So do you think CO2 heat pumps, like what Harvest Thermal is putting together are the future of heating our homes? Go to brilliant.org/Undecided/ and get 20% off your subscription and a 30 day free trial with Brilliant.org! Correction: 3:26 Should have said "Gas burner efficiency" - it's not a COP If you liked this, check out Why This NASA Battery May Be The Future of Energy Storage ua-cam.com/video/2zG-ZrC4BO0/v-deo.html
You talked about its heating abilities. As a person living in Florida, cooling is a little more important. Tho i do need a good heat unit but i need a good cooler more.
I’m sure Matt is constantly working on sound and everything else. On the CO2 side, these units would have to prove themselves. I’m not sold on them yet. If a unit is to pay itself off in 5-10 years then it should carry a warranty for that length of time. The problem is when people give out these estimates they are not taking into mind potential breakdowns, and everything else that goes into the systems while/after they’re installed. To me, heat pumps are usually more problematic than standard ways of heating. But then again, I also live in New York, not for much longer, and by 2030 any new heating device installed in a house has to be a heat pump. America could phase out all CO2 emissions and it still would not make a dent in the CO2 being released by the rest of the world. So we wind up being example setters, and not making any difference. In other words, we incur the cost and all we do is make people feel good about themselves. I’m sorry that’s not a good enough reason. Also, if this channel is about Matt, being undecided, he should rewrite what he is saying to kind of fit that narrative. When he brings these new technologies to the board, it sounds like he’s already sold on them.
To put into context old heat pumps used R22 that had a high side pressure just above 200psi, current heat pumps use R410a which have a high side pressure just under 400psi. CO2 would have a high side pressure above 1500psi for a residential heat pump or 1700psi to 2100psi in a water heating application. R134a which is currently used in heat pump water heaters has a high side pressure around 200psi. That is a significant pressure increase. The higher the pressure the higher the failure rate on these systems. When R22 was phased out and manufactures started using R410a the leak rate on systems increased exponentially. Due to the complexity of the heat pump water heaters it's not economical to service them when they have a leak. Even when they are under warranty the manufacture opt to replace them. Instead of always chasing efficiency, maybe we should take a step back and look at the waste stream we are creating. It takes a significant amount of energy and resources to build these. So if we are replacing the unit 2 to 3 times in the lifetime of a single less efficient unit are we really saving anything?
Something else to consider here is that the refrigerant itself is a key factor in the environmental cost of a refrigeration system. The global warming potential of hydrocarbon refrigerants is hundreds of times higher than CO2. And the higher peak energy consumption means more resources consumed on back end infrastructure (larger/more transmission lines, more generators, more grid scale energy storage hardware etc etc). It's not as simple as just looking at the monetary cost of the endpoint hardware and its longevity on their own.
This hit me as a big red flag so thanks for taking the time to elaborate. I managed a lot of commercial property in Arizona, so almost all some form of heat pump tech. Lots of calls from what commonly ended up being issues with the compressor or giving it enough power.
How does a company stay in business. By selling what it makes. The shorter the life span the more they make. You only get to use the gasoline in your tank once. Get the idea? Some people!
As an industrial refrigeration tech that deals with ammonia and CO2 as well as residential and commercial air conditioners. The biggest problem I see with residential air conditioners going to CO2. Is similar to when the industry changed from r22 to r410. The head pressures doubled from 200 PSI up into the 400 PSI range. CO2 has to be even higher than that. Combine that with the industry trying to cut cost at every corner you will have a lot of failed condensers because of the high pressure until the bad apples are weeded out. You also probably won't have the lifespan on the equipment that you used to get on the older equipment that used a lower pressure refrigerant. I wish the industry would fully embrace ammonia as a refrigerant. It's natural to the environment so there's no pollution factor. It cools with much lower pressures, so it takes less energy to get the pressures you need and you're not trying to contain such high pressure is on the condensing side. There's just the part that it's toxic to humans. Just my opinion
I agree 100% about ammonia. And life is risky anyway, screw the dangers. Frankly I'm tired of all the hand-wringing that everything must always be "totally safe."
Excellent comment Sir. CO² on the condenser side!!! One leak from your condenser in your bedroom, then you will die! No maybes! I didn't know about the pressure issue. The CO² higher pressure increases the probability of leaks. I like your ammonia suggestion - low pressure also because you can smell ammonia if it leaks.
@@michaelyyy2872 you believe the amount of co2 in a home heat pump will kill you? That seems dubious. Also, the co2 can be given a smell just like natural gas has added to it
We had our heat pump put in last year and its been AMAZING! Cheaper to run and in the summer it can make our Rochester NY home feel like a refrigerator. Wasn't cheap but well worth it. Would love a heat pump running on CO2
I also live in the Rochester NY area. What company did you use to provide your heat pump? I may need a new HVAC system soon and would like to consider a heat pump system. Thanks in advance.
@@GeorgeWashingtonLaserMusket in the hot south we usually use heat pumps. But in the north they historically use natural gas to heat in the winter so the extra cost of a heat pump vs simpler air conditioner kept people from buying them.
I work on them daily, and they are great till they break, parts are expensive, almost always special order. Life span isn't great because they run year round. They suck in extremely cold weather. Mini splits we joke and call them expensive throw away units. Parts are usually not available after 7-10 years vs traditional gas furance got 20years plus and parts are common
Liquid CO2 cooling was used a couple of decades ago to cool datacentres that had equipment cabinets having a high heat load. The heat latency of liquid CO2 to the gas phase was much more efficient than at moving heat than water based cooling. It was implemented as a fan assisted heat exchange "radiator" mounted on the back of a standard equipment rack. The high pressures 50+ Bar?) needed to work with liquid CO2 meant that the pipework had to be thick walled stainless steel with close tolerance preformed pipe dimensions. I saw one in operation at Imperial College in London. Expensive to build, but allowed heat loads in rooms that could not otherwise cope.
Liquid CO2? Doesn't carbon dioxide phase change directly from a solid to a gas and not have a liquid state? Hence the name "Dry-ice". Or is it different when under high pressures?
@@Samqdf Check the contents of a CO2 fire extinguisher. It is liquid CO2 held under pressure. At normal atmospheric pressure CO2 exists in the gas or solid states.
Search for "phase diagram CO2" on Google to find out the various CO2 phase. Fun fact: Super critical CO2 is a special phase with fun properties. Search UA-cam for some examples.
I have a CO2 heat pump at home, it’s great. It’s timed to run in solar hours, and so far it’s probably been run over 98% from my own solar. Since it only uses 1/5th of my solar output, and only for two or so hours a day, it’s rare to get a day when it’s not entirely solar powered. So that’s a pretty huge cost and carbon saving!
We’ve had a Sanco2 water heater for almost 3 years and it’s been working great. The reason we chose it was because it’s a split system with the condenser outside. Our water heater is inside the house and so having the condenser mounted on top of the tank as most systems I’ve seen would have required relocating the heater. That would have added significantly to our installation cost.
@@sprockketsprecisely. It would take decades before the price would be recouped via electric savings. When a standard heat pump hot water heater is around $1500 a $5000+ split unit that also requires a HVAC installer would prove about $1500 install. How long does a water tank last anyway? 10 years before it's clogged with hardwater?
Great video Matt. Thanks for helping to get the word out about CO2 heat pumps and Harvest Thermal's collaboration with SANCO2. I noted that you described both HCFC and CFC refrigerants as having ozone depletion potential. Currently R-410a is used in the majority of residential ASHP systems. While it carries a high global warming potential (GWP 2088), the ODP of R-410a is zero. This is one reason we look forward to increased demand for CO2 systems (GWP of 1) and R-32 (GWP 675) as the next phase of refrigerants to be used in res. systems. As a building performance contractor working in the Bay Area we are especially appreciative of Harvest Thermal's product as it more than doubles the potential space heating capacity of the SCANCO2 system when installed as a combination domestic hot water and space heating system.
I had a SANCO2 water heater installed last year in my Salem Oregon home. It is awesome and produces an abundance of very hot water. That plus my whole home heat pump heating system allowed me to disconnect methane gas service. Hallelujah!
It's a common practice to pair a heat pump with PV solar and use excess of the sun to heat 300 to 500 L tank for hot water and even some heating, if the days are sunny during the winter. Not exactly dedicated system, but it accelerates the ROI calculation dramatically.
Have you ever seen/heard of a PVT solar panel? Check out DualSun. I'm looking/wating for a US manf or at least until I can see an installation first hand of one.
Yeah, this ability to go full-out while the sun shines is HUGE. Some of your evening loads at peak (like cooking) are hard to avoid but this way you stored all the heat you'll need during the day.
@@chrisE815 In Germany you get only subsidy for batteries (as a part of the of them solar system, not standalone), which motivates people to get them, this preventing grid stability problems, which already develops in many places. Yes it does makes sense. I have both batteries and 300 L HW tank. I've just been in an old refurnished house and they have two tanks - 500 L for heating water accumulation and 300 L for hot water. And 30 KWh battery storage and large 48 panels solar field. It's a refurnished homestead,so they have a lot south facing roof "real estate". I started slow, not knowing what to expect and in a time of most demand, so I have much smaller system at 5KW/10 KWh, but it still generates more than family of four needs more than half a year each year. I want to get much bigger system on my next house I plan. It all makes so much sense, especially with prices we have in Europe these days.
I only wish combined PV and water panels would be more widely available, you get extra performance from cool solar panels and extra "free" heat to dump into the HW tank, even in winter. Although designing a heat pump system that could : a) cool solar panels b) dump/pull heat into/from a HW tank c) heat/cool house as needed d) dump extra heat outside gives me a headache already
My father is an expert in HVAC technology and I asked him about this video and he had a few thoughts. One thing he mentioned is that the positives mentioned for residential systems are exaggerated a bit, as the cost of the installation of the system doesn't really ever pay for itself because after the the savings catch up, it's already breaking down and costing hundreds if not thousands to fix, completely offsetting any savings it creates. Companies always try to entice us with impressive sounding marketing, but it rarely as perfect as they say. He said it can be good if you can build a home with the system from the start, but if you have a standard system that is already working fine, don't worry about it. For commercial usues it does make a lot of sense though as the higher efficiency is ultilized more effectively for much larger buildings.
The problem with any electronic heat source is the dismal efficient at the power plant where about 2/3 of the heat goes right up the stack. Not counting line losses. 15% 85% of 32% = 28%.
@@suggesttwo Aye, its such a shame that we have absolutely zero other methods of generating power beyond burning fuels, lets just absolutely avoid any methods of generating heat that can avoid it.
@@rjwaters3 I am talking about heating. If we drop the load on the grid you now have power to charge EVs without the grid collapsing. Buying time build renewalables like Tesla battery solar power plants. If we try to jump over the middle steps bad things happen. High rates and low reliability. Solar and wind are much more cost efficient than natural gas. When the infrastructure is built first the expensive coal goes offline, the natural gas lastly natural gas boiler plants. This is going to take a long time.
Matt I'm currently design/building a four family apt building and am exploring ways to potentially be the utility provider for the building. The further I drill down I realized thermal storage is the piece that brings it all together with respect to hvac, hot water, etc. This is a fantastic piece to that puzzle. A further integration/improvement would be adding PVT solar panels to this set up, as the hot water could be dumped in this same water tank / thermal battery to supplement it further. I haven't found a PVT supplier in the US, but there are several abroad; DualSun (FRA), several Chinese, and some Dutch if I recall correctly. A further improvement is using a ground source heat pump (geothermal) vs air source. This is far less practical though per installation and cost though. It's frustrating how much better the options are in the commercial space vs residential, thanks for shedding some light on that. I found the most efficient set up to be a ground-sourced heat pump that, in a multi-unit apt building mind you, could not only heat and cool each space, but also transfer heat/cool from one unit to another (as opposed to from the ground (or air in an air-sourced set up). This is even more efficient than moving from ground/air. Problem is, it requires 3phase electric. Also impractical from an installation/cost perspective.
I have spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about heat pumps and thermal batteries, and now Harvest Thermal does precisely the system I had been imagining for months now. Bless their hearts.
