some of the C02 gassed heatpumps they can run in all conditions with 80c output temps down to -20c outside air temperatures
Life hack, put the maximum sized radiators in every room and thermal valves on them all, lower your boiler temperatures and halve your gas bill, save $40k on a heatpump that will probably burn a compressor out in 5 to 8 years.
Technically what they are minimizing is the pressure difference between the low and high that the compressor has to make in order to meet the system goals, plus the pump and fan electric costs.
Some things they didn't mention: heating your hot water at the warmest point of the day, using the hot water at the coldest time, having the opposite in cooling seasons (a cold water sync). Optimizing for time of use differentials in power rates.
Greatest invention since the water finding stick.
I think home heat pumps are a fantastic idea for new builds and refurb properties. However, it’s a lot more difficult to hit those efficiency goals on an average house where the ripping up floors and replacing piping isn’t possible. I think this is where the horror stories come from. Plenty of bad installs out there.
Great video by the way. 👍
Hi please do a video on thermodynamic heating panels. Pros and cons maybe? Thanks,great videos
Electricity in the UK (on a standard tariff) is about 4x the cost of Gas.
To reach the break-even point you may have to replace your pipework, water cylinder and radiators which could cost up to £20k.
For most people, you are better off spending the money on insulation and glazing - which will always give a cost benefit.
A clear commercial hidden under tech discussion... heat pump efficiency is defined by used refrigerant and by delta between the temperatures. Heat recirculation is another great add on if home is built in the way to capture the heat instead escaping trough ceiling and roof... so it is correct that systemic approach may maximise the efficiency especially by adapting the home to it, but no way to go beyond physics behind the heat pump.