I've done the same. It seems so cumbersome that we don't just unify ALL of our temperature related appliances into one modular system: hot water, cold 'fridge, room heater/cooler, etc, with outside air as a sink for the overall difference AND/OR a varying medium to harness. Wish I could do the thermal math.
@@BillyStanleyIt gets really complicated technically and expensive when you want to run so many things with different goals off one outdoor unit. You're talking about a VRF system essentially, if you were to run refrigerant to each appliance that's adding a lot of failure points, efficiency loss, and complexity. Way more cumbersome to do than individual units I can promise. If you run through water, you can't really do cooling for a refrigerator and not a freezer, it's also going to have a lot of energy loss and waste electricity moving all that water around. Maybe it seems wasteful to have a dedicated refrigerator and whatever else you have that's a heat pump, but they work better that way. Refrigerators, hot water heaters, and air to air heat pumps don't use the same refrigerants. Each refrigerant will give you different in/out temps that they're best at, and the optimal one for the application is used.
Having compressors far away from fridge and freezer could allow for even more silent operation. With how efficient those currently are, I know it won't ever pay for itself, but it might be worth it from a noise pollution standpoint. Plus, it shifts the engineering away from the fridge. It just becomes a box that you plug into a new kind of wiring into the house.
@@TheKdcool The engineering of a fridge is mostly not the compressor, so moving that outside is just an efficiency reduction. You still need electronics in the fridge for control, and a defrost on the coils inside, might even have an electronic expansion valve or refrigerant metering device, plus fans. This is just adding complexity and engineering, a lot of figuring out how to work with a complex VRF outdoor unit and communicate with it. Rather than have a simple, small, and efficient dedicated compressor for an easy closed refrigeration loop. We can already make practically silent refrigerators with inverter systems, you just gotta spend the money, it'd still be less than a fridge hooking up to an outside unit. The copper line set for refrigerant going outside would already cost $500-1000 not including labor to hook it up and purge/vacuum the lines before charging them.
I have a heat pump water heater and we use a heat pump for heating and cooling. Especially living in a hot climate I have often thought about having one heating cooling loop to for example take heat from our fridge and move it into our water heater or even just outside. It has to be better than heating up our house only to have our AC heat pump move it outside.
Being an aussie, I have always questioned… in summer (temps average >25°C) we run our air conditioner (ahem… “heat pump”) to cool the house daily… YET we are simply pumping the heat outside… and we still use gas/electricity to heat our water. Why have we not developed a heat exchanger that it’s on the condenser side of the heat pump (outside)… and when the temp is >25°c… preheat/circulate the heat into our water heaters? Less heating of water required by gas/electricity by using a heat being used-and-dumped into ambient air is just wasteful! I too…am undecided if this would make a difference. I’m not talking about replacing the hot water system (I love my showers too)… I’m talking about a smart system that -like solar hot water- simply heats the water IN CONJUNCTION with the elemental heating. It’s smart use of waster heat. Of course… that’s a mostly Australian problem in summer particularly… I certainly don’t want to reverse-cycle cool my hot water… but there has to be a market for retrofitting a heat exchanger in the condenser section… Food for thought..
I couldn't help noticing the slight echo that appeared when he switched to the new studio. While you could see all the acoustic panels lining the walls, I guess nothing makes up for all the junk that accumulates over 5 years. Considering what happens to empty space in my house, I bet the problem will be fixed in no time.
Air-to-water heat pumps are the standard design in the UK, since HVAC overall is rare. Our summer temperatures have tended never to be high enough to require cooling. Most housing stock uses wall-mounted water-based radiators to provide heating, sometimes augmented by underfloor heating where the flooring is appropriate. The big problem with this setup is that there is no way to bring fresh filtered air into the home. Also, most of the wall-mounted radiators aren't large enough to work well with the low deltas of most air-to-water heat pumps. As such, the journey towards Passive House will be long and arduous for the majority of UK homeowners.
I have worked in the commercial refrigeration space for a a long time with Ammonia refrigerant for ice arenas. For a few years now new arenas have been being built with co2 refrigerant, which at that scale requires a very different maintenance program than ammonia systems.. this is a good deep dive into the tech, I am interested in seeing what the wear and tear in the components is like at the higher pressures, because ammonia is such comparatively low pressure…
It’s going to be a nightmare. Especially in residential applications w/ lines buried in walls. Techs aren’t going to want to work on it for safety reasons. You should know that since most are not willing to work w/ ammonia for the same reason.
@@Bob_Smith19right on there. imagine having to service an unknown system with 2000psi. And the cost to bring out a highly trained and skilled tech will then equal a heart surgeon.
Thanks and very interesting. I head the Swedes were working on CO2 HP several years ago but have not heard of anything until your presentation. I installed a Mitsubishi Mr Slim Zuba Central unit in 2010 and have saved over $22,000 in energy costs since its installation. Two years ago I replaced my 22 year old electric Hot Water tank (domestic hot water) with a Rheem Prestige heat pump hot water tank. It only used 500 kWh last year and my total home energy costs continue to fall and now charge my Leaf at home with no additional household energy use. From what I understand the global warming potential equivalent GWPe of 410a refrigerant is in the thousands so that may be the most attractive aspect of CO2 systems (which of course would only be GWPe of 1). I suspect the problem will be reliability of such high pressure systems and the additional component. But a very interesting potential and thanks for bringing it to light.
I decided to install a WaterFurnace brand geothermal HVAC system in my current home which was built in 1996. For the past 27 years my electric bill has averaged $74 per month for this 1350 ft.² ranch home; there is no other heat source, it’s all electric. As a bonus, the system also heats the hot water in a standard hot water heater. This system is extremely efficient! After 27 years, it is still working flawlessly!
1 relay switch, $45. My HVAC guy for the past 38 years said WaterFurnace was the Cadillac of heat pumps even though his company sold another brand. In addition there is no outside air exchanger to be serviced or replaced. Every 5 years o!@@zodiacfml
As a long time HVAC professional I would choose R-22 first, then R-290. They are very efficient for heat pump service. Perhaps CO2 is better for hot water and some process heat as it can achieve higher temps. Do you know where commercial CO2 comes from? The answer isn't out of the atmosphere.
I worked with a team that put heat pumps into pubs to chill cellars/ heat water. Brilliant idea that needs to be expanded to lots of other areas that need cool products / people and hot water !
The only problem with that is that for a large part of the country something is burned to generate the electricity. But as long as electricity costs remain low the efficiency of a heat pumps is more cost effective.
Definitely going to keep this in mind when I get closer to a heat pump install at the end of next year. My current water heater may only be a few years old, but its a gas unit installed by the prior owner. Running on gas is enough to put it on my "hit list", and doing it at the same time as a heat pump and looping them together in a smart system sounds like it makes a lot of sense to me.
You should check out Nibe F730 exhaust air heat pump. We have been running ours for two years now. It's about the size of a large fridge and does all of our heating (we have underfloor heating in the slab downstairs and upstairs) all of the water heating AND storage (240 litres) and all of our ventilation and heat recovery. Our house is a 5 bedroom two story in Dublin Ireland.
> Environmentalists always yearn to destroy existing, useful equipment NOW, because they want people to install the latest fashions they are creating now. That goes whether it's a coal fired power plant or as here, a gas water heater. Of course, no one counts the cost of wasting useful equipment. It's just a SURPRISE when energy costs keep going up! But that old equipment still has to be paid for, one way or another.
I just had a SANCO2 heat pump water heater installed replacing a 21 year old natural gas water heater. It's powered with a PV system I installed 2 years ago plus net metering. I have a separate heat pump for my HVAC which replaced a 18 year old natural gas furnace and 14 SEER AC. I haven't had an electric bill in two years other than rhe monthly customer charge. ECO2 makes is a great product and helped train the installers it as was the first installation of a SanCO2 in my area.
One of the biggest annoyances with heat pumps in general is that they are almost always tied to installation providers. I have been trying to find data sheets and price listings for heat pumps, especially here in Europe, for a while now and it's almost impossible to find just the compressor unit and a heat exchanger unit prices, even for large manufacturers like Mitsubishi. I don't get this whole situation either, because you can just buy a mini split and install it yourself, but the moment it gets above 5 tons in capacity or thereabouts the listings just vanish it seems.
Not sure if I fully understood your problem but.... Well, actually you can't. There are s lot of countries in Europe where for safety reasons you can't buy a heat pump if you don't have an authorised installer to do it. You can't do it yourself. I don't know if this is the case in all European countries but it happens at least in some.
If you want home insurance you will get a pro to do the install. Also, for a CO2 system you have to be certified to do the actual lines given the temperatures and pressures involved. CO2 is not that toxic but copper shrapnel is never good.@@TheAllMightyGodofCod
I notice that too. Over here in Australia, all the prices and units are available online or even in electrical stores for anyone to purchase. So you can choose your own and then must get an installer to install it.
Take a Remko heatpump for heating and cooling, install it yourself room to room. Let your old heating system stand, where it is and use it as a backup. That is a practical and rather cheap solutions for many people. Greetings from Germany
@@TheAllMightyGodofCod Shit like this is never for safety reasons, but it is almost always for price gouging reasons (the third reason is the wild flukes where something stupid gets enacted despite everyone's objections). This type of approach cannot ensure safety in principle, since the licensing ultimately comes down to paying to the right people, with the ability to actually do it safely being sidelined. It's like the John Deere thing where they go out of their way to make you unable to repair your own farm equipment, but pretend it's for safety reasons. They actually cite things like "otherwise farmers may increase the horsepower of their tractors". Yeah god forbid they add 50 bhp so their tractor can go 2 mph faster, that would be a safety disaster. Anyone who uses "it's for your safety" arguments are always full of shit and are simply trying to manipulate you to get their way (which mind you is at your own expense).
What I find frustrating is that I can't buy a system that dumps excess heat from rooms which are too hot into a hot water tank and rooms which are too cold. The smallest heat recovery systems are way too big for a 3 bedroom house. While we have the technology to make our homes far more efficient than they are now, no-one is selling systems small enough to make use of that technology, so my option seems to be two systems, one pumping heat outside for cooling, and another pumping heat inside for hot water. That can't be more efficient than a single system that pumps heat inside into the water directly.
The issue with CO2 is that it requires 1500 to 2600 PSI to work. This mean that the compressor will need 3 stages and that it would also require stainless steel lines making it extremely expensive.
I have seen a demonstration of a "small" unit in a HVAC convention called MCEE this year and it was able to operate at 1770 psi with only 2 stages. But you are right about the price: the lines were made of thick steel with top of the line insulation.
The fact that these are already in widespread use elsewhere in the world suggests that its not really that much of an issue. The biggest issue for this or any similar tech is defeating the fossil fuel propaganda campaign. Compared to that, the engineering is a cake walk.
CO2 heat pumps already exist. The technology is there and has been for decades. It's not cheap, but it is not super expensive either. Due to the better efficiency they are cheaper to run.
@@altrag There is no fossil fuel propaganda campaign.. People simply compare the pro vs con between the working system they currently use and the proposed system... even if so many people hate fossil fuels the truth is they actually work and do so fairly efficiently and at affordable price ranges.
Propane/butane are about the most efficient commonly available refrigerant. My current home geothermal pumps are 410, have had 22 in the past. CO2 can be made to work, but isn't the most efficient refrigerant. Air source heat pumps can also be made to work, but if you have well water geothermal can run COPs into the teens. Ammonia is efficient, has been commonly used in industry, but a leak can kill you.
The other challenge with CO2 refrigerant that I think Harvest is addressing is that it has a narrow range of input water temperatures at which it can work efficiently. They really want to take in relatively cold water and put it out piping hot. We have a large radiant heating system in our house, and were trying very hard to find a way to use the Mitsubishi CO2 heat pumps in our electrification project. Unfortunately, simply using a large buffer tank would mean that the water going back in to the heat exchanger would be too warm for the sweet spot of the CO2 unit.
I agree with your statement of the problem, but I don't see how Harvest can solve it. Every SANCO2 DHW system has a tank; every DHW heater, gas or heat pump, has a storage tank/"thermal battery". And for best COP it has to be carefully stratified with only 10C cold water into the bottom of the tank/ into the heat pump. Once you mix in return from _any_ space heat emitter (central ducted hydronic coil, fancoil or even low temp radiant flooring), your input temp into the heat pump goes way up and your COP goes kablooey. Hope I'm missing something, because I don't see how any algorithm controlled manifold can get around physics.
I installed a Sandon CO2 heat pump, hot water heater several years ago. Then tracked the energy consumption with a Sense monitor. It does have a time of use control in the menu. I have it set from 9 AM to 9 PM. The other half of the day the hot water heater does not turn on thus primarily using the solar energy from our system during the day. Unfortunately, the water from the tank, circulates through the outside unit, so it needs freeze protection. This is done with a thermostat. Whenever the outside air temperature dips below 39° the unit turns on and circulates hot water to protect from freezing and heats the entire 80 gallon tank to the setpoint several times per night thus defeating the time of use shut off. Our winter, low temperatures dip into the single digits, fairly often. The point of these details is to say a bit more than half of the electricity used by the Sanden heat pump during the six month cold season is for freeze protection. The COP during half the year is cut in half to about a COP of two. This is still twice as good as an electric resistance, hot water heater but the expense of the Sanden is far more than the added Solar Panels that would be needed to run an electric resistance, hot water heater. In the houses I design now I use point of use electric tankless water heaters. This not only gives instant hot water, but it saves the wasted water and heat from the residual hot water left in the pipe, running from the mechanical room. Plus they range from $100-$200 apiece far less than the $6000 for the Sanden. Finally, I do like the concept of using CO2 as a refrigerant.
I love your videos, We just built a new house last year And we use our air to water heat pump Overnight to heat our slab, And we have a large buffer tank in case we need a bump throughout the day. These systems cost more money up front But it's a guarantee return in the long run and typically results in a more comfortable home.
Propane heat pumps have a lot more potential for domestic use. The components are still cheap and they are more efficient than traditional refrigerant heat pumps. As long as manufacturers meet the product safety requirements for propane products, then there is no safety hazard.
I believe R12a which is a mix of R290/R600a (Propane/iso-Butane) is a direct replacement for the current refrigerants without the environmental and handling requirements with freon.
I love how it starts out "more efficient by some calculations" Which means they have not actually built one that is more efficient.Thinking that puts CO2 in the pump will NOT reduce CO2 by any appreciable amount. This is green selling
This is actually super interesting, especially for cold climates where choosing when to pump heat to a thermal storage unit could be highly beneficial. For instance, have the heat pump take heat from the water heater at night while the outside is at its coldest would probably be better than running electric resistance heating. You could also heat up the water heater during the day which would be better since outside air temperatures would be higher. Of course, this is assuming that a typical water heater could store enough heat energy to keep a house warm all night (which I am doubtful of), but the same concept could be used with other thermal masses.
A 100 gallon hot water tank holds 800 pounds of water, so by heating that to 130F (the highest that a heat pump can heat the water before the COP starts to fall) and you need to have 100F water to warm the air in your home, then you can store 30 F X 800 pounds, or 24,000 Btu's of usable heat. So basically nothing when compared to a 75,000 BTU per hour furnace. I installed a 48,000 Btu heat pump in my 1,800 square foot home in 2014, it is 14 SEER Goodman single speed heat pump. If I had selected cooling only, then a 30,000 BTU would work great in Portland Oregon, yet I live in a all electric home, so need the heat pump to make about 30,000 Btu's at 20F outside (the record low temperature that we get here). So I never hooked up my back up electric heater, and the Goodman unit has worked fine for 10 years now. It really does not take much more energy to remove heat from the 45F daytime air than the 30F night time air. So storing a little bit of heat in the water heater is less efficient than heating the air as you need to warm it.
I've spent some time doing some preliminary design for combined solar/heat pump systems. One of the problems is that in a lot of environments (such as here in the temperate part of Australia) the need for cooling in summer is similar to the need for heating in winter. So automatically a heat storage only solves part of the problem. You ideally need a cold storage and that can make things more complex. Or you just end up with more conventional air source heat exchangers. Speaking of which (and I'll let you in in a secret here). A lot of the cost in a conventional heat pumps owes to the fact that you need expensive metals (copper, aluminium) and you're both trying to contain high pressure refrigerant (thickness) and you need lots of surface area to get heat to/from air (overall size). That's why regular air cons are so heavy and why they skimp on COP to save cost. On the other hand, if you use water as an intermediate heat transfer fluid - and water has vastly more heat capacity than air - then you can create a much smaller (and cheaper) heat exchanger to operate between the high pressure refrigerant and the low pressure water. That still requires metals, but its a lot smaller. You still need big heat exchangers to create the surface area to get heat to/from the air, but in this case you're dealing with low pressures and cheaper materials.
I have a goal to transition to a water cooled heat pump based system that can make hot water and possibly dump the energy from my house into a hot water tank and or a swimming pool. Living in Arizona desert this makes a lot of sense to me. I already run my home off of air source heat pumps and have a heat pump water heater but combining them and using CO2 as the refrigerant makes a lot of sense.
In 09 I was living in a building with 22 apartments. We made some major renovations to our central heating system supplied by the city. Both the heat in the winter and the hot water provided by the city were expensive. I proposed to my neighbours to install a heat pump that in the summer would give us hot water and central air conditioning while in the winter it would take care of the heating. Although the initial investment might have seem high, it would have recovered our costs within 5 years, they refused. So I went and installed air conditioning with heat pump for me alone with just air heating and cooling, no hot water, ended up recovering my investment in 2 years. Everything after that was a profit to this day. It's at my mom's place. I fail to understand why people refuse to make a short term effort to capitalize on a very big profit on the long term!
The downside of CO2 that was missed or skipped over is its tenancy to freeze into a solid (dry ice) under normal atmospheric conditions. In a refrigerant heat pump, you want to compress a gas into a liquid expelling heat and then in a different place expand the liquid back to a gas absorbing heat. With CO2 that expansion has enough cooling potential under 1 to several atmospheres of pressure will cool and freeze the liquid CO2. In pipes this clogs and stops the system. Running under much higher temperatures and pressures will eliminate this issue but create new risks and costs. Otherwise, CO2 has a lot of great properties and I hope the new engineering can mitigate those issues.
Yah. The SanCO2 runs the loop at 600 to 1600 psi. No other risks though, the loop is really small and entirely enclosed in the outside unit. There are no external refrigerant lines at all. Just cost... but again, since the loop is entirely enclosed its hard to mess it up. Which also means the unit comes pre-charged.
CO2 works west inherit pumps at pressures of 1000pi or higher. At this pressure and normal atmospheric temperatures we live in the CO2 will not freeze i the pipes.
You can do the same thing with regular heat pumps. They already do in fact heat grocery stores with the exchange heat from their freezers they remove the heat using water and then heat building in the winter and hot water in the summer
Everything’s about to change indeed, but congratulations on moving into your new set up. You 1000% deserve it. Thanks for being such a powerful voice and for sharing so many technologies that literally give me enough hope to sleep at night. You have such a positive impact in my life and remind me why I work hard to be a voice in my own community even if it’s just internal in my corporate world. Every little bit matters 💚
I would think that space heating with 90C water heated from a heat pump would be inefficient. Given an outdoor air temperature of -15C, the maximum COP a heat pump could achieve when heating to 90C is 3.46. When heating directly to a more typical space heating temperature of 30C, max theoretical COP jumps to 6.74. There's lots of other variables here of course: Not all of your hot water heating is at 90C; heating it from lower temperatures is more efficient. Also TOU electricity rates, day/night temperature fluctuation, and effective operating temperature range of your refrigerant.
One of the biggest issues with CFC’s was the decision to use it for deodorant, air dusters, hair spray, inhalers - etc. AC is a closed system and is not supposed to be dumped in the atmosphere. I’m so glad we are seeing new technology, but I strongly hope we can develop a standard as all the constant changes in refrigeration gas is making it far worse to manage. For example, 410a, 134 are great solutions - yet we now want to push it out because of greenhouse risk. Let’s manage what we have and be smart about how we manage the use. The final comment is to say - this has to become affordable.
I would be concerned about getting a CO2 system serviced. Until (or unless) it reaches a point at which it is widely supported by regular HVAC contractors I’m going to keep with the reasonably efficient Trane heat pump I already have installed.
Yes. It’s manipulative or poorly-informed when people point out environmental issues with refrigerants and fail to mention this. Handling and disposing of it is intensely regulated.
My question is... With standard heat pump systems their efficiency goes down in climates with cold winters; do these CO² perform better in an St Paul, Chicago or Buffalo region during these freezing temperatures? I live more in SW Indiana, but our winters are generally more mild, generally.
I've never understood why thermal mass and water heating aren't standard features in a heat pump system. There's huge compounding benefits by having the units work together and could be a packaged unit.
Probably the usual suspect: Cost. Simpler units cost less. Each additional component will add cost and complexity to a product. It has to be made and installed cheaply enough for 1, the upfront costs to be accessible, and 2, for it to be worth it over the products lifespan.
well...there is also always a risk when you lay additional pipes with pressurized water... it's relatively easier to push the air around... also I guess there is a space consideration... you need space for the thermal mass... a lot of homes in the US have water heaters with tanks... but most other places use tankless water heaters to save space...
@@porcorosso4330 take a packaged unit and make the base a water tank that is in line to the primary water heater. Have the bottom of the tank a heat exchanger so the heat from cooling preheats the water. Wouldn't take up that much space other then the unit sitting a bit higher and the water heater in the house is getting preheated water vs ground temp.
@@porcorosso4330 it you have a packaged unit and it sits on a tank for its pad that is 3x3x2ft that's over 100 gallons of water you could be pre heating.
My local supermarket has a CO2 cooling system, which pumps the heat to the district heating network. So the same energy that is used to keeping the groceries cool also helps keeping my house warm / giving me warm water for showering. That's a win-win.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, ideas and videos. Will definitely have to keep an eye on harvest thermal. Sounds like a great idea, I’ve been pondering if there was a mini split system with several inside units and one external that would be able to take advantage of the various heat levels in your house and optimize its use, the missing component I wasn’t finding was the heat reservoir that harvest thermal seems to have come up with. Definitely will need a bit more research on my point. Not everyone wants a bedroom at the same temperature, hotter or colder and with the newer tighter homes, you introduce heat from cleaning typically be it clothes, dishes, or your shower. And then adjust the air conditioning to pull it back out. Would be great to be able to recycle the BTUs from cooling back into a centralized heating solution. New studio look great BTW, love the color scheme of both. Hope you keep the stuff on the shelf backdrop, always entertaining whenever the subjects inevitably get a little dry and keep the mind involved in the situation rather than bolting in a different direction. Wishing you and your family the best.
Gas fired appliances do not have a COP. The “.93” efficiency you quoted is a combustion efficiency which relates to how complete the combustion process is i.e. 1 or 100% equals complete combustion and the value can never go higher. Combustion efficiency and COP cannot be directly compared. When analyzing different system types I typically compare their dollar cost per delivered BTU.
Fair callout about the technical differences. I still think it’s a fair comparison though because it’s still about how effective they convert their energy source into heat energy for the home. An electric heater is effectively the same as gas (best case 1:1 for energy units in for heat units out). Heat pumps are the only technology that stretch beyond that 1:1 limit.
No, the comparison of C02 heat pump versus gas fired using COP numbers makes absolutely no sense. It just leads me to suspect any other numbers you tout as real. Also I think you were referring to those electric heaters placed within close range to bathroom showers in apartments that have no space for heater tanks or access to gas pipes. They are infamous for being extremely energy inefficient. The energy inefficiency is due to having to use electricity to immediately heat the water in an instant, versus water tanks that slowly heats the tank of water over time.
Since I felt it necessary to post on your previous video about how it felt like an advertisement rather than a proper review, I wanted to comment that this video felt more like your regular content. The reason that I watch your content is to learn new things, and I have always appreciated that you take a balanced look, informing of the good and the bad. Thank you!
I feel the same. Actually I open this video with the intention to see if it was "just another advert" if it was, I would unsubscribe to the channel. I was happy it wasn't.
nice find. I have no idea about this until now. with my quick read on the internet, CO2 is indeed superior in all ways except cost. It requires multiple times higher pressure vs common refrigerant so the equipment does indeed require to be beefier. Once you have the beefy equipment, it is most likely too good for residential use which is the reason one company in the video would use a thermal battery to harvest or store the excess performance of the CO2 system. In short, CO2 heat pump is best for commercial industrial use.
I've had my CO2 heat pump hot water system running for a few years now and it's been brilliant. Based on my usage it takes about 2 hours to warm up the water on a daily basis and it runs at around noon when my solar system is running at peak, so effectively getting hot water at virtually zero operational cost.
If you are using solar it almost certainly better to add an extra panel and use a plain electric water heater. They make models that last for 50 years whereas heat pump water heaters only last 15 years. The money difference is just too great to justify the heat pump version.
@@Jason821821 I've got solar already and my home came with a gas heater that was on its last legs. The resistive heating was no longer an option and we get huge rebates on the heat pump here so it was a no brainer decision.
And since this uses about 3 times less energy to heat, I personally rather use the excess solar to power something else. Like home heating or cooling which uses a lot more energy, especially in winter when solar doesn't generate anywhere near enough to power both.
Someone needs to really modularize this whole system. Like Heat Pump + Water Heater + certain times of the year dump the excess AC heat into your swimming pool + Ground Source Loop, etc. Then stick a smart controller in front of it all so it always picks the best source for AC/Heat and stores the right amount of excess between water heater vs battery from solar, etc. My biggest issue with all of it is I already live in a Franken-house, and it's far easier and way cheaper to just keep putting bandaids on it rather then rip out large chunks of infra and replace with something better. Especially since I won't be here in 10 years, so payback savings are basically non existent.
The problems with videos like this is that they always promote higher technology as an improvement. And sometimes it is. Unfortunately, today's new technology is pushing initial costs ever higher, while the increased complexity is guaranteeing more maintenance and reliability problems throughout the life of the equipment. This is further aggravated by today's manufacturers lacking the desire to spend the money to fully test their products before throwing them out into the market. The final nail in the coffin is the marketing job colleges and universities have spent the last 30 years pushing on us, which has caused a HUGE shortage of people going into the skilled trades. Without highly skilled technicians, these more complex and higher-maintenance products will never get the proper maintenance and repair work needed to offset their increased complexity, thus creating a perfect storm for consumers. And this completely ignores the problem that occurs when the chip your circuit board requires can only be sourced from one place on earth, and there's a global event that stops product of that chip for a time... So yes, higher technology can often deliver lower energy usage. But if the end result is significantly shorter lifespans for equipment, aggravation, and higher replacement and repair costs, was it worth it?
Well, you are posing a "what if" question and then asking if your "what is" makes something worth it. The problem with that is that your "what if" might not reflect reality. While technology does impose costs, particularly for first movers, those costs rapidly drop as the technology enters production scale and mass adoption. As to whether it is worth it or not... we're talking about getting rid of a fairly large amount of natural gas consumption and replacing it with four small solar panels (or one large residential panel) worth of electricity. Yah, its worth it. So the only question you really should be asking is whether you, personally, want to be a first-mover, or wait for mass adoption and dropping costs before you switch.
@@junkerzn7312He hit the nail on the head about qualified technicians. The HVAC industry hasn’t had enough techs in well over thirty years. There are less people going into it every year. And the ones that are usually bottom of the barrel. But what do I know. I’ve only been in the industry for 30+ years and have been responsible for hiring for over 20 of them. No skilled technician means your high tech equipment won’t be working for long.
We installed Sanden CO2 heat pumps (Japanese, COP rating 5.2 ) on our house a few years ago and have been very happy with them. They feed hot water to a tank that is used for both domestic hot water and hydronic floor heating. Fortunately we do not have any cooling needs in our climate.
If you're going to say that CO2 is actually better than other refrigerants, it might have been nice to spend a couple seconds actually displaying a comparison between the most common instead of just quoting a metric. Sounds interesting, hope to see more about this in the future.
Very cool! It seems like a solar hot water heater would be a good addition to a system like this. I've always been amazed that we spend so much money essentially creating heat or cooling instead of simply moving it from place to place. A fridge next to a stove has always been an embarrassing proof of our lack of development.
There are these hybrid solar panels called PVT that have the heat exchanger on the back of a pv panel. Really cool tech. Add in a subterranean part of the exchanger loop so you can tap into the ground as well
Well, the fridge and the stove do a very very good job at insulating… at least with quality appliances. So it’s not a huge concern. Actually maybe the rear of the fridge should face the oven just to really keep the hot together 😂
I was just poking around their page (unfortunately it looks like they are only in California right now) but their FAQ says they work well with solar panels but not with solar thermal. Doesn't say why. Maybe they just don't want something else using the heat battery that they have to manage on their end. A whole-house integrated system would be great, but.. there are reasons why we can't have nice things ;D
Thank you for making this video. This is exactly the kind of technology I was looking for for my home. It is really hard to find good (less biased) information on heat pumps / heating solutions here in America. This one makes a ton of sense.
@tofulnc you are exactly right. The equipment that is needed to withstand the pressures of c02 refrigeration is much harder to design and implement. Stainless steel tubing and fittings. Large compressors. I don’t see this tech ever being implemented in the residential space. Maybe commercial at some point.
So, I work in the industry. Co2 is definitely the future, but it'll be slow going. It's gaining widespread use in commercial settings, especially refrigeration applications. However, as of now, it's much more expensive. There is a huge amount of safeties used to keep the units from becoming a literal bomb, and the copper piping is actually an alloy with (I believe) steel. It's about twice as heavy and actually magnetic. CO2 is probably the best future refrigerant we've got right now, it'll just be a slow roll out.
Indeed, the high pressures are the hurdle for cheaper retail/commercial systems. It's sucks now if you end up in a front end collision that breaks the condenser. Now add some more stored energy to the possible downside.
The refrigerant loop in the SanCO2 is also very short and entirely enclosed in the outside unit. There are no external refrigerant lines at all. Instead, a water loop is piped from the steel hot water tank through the outside unit.and back into the steel hot water tank. So even if the refrigerant loop were to rupture, it wouldn't do much damage if any. Just no gas volume to do damage with.
@@junkerzn7312 that's good to know, so it's basically a water source heat pump, just using the water heater as your condenser water loop. That's cool to know, I'm more used to seeing large rack style systems for grocery stores converting from older refrigerants. The savings they see with Co2 is absolutely bonkers. It's so much more efficient.
While you're at it with videos about heat pumps - have you heard of "LAMBDA Wärmepumpen"? They're a relatively new, Austrian company manufacturing propane heat pumps with some very interesting technical tweaks. Apparently their pumps can run at just 3°C delta to ambient air versus the typical 8°-9° (a big advantage in winter) while still outputting a COP of >5.5 at 55°C target temperature. Most normal heat pumps struggle to get that kind of COP at 35°C. It doesn't look like they have an English language website, but maybe if you contact them directly they can give you some info :)
I understand that CO2 does well with heating via a heatpump system, but how does it do for cooling? and can a fridge/freezer also work with CO2 as a refrigerant?
Heating or cooling wouldn't be a problem for CO2. I'm question the number COP numbers. Also don't see any gain from store the heat in hot water as well.
It's has the ability to cool to lower temperatures than other commercially used gasses for heat pumps, the disadvantage is that it needs specialised compressors and much thicker piper work and heat exchanges for the high pressure. Advantage over other heat pumps is it can directly heat beyond 65C, so above critical temp to kill legionnaires, other heat pumps can only heat to about 48c and need an electric element to do the rest for safety, so they drop efficiency. The higher heat temperatures mean water is easier, but also needed because it functions as a way of using an 80c heat source to heat a home to room temperature.
Seems great for the southwest, but here in the PNW, we're only cooling maybe two months out of the year, and even then, only for a few hours a day. So, we wouldn't get the energy benefit of the hot water heater.
Most power plants are only 32% efficient (not counting line losses) because they are boiler plants. Therefore a heat pump needs to have an efficiency of 300% in order have the same carbon footprint as a natural gas heaters for heating. 600% if the power comes from a coal power plant.
Burning things is a cheap way to produce heat, yes... with the downside of outputting huge amounts of pollution. If the only specification is to heat water as cheaply as possible, a natural gas water heater with a desuperheater is incredibly efficient. But that's not the only specification that matters. And if the heat pumps can be powered by solar or wind, this setup becomes a very efficient carbon-neutral system.
This isn't entirely true, many plants easily exceed 32% efficiency, and increasingly power generation is being done by power plants that produce no CO2 (wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, even nuclear is still kicking around). Any given heat pump also continues improving as the power mix shifts to lower carbon production, whereas a gas furnace always emits the same CO2 (actually it can wind up emitting more CO2 depending on the gas source since a lot of gas wells directly emit trapped CO2 as well). Heat pumps are also not just displacing gas furnaces, they're also displacing space heaters, which are using that same electricity at much lower efficiencies. And under most circumstances they can easily beat an effective efficiency of 300%.
@@bosstowndynamics5488 A power plant powdered by a natural gas gas turbine engine is up to 63%. 2020. The most inefficient natural gas furnace I have ever seen was 67%. Internal Combustion engines are way more efficient than steam. It's 88 years old now. Do you know it costs twice as much to generate electricity with coal as natural gas? Steam. I had to look that up. No one talks about that. Or LED lighting. The only country to ever hit Paris Accord targets was the USA under President Trump. Methane natural gas has CH4 produces 1 CO2 and 2 water molecules when burning and natural gas appliances have the highest energy conversion efficiency. Convert an electric furnace to a high efficiency natural gas furnace and produce 1/6 the CO2 to heat the building. If it wasn't online... the baseline load drops, which ones will they turn off and close? As for the 32%, that's average. But some are upto 63%. But that's peak. China builds lots of coal plants. To bad JT and JB are doing thier best to squeeze out natural gas. (and oil)
@@yolo_burritoyes upto 64% from 63%, the peak efficiency. But most power plants are still coal and natural gas fired boilers. A natural gas gas turbine engine with a steam engine heated by the exhaust gasses. With a duel turbine.
From what you've said it sounds like these may be better for heating in cold environments than cooling in hot? Unless maybe they can dump the heat from cooling the house into the water tank
Good luck with the new home Matt! It's nice to see someone practice what they preach. May you have many years of great content ahead for all of us to enjoy. Cheers!
I think there is huge potential for CO2 heatpumps for large refrigerant/heatpump setups as on a large scale. It is almost impossible to prevent leakages on a large scale and many refrigerants are potent greenhouse gases or harmful for the environment in general. With CO2, a little leakage isn't a huge problem, a system slightly leaking over a year likely wouldn't produce more CO2 than a person driving to work with a gas engine vehicle over the course of a week. It might even be economical for systems, especially large ones, to have some sort of system for collecting their own CO2 to replenish themselves from the air around them, thus making them carbon neutral (not counting however they get their energy).
I have the same interest. Being in Texas, where we just experienced 75 days of 100F (38C) or higher temperatures, good cooling efficiency would be essential here.
@@se777en73120 co2 refrigerant is in "supercritical state" when compressed 8:23 , so cooling efficiency increase as temeperature decrease, so colling mode works only in cold countries -spring season, not works in place like dubai saudi qatar, but there is another way to make this work by using other refrigerant along with co2 (cascade refrigeration)
I added a hybrid heat pump when I did a renovation. That said, there is no temperature where it is cheaper to heat my house using electric over the gas "back up" line. I am not arguing efficiency - I am only talking cost to me. Once gas prices rise or electric prices drop, I will happily switch to the heat pump only mode.
I’m hoping for the day when all our heating and cooling needs are served by a heat pump network in the home. Imagine if AC, pool, refrigerator, freezer, water heater etc were all interconnected. Maybe one day :)
I've thought about this for a long time. With the new multi-head heat pumps it's not too much of a stretch. LG can actually do it most of it with their Multi V line with a hydro kit.
Co2 could be the answer for uk style hot water central heating system. Traditional heat pumps operate at too low temperature to suit existing hot water systems but if co2 heat pumps can heat to 60’c needed for these systems. This means not having to upsize radiators & keep the same units. Possible good solution for uk housing stock going net zero / replacing gas combi-boilers.
What you said makes no sense. If CO2 heat pumps have a lower COP, why would you choose CO2 over conventional with all other factors the same? Saying storage makes it more efficient makes no sense because you could use the same storage with conventional heats pumps.
Where I live in Europe (Spain) heat pumps are the most common air conditioning units. They, however, are not used for heating even though they have the capability. This is because heating is usually done by on-demand type gas boilers in each unit because they a a bit less expensive to operate and the construction style here is much more conducive to running pipes for hot water radiators rather than ducts for forced air heat. The most common units use R32 for their refrigerant. This is because it is the least expensive option and the installers recommend what they are most familiar with (new tech adoption can be a little slow here). I have seen some new CO2 units being installed in new construction on more commercial uses. I saw a SANCO2 unit going in on one, but did not know what it was and why it was different. Keep up the good work and I am looking forward to the next video from your new studio.
I am thinking that your climate probably leads to considerably more air-conditioning demand than heating demand measured on an annual basis. It may be more economically viable to just use natural-gas heating to cover the relatively small heating demand in winter.
Yes, but there are limits as to how many heads on unit can support. Heating a seven-room apartment on say the 5th floor will require multiple units or are too large to hang on an outside wall and are cost prohibitive.@@percyfaith11
I wish I had known about CO2 heat pumps when we were adding solar to our house, because we replaced out standard electric cool and gas heat furnace with a Freon heat pump.
"C02 won't explode" -- Not from fire. But from pressures, sure it can. If you go from solid to gas, or liquid to gas, in a container that can't handle the pressures. it will. You yourself stated in the beginning that "due to high pressures you need specialized equipment" and the high pressures was why they didn't use it in the first place. What do you think the specialized equipment are for? (you don't need fire for an explosion).
Tesla uses R1234yf. Lower pressures give critocal weight, reliablity and N, V, H advantages over CO2, but it is mildy flamable - which is more of an issue for ICE
I’ll be building a home in southern Nevada and have been looking into the most efficient ways to do everything from cooling the house to heating the water by using water to cool PV panels and storing that heated water for use later. It’s a daunting task to say the least. I wish there was a single place I could go to find all the resources for green living in a desert.
Here in new zealand, most heatpumps were changed from coming with r410, to r32. I have recently changed my 3 from r410 to m60, which is an HCr, which i did wonder how safe it would be if something went wrong. But i was surprised to learn a few days ago that - R32 will detonate, given the right circumstances (See the Tokyo University Report) . H C Refrigerants don’t detonate(note detonate is a huge order above burn or explode). ps- change reduced my (winter) heating energy usage by approx 15% ). So i find the idea of co2 good, as it should be a lot safer than others, (i assume) - was my trade for around 40 years.
Another concern with newer technology is when things break, you might be without for months while parts are sourced. This has been a huge issue with high efficiency HVAC units the last few years.
We used Co2 refrigerant for the cooling the cargo of ships in the 1950’s but the compressors had to be very heavy duty due to the pressure required. Also the dangers of leakage.
I’ve worked on CO2 racks in grocery stores here in the US. It’s a great way for stores to keep their GWP numbers down as CO2 has a GWP of 1 and all other refrigerants are much higher.
As an Engineer, I can state with authority that CFCs are designed for, and better at making phase changes at appropriate temp and pressure. And look! The ozone layer didn’t vanish, any more than Miami went underwater back in 2020 from climate change. CO2 isn’t optimal in most climates
Compare the pressure temperature charts of R744 (co2 refrigerant) to the common R410A refrigerants used in your home. “Higher pressure” is a bit of an understatement. Using water to transfer heat is a requirement to contain that beast. I also find it unlikely you’ll only be paying 2x as much to have it installed in a home even if their marketing is based on the most expensive competitive equipment installed by the most expensive contractor.
For people saying 2000 psi is too much, typical home pressure washers are between 1000-4000 PSI, the fuel rail in your direct injection gas car is 2000-3000psi and for diesel engines it's between 2000 - 30,000 psi. Yes 30,000 PSI. The biggest benefit of CO2 being used as a refrigerant is that it's dirt cheap and you don't have to worry about it being 'phased' out, special recovery systems, etc. Releasing to the atmosphere is basically inconsequential. It's a technology in its infancy but give it a few decades and it can easily supplant all the other refrigerants.
CO2 is not the only competitor in the race to environmental-friendly refrigerants. Ammonia was already widely used in commericial food refrigeration, and propane is making its way into small refrigerators and AC units for its low material and low liquidation pressure. Technology Connections had also made a video on his small fridge that uses propane.
I might be missing something, but I thought CO2 wasn't suitable as a refrigerant because it tends to turn to a solid when it gets really cold? Basically it turns into dry ice and would not work in a traditional compressor style system. Legacy refrigerants are preferable because they can change state from a gas to a liquid and is able to mix with oil to keep the compressor lubricated and cooled.
1:45: 90 Celsius? That will take you skin off in about a second. I have my heatpump water heater set to 45 Celsius. Perfect, and I don't get scalded. But, that's the key to "heat harvesting", using the higher CO2 working temperatures to heat water to much higher temperatures. That translates into more energy per liter of water, and a more useful temperature for heating.
I’ve had a heat pump in the last two EVs I’ve leased: Hyundai Ioniq Electric & Kia Niro EV. It’s a drastic decrease in energy use compared to past hybrid/gasoline cars I’ve leased. Which makes it even better for camping/Utility Mode/Dog-Mode. The only other EV company using heat pumps is Tesla.
here in EU heat pumps are already sought after and they can reach COP of 3-4-5-6 -> 5-6 if you optimize your home and make it as a passive house standard (something americans barely have a few such houses
So do you think CO2 heat pumps, like what Harvest Thermal is putting together are the future of heating our homes? Go to brilliant.org/Undecided/ and get 20% off your subscription and a 30 day free trial with Brilliant.org!
Correction: 3:26 Should have said "Gas burner efficiency" - it's not a COP
If you liked this, check out Why This NASA Battery May Be The Future of Energy Storage ua-cam.com/video/2zG-ZrC4BO0/v-deo.html
The studio in your new house needs more sound dampening.
You talked about its heating abilities. As a person living in Florida, cooling is a little more important. Tho i do need a good heat unit but i need a good cooler more.
I'd compare this complex bit of kit to a batch solar water heater.
I agree. May want to play with the sound in there a little. Has a little bit of an echo and the mic pick up was a little off.@@pranavid
I’m sure Matt is constantly working on sound and everything else. On the CO2 side, these units would have to prove themselves. I’m not sold on them yet. If a unit is to pay itself off in 5-10 years then it should carry a warranty for that length of time. The problem is when people give out these estimates they are not taking into mind potential breakdowns, and everything else that goes into the systems while/after they’re installed. To me, heat pumps are usually more problematic than standard ways of heating. But then again, I also live in New York, not for much longer, and by 2030 any new heating device installed in a house has to be a heat pump. America could phase out all CO2 emissions and it still would not make a dent in the CO2 being released by the rest of the world. So we wind up being example setters, and not making any difference. In other words, we incur the cost and all we do is make people feel good about themselves. I’m sorry that’s not a good enough reason. Also, if this channel is about Matt, being undecided, he should rewrite what he is saying to kind of fit that narrative. When he brings these new technologies to the board, it sounds like he’s already sold on them.
To put into context old heat pumps used R22 that had a high side pressure just above 200psi, current heat pumps use R410a which have a high side pressure just under 400psi. CO2 would have a high side pressure above 1500psi for a residential heat pump or 1700psi to 2100psi in a water heating application. R134a which is currently used in heat pump water heaters has a high side pressure around 200psi.
That is a significant pressure increase. The higher the pressure the higher the failure rate on these systems. When R22 was phased out and manufactures started using R410a the leak rate on systems increased exponentially. Due to the complexity of the heat pump water heaters it's not economical to service them when they have a leak. Even when they are under warranty the manufacture opt to replace them.
Instead of always chasing efficiency, maybe we should take a step back and look at the waste stream we are creating. It takes a significant amount of energy and resources to build these. So if we are replacing the unit 2 to 3 times in the lifetime of a single less efficient unit are we really saving anything?
Something else to consider here is that the refrigerant itself is a key factor in the environmental cost of a refrigeration system. The global warming potential of hydrocarbon refrigerants is hundreds of times higher than CO2. And the higher peak energy consumption means more resources consumed on back end infrastructure (larger/more transmission lines, more generators, more grid scale energy storage hardware etc etc).
It's not as simple as just looking at the monetary cost of the endpoint hardware and its longevity on their own.
200psi makes quite a bang, never mind 2000...
Stop with that global warming nonsense. We are still coming out of the tail end of an ice age according to scientists.
This hit me as a big red flag so thanks for taking the time to elaborate. I managed a lot of commercial property in Arizona, so almost all some form of heat pump tech. Lots of calls from what commonly ended up being issues with the compressor or giving it enough power.
How does a company stay in business. By selling what it makes. The shorter the life span the more they make. You only get to use the gasoline in your tank once. Get the idea? Some people!
As an industrial refrigeration tech that deals with ammonia and CO2 as well as residential and commercial air conditioners. The biggest problem I see with residential air conditioners going to CO2. Is similar to when the industry changed from r22 to r410. The head pressures doubled from 200 PSI up into the 400 PSI range. CO2 has to be even higher than that. Combine that with the industry trying to cut cost at every corner you will have a lot of failed condensers because of the high pressure until the bad apples are weeded out. You also probably won't have the lifespan on the equipment that you used to get on the older equipment that used a lower pressure refrigerant. I wish the industry would fully embrace ammonia as a refrigerant. It's natural to the environment so there's no pollution factor. It cools with much lower pressures, so it takes less energy to get the pressures you need and you're not trying to contain such high pressure is on the condensing side. There's just the part that it's toxic to humans. Just my opinion
I agree 100% about ammonia. And life is risky anyway, screw the dangers. Frankly I'm tired of all the hand-wringing that everything must always be "totally safe."
I things ammonia would better with packaged unit
Excellent comment Sir. CO² on the condenser side!!! One leak from your condenser in your bedroom, then you will die! No maybes!
I didn't know about the pressure issue. The CO² higher pressure increases the probability of leaks.
I like your ammonia suggestion - low pressure also because you can smell ammonia if it leaks.
@@michaelyyy2872 you believe the amount of co2 in a home heat pump will kill you? That seems dubious. Also, the co2 can be given a smell just like natural gas has added to it
Lots of RV fridges run on an ammonia cycle, some with switchable propane to electric power.
We had our heat pump put in last year and its been AMAZING! Cheaper to run and in the summer it can make our Rochester NY home feel like a refrigerator. Wasn't cheap but well worth it. Would love a heat pump running on CO2
No. CO2 has change to gas to liquid problems.
I also live in the Rochester NY area. What company did you use to provide your heat pump? I may need a new HVAC system soon and would like to consider a heat pump system. Thanks in advance.
@@GeorgeWashingtonLaserMusket in the hot south we usually use heat pumps. But in the north they historically use natural gas to heat in the winter so the extra cost of a heat pump vs simpler air conditioner kept people from buying them.
I also live in Rochester. I'm considering replacing my HVAC system soon too! Please share which company you used!
I work on them daily, and they are great till they break, parts are expensive, almost always special order. Life span isn't great because they run year round. They suck in extremely cold weather. Mini splits we joke and call them expensive throw away units. Parts are usually not available after 7-10 years vs traditional gas furance got 20years plus and parts are common
Liquid CO2 cooling was used a couple of decades ago to cool datacentres that had equipment cabinets having a high heat load. The heat latency of liquid CO2 to the gas phase was much more efficient than at moving heat than water based cooling. It was implemented as a fan assisted heat exchange "radiator" mounted on the back of a standard equipment rack. The high pressures 50+ Bar?) needed to work with liquid CO2 meant that the pipework had to be thick walled stainless steel with close tolerance preformed pipe dimensions. I saw one in operation at Imperial College in London. Expensive to build, but allowed heat loads in rooms that could not otherwise cope.
Liquid CO2? Doesn't carbon dioxide phase change directly from a solid to a gas and not have a liquid state? Hence the name "Dry-ice". Or is it different when under high pressures?
@@Samqdf Check the contents of a CO2 fire extinguisher. It is liquid CO2 held under pressure. At normal atmospheric pressure CO2 exists in the gas or solid states.
Search for "phase diagram CO2" on Google to find out the various CO2 phase.
Fun fact: Super critical CO2 is a special phase with fun properties. Search UA-cam for some examples.
5.2 Atmospheres and above you can have liquid CO2. I have seen it in a lab using a sapphire tube as undergraduate chemist.
@@Rico-oy3dcI see, I stand correct then
I have a CO2 heat pump at home, it’s great. It’s timed to run in solar hours, and so far it’s probably been run over 98% from my own solar. Since it only uses 1/5th of my solar output, and only for two or so hours a day, it’s rare to get a day when it’s not entirely solar powered. So that’s a pretty huge cost and carbon saving!
We’ve had a Sanco2 water heater for almost 3 years and it’s been working great. The reason we chose it was because it’s a split system with the condenser outside. Our water heater is inside the house and so having the condenser mounted on top of the tank as most systems I’ve seen would have required relocating the heater. That would have added significantly to our installation cost.
That's cool as hell. Haven't heat much about that style system.
Unfortunately, for me, the added costs for that unit were just too much to justify it's higher cost vs a normal heat pump unit, even up north.
How much was it?
@@sergiocruz6195 At least 3000 dollars just for the outdoor unit IIRC. The web site that sells them no longer lists prices.
@@sprockketsprecisely. It would take decades before the price would be recouped via electric savings. When a standard heat pump hot water heater is around $1500 a $5000+ split unit that also requires a HVAC installer would prove about $1500 install. How long does a water tank last anyway? 10 years before it's clogged with hardwater?
Great video Matt. Thanks for helping to get the word out about CO2 heat pumps and Harvest Thermal's collaboration with SANCO2. I noted that you described both HCFC and CFC refrigerants as having ozone depletion potential. Currently R-410a is used in the majority of residential ASHP systems. While it carries a high global warming potential (GWP 2088), the ODP of R-410a is zero. This is one reason we look forward to increased demand for CO2 systems (GWP of 1) and R-32 (GWP 675) as the next phase of refrigerants to be used in res. systems.
As a building performance contractor working in the Bay Area we are especially appreciative of Harvest Thermal's product as it more than doubles the potential space heating capacity of the SCANCO2 system when installed as a combination domestic hot water and space heating system.
I had a SANCO2 water heater installed last year in my Salem Oregon home.
It is awesome and produces an abundance of very hot water.
That plus my whole home heat pump heating system allowed me to disconnect methane gas service.
Hallelujah!
It's a common practice to pair a heat pump with PV solar and use excess of the sun to heat 300 to 500 L tank for hot water and even some heating, if the days are sunny during the winter. Not exactly dedicated system, but it accelerates the ROI calculation dramatically.
Have you ever seen/heard of a PVT solar panel? Check out DualSun. I'm looking/wating for a US manf or at least until I can see an installation first hand of one.
Probably not common enough. IMO to qualify for tax credits, solar system should be required to have storage, batteries or hot water at a minimum.
Yeah, this ability to go full-out while the sun shines is HUGE. Some of your evening loads at peak (like cooking) are hard to avoid but this way you stored all the heat you'll need during the day.
@@chrisE815 In Germany you get only subsidy for batteries (as a part of the of them solar system, not standalone), which motivates people to get them, this preventing grid stability problems, which already develops in many places. Yes it does makes sense. I have both batteries and 300 L HW tank. I've just been in an old refurnished house and they have two tanks - 500 L for heating water accumulation and 300 L for hot water. And 30 KWh battery storage and large 48 panels solar field. It's a refurnished homestead,so they have a lot south facing roof "real estate". I started slow, not knowing what to expect and in a time of most demand, so I have much smaller system at 5KW/10 KWh, but it still generates more than family of four needs more than half a year each year. I want to get much bigger system on my next house I plan. It all makes so much sense, especially with prices we have in Europe these days.
I only wish combined PV and water panels would be more widely available, you get extra performance from cool solar panels and extra "free" heat to dump into the HW tank, even in winter.
Although designing a heat pump system that could :
a) cool solar panels
b) dump/pull heat into/from a HW tank
c) heat/cool house as needed
d) dump extra heat outside
gives me a headache already
My father is an expert in HVAC technology and I asked him about this video and he had a few thoughts. One thing he mentioned is that the positives mentioned for residential systems are exaggerated a bit, as the cost of the installation of the system doesn't really ever pay for itself because after the the savings catch up, it's already breaking down and costing hundreds if not thousands to fix, completely offsetting any savings it creates. Companies always try to entice us with impressive sounding marketing, but it rarely as perfect as they say.
He said it can be good if you can build a home with the system from the start, but if you have a standard system that is already working fine, don't worry about it.
For commercial usues it does make a lot of sense though as the higher efficiency is ultilized more effectively for much larger buildings.
Think I'd rather install additional solar panels to offset the relative inefficiency of my existing, so far very reliable R410a system.
The problem with any electronic heat source is the dismal efficient at the power plant where about 2/3 of the heat goes right up the stack. Not counting line losses. 15%
85% of 32% = 28%.
@@suggesttwo Aye, its such a shame that we have absolutely zero other methods of generating power beyond burning fuels, lets just absolutely avoid any methods of generating heat that can avoid it.
Self-sufficiency is the way to go, not centralization.
@@rjwaters3 I am talking about heating. If we drop the load on the grid you now have power to charge EVs without the grid collapsing. Buying time build renewalables like Tesla battery solar power plants. If we try to jump over the middle steps bad things happen. High rates and low reliability.
Solar and wind are much more cost efficient than natural gas. When the infrastructure is built first the expensive coal goes offline, the natural gas lastly natural gas boiler plants. This is going to take a long time.
Matt I'm currently design/building a four family apt building and am exploring ways to potentially be the utility provider for the building. The further I drill down I realized thermal storage is the piece that brings it all together with respect to hvac, hot water, etc. This is a fantastic piece to that puzzle. A further integration/improvement would be adding PVT solar panels to this set up, as the hot water could be dumped in this same water tank / thermal battery to supplement it further. I haven't found a PVT supplier in the US, but there are several abroad; DualSun (FRA), several Chinese, and some Dutch if I recall correctly. A further improvement is using a ground source heat pump (geothermal) vs air source. This is far less practical though per installation and cost though.
It's frustrating how much better the options are in the commercial space vs residential, thanks for shedding some light on that. I found the most efficient set up to be a ground-sourced heat pump that, in a multi-unit apt building mind you, could not only heat and cool each space, but also transfer heat/cool from one unit to another (as opposed to from the ground (or air in an air-sourced set up). This is even more efficient than moving from ground/air. Problem is, it requires 3phase electric. Also impractical from an installation/cost perspective.
I have spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about heat pumps and thermal batteries, and now Harvest Thermal does precisely the system I had been imagining for months now. Bless their hearts.
I've done the same. It seems so cumbersome that we don't just unify ALL of our temperature related appliances into one modular system: hot water, cold 'fridge, room heater/cooler, etc, with outside air as a sink for the overall difference AND/OR a varying medium to harness. Wish I could do the thermal math.
@@BillyStanleyIt gets really complicated technically and expensive when you want to run so many things with different goals off one outdoor unit. You're talking about a VRF system essentially, if you were to run refrigerant to each appliance that's adding a lot of failure points, efficiency loss, and complexity. Way more cumbersome to do than individual units I can promise. If you run through water, you can't really do cooling for a refrigerator and not a freezer, it's also going to have a lot of energy loss and waste electricity moving all that water around.
Maybe it seems wasteful to have a dedicated refrigerator and whatever else you have that's a heat pump, but they work better that way. Refrigerators, hot water heaters, and air to air heat pumps don't use the same refrigerants. Each refrigerant will give you different in/out temps that they're best at, and the optimal one for the application is used.
Having compressors far away from fridge and freezer could allow for even more silent operation. With how efficient those currently are, I know it won't ever pay for itself, but it might be worth it from a noise pollution standpoint. Plus, it shifts the engineering away from the fridge. It just becomes a box that you plug into a new kind of wiring into the house.
@@TheKdcool The engineering of a fridge is mostly not the compressor, so moving that outside is just an efficiency reduction. You still need electronics in the fridge for control, and a defrost on the coils inside, might even have an electronic expansion valve or refrigerant metering device, plus fans.
This is just adding complexity and engineering, a lot of figuring out how to work with a complex VRF outdoor unit and communicate with it. Rather than have a simple, small, and efficient dedicated compressor for an easy closed refrigeration loop. We can already make practically silent refrigerators with inverter systems, you just gotta spend the money, it'd still be less than a fridge hooking up to an outside unit. The copper line set for refrigerant going outside would already cost $500-1000 not including labor to hook it up and purge/vacuum the lines before charging them.
@@Jaker788 If it's hot inside and you directly vent the heat from the fridge outside or into the hot water, there is place to improve efficiency
I have a heat pump water heater and we use a heat pump for heating and cooling. Especially living in a hot climate I have often thought about having one heating cooling loop to for example take heat from our fridge and move it into our water heater or even just outside. It has to be better than heating up our house only to have our AC heat pump move it outside.
Being an aussie, I have always questioned… in summer (temps average >25°C) we run our air conditioner (ahem… “heat pump”) to cool the house daily… YET we are simply pumping the heat outside… and we still use gas/electricity to heat our water.
Why have we not developed a heat exchanger that it’s on the condenser side of the heat pump (outside)… and when the temp is >25°c… preheat/circulate the heat into our water heaters? Less heating of water required by gas/electricity by using a heat being used-and-dumped into ambient air is just wasteful!
I too…am undecided if this would make a difference.
I’m not talking about replacing the hot water system (I love my showers too)… I’m talking about a smart system that -like solar hot water- simply heats the water IN CONJUNCTION with the elemental heating.
It’s smart use of waster heat.
Of course… that’s a mostly Australian problem in summer particularly… I certainly don’t want to reverse-cycle cool my hot water… but there has to be a market for retrofitting a heat exchanger in the condenser section…
Food for thought..
Congratulations, Matt! It’s very touching to see your studio transition starting, and how you’re feeling about it. Best wishes!
I couldn't help noticing the slight echo that appeared when he switched to the new studio. While you could see all the acoustic panels lining the walls, I guess nothing makes up for all the junk that accumulates over 5 years. Considering what happens to empty space in my house, I bet the problem will be fixed in no time.
Air-to-water heat pumps are the standard design in the UK, since HVAC overall is rare. Our summer temperatures have tended never to be high enough to require cooling. Most housing stock uses wall-mounted water-based radiators to provide heating, sometimes augmented by underfloor heating where the flooring is appropriate. The big problem with this setup is that there is no way to bring fresh filtered air into the home. Also, most of the wall-mounted radiators aren't large enough to work well with the low deltas of most air-to-water heat pumps. As such, the journey towards Passive House will be long and arduous for the majority of UK homeowners.
I have worked in the commercial refrigeration space for a a long time with Ammonia refrigerant for ice arenas.
For a few years now new arenas have been being built with co2 refrigerant, which at that scale requires a very different maintenance program than ammonia systems..
this is a good deep dive into the tech, I am interested in seeing what the wear and tear in the components is like at the higher pressures, because ammonia is such comparatively low pressure…
It’s going to be a nightmare. Especially in residential applications w/ lines buried in walls. Techs aren’t going to want to work on it for safety reasons. You should know that since most are not willing to work w/ ammonia for the same reason.
@@Bob_Smith19right on there. imagine having to service an unknown system with 2000psi. And the cost to bring out a highly trained and skilled tech will then equal a heart surgeon.
Thanks and very interesting. I head the Swedes were working on CO2 HP several years ago but have not heard of anything until your presentation. I installed a Mitsubishi Mr Slim Zuba Central unit in 2010 and have saved over $22,000 in energy costs since its installation. Two years ago I replaced my 22 year old electric Hot Water tank (domestic hot water) with a Rheem Prestige heat pump hot water tank. It only used 500 kWh last year and my total home energy costs continue to fall and now charge my Leaf at home with no additional household energy use. From what I understand the global warming potential equivalent GWPe of 410a refrigerant is in the thousands so that may be the most attractive aspect of CO2 systems (which of course would only be GWPe of 1). I suspect the problem will be reliability of such high pressure systems and the additional component. But a very interesting potential and thanks for bringing it to light.
I decided to install a WaterFurnace brand geothermal HVAC system in my current home which was built in 1996. For the past 27 years my electric bill has averaged $74 per month for this 1350 ft.² ranch home; there is no other heat source, it’s all electric. As a bonus, the system also heats the hot water in a standard hot water heater. This system is extremely efficient! After 27 years, it is still working flawlessly!
did it require repairs or part replacements after all those years?
1 relay switch, $45. My HVAC guy for the past 38 years said WaterFurnace was the Cadillac of heat pumps even though his company sold another brand. In addition there is no outside air exchanger to be serviced or replaced. Every 5 years o!@@zodiacfml
As a long time HVAC professional I would choose R-22 first, then R-290. They are very efficient for heat pump service. Perhaps CO2 is better for hot water and some process heat as it can achieve higher temps. Do you know where commercial CO2 comes from? The answer isn't out of the atmosphere.
I worked with a team that put heat pumps into pubs to chill cellars/ heat water. Brilliant idea that needs to be expanded to lots of other areas that need cool products / people and hot water !
The only problem with that is that for a large part of the country something is burned to generate the electricity. But as long as electricity costs remain low the efficiency of a heat pumps is more cost effective.
Definitely going to keep this in mind when I get closer to a heat pump install at the end of next year. My current water heater may only be a few years old, but its a gas unit installed by the prior owner. Running on gas is enough to put it on my "hit list", and doing it at the same time as a heat pump and looping them together in a smart system sounds like it makes a lot of sense to me.
You may be able to integrate the existing HW heater to the system but it would probably be more work than it's worth.
You should check out Nibe F730 exhaust air heat pump. We have been running ours for two years now. It's about the size of a large fridge and does all of our heating (we have underfloor heating in the slab downstairs and upstairs) all of the water heating AND storage (240 litres) and all of our ventilation and heat recovery. Our house is a 5 bedroom two story in Dublin Ireland.
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Environmentalists always yearn to destroy existing, useful equipment NOW, because they want people to install the latest fashions they are creating now.
That goes whether it's a coal fired power plant or as here, a gas water heater.
Of course, no one counts the cost of wasting useful equipment. It's just a SURPRISE when energy costs keep going up! But that old equipment still has to be paid for, one way or another.
I just had a SANCO2 heat pump water heater installed replacing a 21 year old natural gas water heater. It's powered with a PV system I installed 2 years ago plus net metering. I have a separate heat pump for my HVAC which replaced a 18 year old natural gas furnace and 14 SEER AC. I haven't had an electric bill in two years other than rhe monthly customer charge. ECO2 makes is a great product and helped train the installers it as was the first installation of a SanCO2 in my area.
My out of pocket cost was about $8500, but claimed the federal $2000 tax credit.
One of the biggest annoyances with heat pumps in general is that they are almost always tied to installation providers. I have been trying to find data sheets and price listings for heat pumps, especially here in Europe, for a while now and it's almost impossible to find just the compressor unit and a heat exchanger unit prices, even for large manufacturers like Mitsubishi. I don't get this whole situation either, because you can just buy a mini split and install it yourself, but the moment it gets above 5 tons in capacity or thereabouts the listings just vanish it seems.
Not sure if I fully understood your problem but.... Well, actually you can't.
There are s lot of countries in Europe where for safety reasons you can't buy a heat pump if you don't have an authorised installer to do it. You can't do it yourself.
I don't know if this is the case in all European countries but it happens at least in some.
If you want home insurance you will get a pro to do the install. Also, for a CO2 system you have to be certified to do the actual lines given the temperatures and pressures involved. CO2 is not that toxic but copper shrapnel is never good.@@TheAllMightyGodofCod
I notice that too. Over here in Australia, all the prices and units are available online or even in electrical stores for anyone to purchase. So you can choose your own and then must get an installer to install it.
Take a Remko heatpump for heating and cooling, install it yourself room to room. Let your old heating system stand, where it is and use it as a backup.
That is a practical and rather cheap solutions for many people.
Greetings from Germany
@@TheAllMightyGodofCod Shit like this is never for safety reasons, but it is almost always for price gouging reasons (the third reason is the wild flukes where something stupid gets enacted despite everyone's objections). This type of approach cannot ensure safety in principle, since the licensing ultimately comes down to paying to the right people, with the ability to actually do it safely being sidelined. It's like the John Deere thing where they go out of their way to make you unable to repair your own farm equipment, but pretend it's for safety reasons. They actually cite things like "otherwise farmers may increase the horsepower of their tractors". Yeah god forbid they add 50 bhp so their tractor can go 2 mph faster, that would be a safety disaster. Anyone who uses "it's for your safety" arguments are always full of shit and are simply trying to manipulate you to get their way (which mind you is at your own expense).
What I find frustrating is that I can't buy a system that dumps excess heat from rooms which are too hot into a hot water tank and rooms which are too cold. The smallest heat recovery systems are way too big for a 3 bedroom house. While we have the technology to make our homes far more efficient than they are now, no-one is selling systems small enough to make use of that technology, so my option seems to be two systems, one pumping heat outside for cooling, and another pumping heat inside for hot water. That can't be more efficient than a single system that pumps heat inside into the water directly.
The issue with CO2 is that it requires 1500 to 2600 PSI to work. This mean that the compressor will need 3 stages and that it would also require stainless steel lines making it extremely expensive.
Is there an issue using oil in these compressors?
I have seen a demonstration of a "small" unit in a HVAC convention called MCEE this year and it was able to operate at 1770 psi with only 2 stages.
But you are right about the price: the lines were made of thick steel with top of the line insulation.
The fact that these are already in widespread use elsewhere in the world suggests that its not really that much of an issue.
The biggest issue for this or any similar tech is defeating the fossil fuel propaganda campaign. Compared to that, the engineering is a cake walk.
CO2 heat pumps already exist. The technology is there and has been for decades. It's not cheap, but it is not super expensive either. Due to the better efficiency they are cheaper to run.
@@altrag There is no fossil fuel propaganda campaign.. People simply compare the pro vs con between the working system they currently use and the proposed system... even if so many people hate fossil fuels the truth is they actually work and do so fairly efficiently and at affordable price ranges.
Propane/butane are about the most efficient commonly available refrigerant. My current home geothermal pumps are 410, have had 22 in the past. CO2 can be made to work, but isn't the most efficient refrigerant. Air source heat pumps can also be made to work, but if you have well water geothermal can run COPs into the teens. Ammonia is efficient, has been commonly used in industry, but a leak can kill you.
The other challenge with CO2 refrigerant that I think Harvest is addressing is that it has a narrow range of input water temperatures at which it can work efficiently. They really want to take in relatively cold water and put it out piping hot. We have a large radiant heating system in our house, and were trying very hard to find a way to use the Mitsubishi CO2 heat pumps in our electrification project. Unfortunately, simply using a large buffer tank would mean that the water going back in to the heat exchanger would be too warm for the sweet spot of the CO2 unit.
stages and switching like a class d amplifier as inevitable solution.
@@hardrays It's called an inverter.
I agree with your statement of the problem, but I don't see how Harvest can solve it. Every SANCO2 DHW system has a tank; every DHW heater, gas or heat pump, has a storage tank/"thermal battery". And for best COP it has to be carefully stratified with only 10C cold water into the bottom of the tank/ into the heat pump. Once you mix in return from _any_ space heat emitter (central ducted hydronic coil, fancoil or even low temp radiant flooring), your input temp into the heat pump goes way up and your COP goes kablooey. Hope I'm missing something, because I don't see how any algorithm controlled manifold can get around physics.
I installed a Sandon CO2 heat pump, hot water heater several years ago. Then tracked the energy consumption with a Sense monitor.
It does have a time of use control in the menu. I have it set from 9 AM to 9 PM. The other half of the day the hot water heater does not turn on thus primarily using the solar energy from our system during the day. Unfortunately, the water from the tank, circulates through the outside unit, so it needs freeze protection. This is done with a thermostat. Whenever the outside air temperature dips below 39° the unit turns on and circulates hot water to protect from freezing and heats the entire 80 gallon tank to the setpoint several times per night thus defeating the time of use shut off.
Our winter, low temperatures dip into the single digits, fairly often.
The point of these details is to say a bit more than half of the electricity used by the Sanden heat pump during the six month cold season is for freeze protection. The COP during half the year is cut in half to about a COP of two. This is still twice as good as an electric resistance, hot water heater but the expense of the Sanden is far more than the added Solar Panels that would be needed to run an electric resistance, hot water heater. In the houses I design now I use point of use electric tankless water heaters. This not only gives instant hot water, but it saves the wasted water and heat from the residual hot water left in the pipe, running from the mechanical room. Plus they range from $100-$200 apiece far less than the $6000 for the Sanden. Finally, I do like the concept of using CO2 as a refrigerant.
For a second there I was SURE Matt was going to do a Technology Connections crossover.
I love your videos,
We just built a new house last year And we use our air to water heat pump Overnight to heat our slab, And we have a large buffer tank in case we need a bump throughout the day.
These systems cost more money up front But it's a guarantee return in the long run and typically results in a more comfortable home.
Propane heat pumps have a lot more potential for domestic use. The components are still cheap and they are more efficient than traditional refrigerant heat pumps. As long as manufacturers meet the product safety requirements for propane products, then there is no safety hazard.
I believe R12a which is a mix of R290/R600a (Propane/iso-Butane) is a direct replacement for the current refrigerants without the environmental and handling requirements with freon.
Everything is going propane now
I love how it starts out "more efficient by some calculations" Which means they have not actually built one that is more efficient.Thinking that puts CO2 in the pump will NOT reduce CO2 by any appreciable amount. This is green selling
This is actually super interesting, especially for cold climates where choosing when to pump heat to a thermal storage unit could be highly beneficial. For instance, have the heat pump take heat from the water heater at night while the outside is at its coldest would probably be better than running electric resistance heating. You could also heat up the water heater during the day which would be better since outside air temperatures would be higher.
Of course, this is assuming that a typical water heater could store enough heat energy to keep a house warm all night (which I am doubtful of), but the same concept could be used with other thermal masses.
A 100 gallon hot water tank holds 800 pounds of water, so by heating that to 130F (the highest that a heat pump can heat the water before the COP starts to fall) and you need to have 100F water to warm the air in your home, then you can store 30 F X 800 pounds, or 24,000 Btu's of usable heat. So basically nothing when compared to a 75,000 BTU per hour furnace.
I installed a 48,000 Btu heat pump in my 1,800 square foot home in 2014, it is 14 SEER Goodman single speed heat pump. If I had selected cooling only, then a 30,000 BTU would work great in Portland Oregon, yet I live in a all electric home, so need the heat pump to make about 30,000 Btu's at 20F outside (the record low temperature that we get here).
So I never hooked up my back up electric heater, and the Goodman unit has worked fine for 10 years now. It really does not take much more energy to remove heat from the 45F daytime air than the 30F night time air. So storing a little bit of heat in the water heater is less efficient than heating the air as you need to warm it.
I've spent some time doing some preliminary design for combined solar/heat pump systems. One of the problems is that in a lot of environments (such as here in the temperate part of Australia) the need for cooling in summer is similar to the need for heating in winter. So automatically a heat storage only solves part of the problem. You ideally need a cold storage and that can make things more complex. Or you just end up with more conventional air source heat exchangers.
Speaking of which (and I'll let you in in a secret here). A lot of the cost in a conventional heat pumps owes to the fact that you need expensive metals (copper, aluminium) and you're both trying to contain high pressure refrigerant (thickness) and you need lots of surface area to get heat to/from air (overall size). That's why regular air cons are so heavy and why they skimp on COP to save cost. On the other hand, if you use water as an intermediate heat transfer fluid - and water has vastly more heat capacity than air - then you can create a much smaller (and cheaper) heat exchanger to operate between the high pressure refrigerant and the low pressure water. That still requires metals, but its a lot smaller. You still need big heat exchangers to create the surface area to get heat to/from the air, but in this case you're dealing with low pressures and cheaper materials.
I have a goal to transition to a water cooled heat pump based system that can make hot water and possibly dump the energy from my house into a hot water tank and or a swimming pool. Living in Arizona desert this makes a lot of sense to me. I already run my home off of air source heat pumps and have a heat pump water heater but combining them and using CO2 as the refrigerant makes a lot of sense.
Ground sourced may be simpler and more consistent than either air or water sourced.
In 09 I was living in a building with 22 apartments. We made some major renovations to our central heating system supplied by the city. Both the heat in the winter and the hot water provided by the city were expensive.
I proposed to my neighbours to install a heat pump that in the summer would give us hot water and central air conditioning while in the winter it would take care of the heating. Although the initial investment might have seem high, it would have recovered our costs within 5 years, they refused.
So I went and installed air conditioning with heat pump for me alone with just air heating and cooling, no hot water, ended up recovering my investment in 2 years. Everything after that was a profit to this day. It's at my mom's place.
I fail to understand why people refuse to make a short term effort to capitalize on a very big profit on the long term!
The downside of CO2 that was missed or skipped over is its tenancy to freeze into a solid (dry ice) under normal atmospheric conditions. In a refrigerant heat pump, you want to compress a gas into a liquid expelling heat and then in a different place expand the liquid back to a gas absorbing heat. With CO2 that expansion has enough cooling potential under 1 to several atmospheres of pressure will cool and freeze the liquid CO2. In pipes this clogs and stops the system. Running under much higher temperatures and pressures will eliminate this issue but create new risks and costs. Otherwise, CO2 has a lot of great properties and I hope the new engineering can mitigate those issues.
Yah. The SanCO2 runs the loop at 600 to 1600 psi. No other risks though, the loop is really small and entirely enclosed in the outside unit. There are no external refrigerant lines at all. Just cost... but again, since the loop is entirely enclosed its hard to mess it up. Which also means the unit comes pre-charged.
CO2 works west inherit pumps at pressures of 1000pi or higher. At this pressure and normal atmospheric temperatures we live in the CO2 will not freeze i the pipes.
Guess that's why they use water outside the unit
You can do the same thing with regular heat pumps. They already do in fact heat grocery stores with the exchange heat from their freezers they remove the heat using water and then heat building in the winter and hot water in the summer
Everything’s about to change indeed, but congratulations on moving into your new set up. You 1000% deserve it.
Thanks for being such a powerful voice and for sharing so many technologies that literally give me enough hope to sleep at night. You have such a positive impact in my life and remind me why I work hard to be a voice in my own community even if it’s just internal in my corporate world. Every little bit matters 💚
I would think that space heating with 90C water heated from a heat pump would be inefficient. Given an outdoor air temperature of -15C, the maximum COP a heat pump could achieve when heating to 90C is 3.46. When heating directly to a more typical space heating temperature of 30C, max theoretical COP jumps to 6.74.
There's lots of other variables here of course: Not all of your hot water heating is at 90C; heating it from lower temperatures is more efficient. Also TOU electricity rates, day/night temperature fluctuation, and effective operating temperature range of your refrigerant.
One of the biggest issues with CFC’s was the decision to use it for deodorant, air dusters, hair spray, inhalers - etc. AC is a closed system and is not supposed to be dumped in the atmosphere. I’m so glad we are seeing new technology, but I strongly hope we can develop a standard as all the constant changes in refrigeration gas is making it far worse to manage. For example, 410a, 134 are great solutions - yet we now want to push it out because of greenhouse risk. Let’s manage what we have and be smart about how we manage the use. The final comment is to say - this has to become affordable.
I am concerned about pressures--C02 (R-744) runs at 536 PSI at 38 degrees F, R-410a runs at around 120 PSI at the same temp.
I would be concerned about getting a CO2 system serviced. Until (or unless) it reaches a point at which it is widely supported by regular HVAC contractors I’m going to keep with the reasonably efficient Trane heat pump I already have installed.
@@andrewludwig9251 410a is such a sweet refrigerant but has a high GWP. If you manage the recovery, I don’t see why we are trying to push it out.
PFAS had a similar issue, they're used as a spray-on cleaning solvent.
Yes. It’s manipulative or poorly-informed when people point out environmental issues with refrigerants and fail to mention this. Handling and disposing of it is intensely regulated.
My question is...
With standard heat pump systems their efficiency goes down in climates with cold winters; do these CO² perform better in an St Paul, Chicago or Buffalo region during these freezing temperatures?
I live more in SW Indiana, but our winters are generally more mild, generally.
I've never understood why thermal mass and water heating aren't standard features in a heat pump system. There's huge compounding benefits by having the units work together and could be a packaged unit.
Probably the usual suspect: Cost.
Simpler units cost less. Each additional component will add cost and complexity to a product. It has to be made and installed cheaply enough for 1, the upfront costs to be accessible, and 2, for it to be worth it over the products lifespan.
well...there is also always a risk when you lay additional pipes with pressurized water...
it's relatively easier to push the air around...
also I guess there is a space consideration... you need space for the thermal mass...
a lot of homes in the US have water heaters with tanks... but most other places use tankless water heaters to save space...
@@porcorosso4330 take a packaged unit and make the base a water tank that is in line to the primary water heater. Have the bottom of the tank a heat exchanger so the heat from cooling preheats the water. Wouldn't take up that much space other then the unit sitting a bit higher and the water heater in the house is getting preheated water vs ground temp.
@@matthewconnor5483
by definition it needs to take up space, it is a thermal _mass_... not so useful if it is not very massive...
@@porcorosso4330 it you have a packaged unit and it sits on a tank for its pad that is 3x3x2ft that's over 100 gallons of water you could be pre heating.
You should do another channel called "Decided with" where you discuss technologies that ARE gaining consumer level traction
Audio in the new studio is great! Maybe boost the volume a smidge, but the clarity and quality is great!
My local supermarket has a CO2 cooling system, which pumps the heat to the district heating network. So the same energy that is used to keeping the groceries cool also helps keeping my house warm / giving me warm water for showering. That's a win-win.
That's pretty fascinating - what country/state?
@@eh42 in Finland. I guess it was one of the first such installations, as they still have some signs on the store telling about this.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, ideas and videos. Will definitely have to keep an eye on harvest thermal. Sounds like a great idea, I’ve been pondering if there was a mini split system with several inside units and one external that would be able to take advantage of the various heat levels in your house and optimize its use, the missing component I wasn’t finding was the heat reservoir that harvest thermal seems to have come up with. Definitely will need a bit more research on my point. Not everyone wants a bedroom at the same temperature, hotter or colder and with the newer tighter homes, you introduce heat from cleaning typically be it clothes, dishes, or your shower. And then adjust the air conditioning to pull it back out. Would be great to be able to recycle the BTUs from cooling back into a centralized heating solution. New studio look great BTW, love the color scheme of both. Hope you keep the stuff on the shelf backdrop, always entertaining whenever the subjects inevitably get a little dry and keep the mind involved in the situation rather than bolting in a different direction. Wishing you and your family the best.
Gas fired appliances do not have a COP. The “.93” efficiency you quoted is a combustion efficiency which relates to how complete the combustion process is i.e. 1 or 100% equals complete combustion and the value can never go higher. Combustion efficiency and COP cannot be directly compared. When analyzing different system types I typically compare their dollar cost per delivered BTU.
Fair callout about the technical differences. I still think it’s a fair comparison though because it’s still about how effective they convert their energy source into heat energy for the home. An electric heater is effectively the same as gas (best case 1:1 for energy units in for heat units out). Heat pumps are the only technology that stretch beyond that 1:1 limit.
No, the comparison of C02 heat pump versus gas fired using COP numbers makes absolutely no sense. It just leads me to suspect any other numbers you tout as real. Also I think you were referring to those electric heaters placed within close range to bathroom showers in apartments that have no space for heater tanks or access to gas pipes. They are infamous for being extremely energy inefficient. The energy inefficiency is due to having to use electricity to immediately heat the water in an instant, versus water tanks that slowly heats the tank of water over time.
Congrats Matt, well-earned on the new studio! Thanks for all you do!
The Mitsubishi Hyper Heat units are fantastic even at 5 degree F! Love them for the vast majority of the USA and many country!
Since I felt it necessary to post on your previous video about how it felt like an advertisement rather than a proper review, I wanted to comment that this video felt more like your regular content. The reason that I watch your content is to learn new things, and I have always appreciated that you take a balanced look, informing of the good and the bad. Thank you!
I feel the same. Actually I open this video with the intention to see if it was "just another advert" if it was, I would unsubscribe to the channel.
I was happy it wasn't.
nice find. I have no idea about this until now. with my quick read on the internet, CO2 is indeed superior in all ways except cost. It requires multiple times higher pressure vs common refrigerant so the equipment does indeed require to be beefier. Once you have the beefy equipment, it is most likely too good for residential use which is the reason one company in the video would use a thermal battery to harvest or store the excess performance of the CO2 system. In short, CO2 heat pump is best for commercial industrial use.
I've had my CO2 heat pump hot water system running for a few years now and it's been brilliant. Based on my usage it takes about 2 hours to warm up the water on a daily basis and it runs at around noon when my solar system is running at peak, so effectively getting hot water at virtually zero operational cost.
If you are using solar it almost certainly better to add an extra panel and use a plain electric water heater. They make models that last for 50 years whereas heat pump water heaters only last 15 years. The money difference is just too great to justify the heat pump version.
@@Jason82182150 years for an electric water heater? Which brands?
@@Jason821821 I've got solar already and my home came with a gas heater that was on its last legs. The resistive heating was no longer an option and we get huge rebates on the heat pump here so it was a no brainer decision.
And since this uses about 3 times less energy to heat, I personally rather use the excess solar to power something else. Like home heating or cooling which uses a lot more energy, especially in winter when solar doesn't generate anywhere near enough to power both.
Someone needs to really modularize this whole system.
Like Heat Pump + Water Heater + certain times of the year dump the excess AC heat into your swimming pool + Ground Source Loop, etc.
Then stick a smart controller in front of it all so it always picks the best source for AC/Heat and stores the right amount of excess between water heater vs battery from solar, etc.
My biggest issue with all of it is I already live in a Franken-house, and it's far easier and way cheaper to just keep putting bandaids on it rather then rip out large chunks of infra and replace with something better.
Especially since I won't be here in 10 years, so payback savings are basically non existent.
The problems with videos like this is that they always promote higher technology as an improvement. And sometimes it is. Unfortunately, today's new technology is pushing initial costs ever higher, while the increased complexity is guaranteeing more maintenance and reliability problems throughout the life of the equipment. This is further aggravated by today's manufacturers lacking the desire to spend the money to fully test their products before throwing them out into the market. The final nail in the coffin is the marketing job colleges and universities have spent the last 30 years pushing on us, which has caused a HUGE shortage of people going into the skilled trades. Without highly skilled technicians, these more complex and higher-maintenance products will never get the proper maintenance and repair work needed to offset their increased complexity, thus creating a perfect storm for consumers. And this completely ignores the problem that occurs when the chip your circuit board requires can only be sourced from one place on earth, and there's a global event that stops product of that chip for a time...
So yes, higher technology can often deliver lower energy usage. But if the end result is significantly shorter lifespans for equipment, aggravation, and higher replacement and repair costs, was it worth it?
Well, you are posing a "what if" question and then asking if your "what is" makes something worth it. The problem with that is that your "what if" might not reflect reality. While technology does impose costs, particularly for first movers, those costs rapidly drop as the technology enters production scale and mass adoption.
As to whether it is worth it or not... we're talking about getting rid of a fairly large amount of natural gas consumption and replacing it with four small solar panels (or one large residential panel) worth of electricity. Yah, its worth it.
So the only question you really should be asking is whether you, personally, want to be a first-mover, or wait for mass adoption and dropping costs before you switch.
@@junkerzn7312He hit the nail on the head about qualified technicians. The HVAC industry hasn’t had enough techs in well over thirty years. There are less people going into it every year. And the ones that are usually bottom of the barrel. But what do I know. I’ve only been in the industry for 30+ years and have been responsible for hiring for over 20 of them. No skilled technician means your high tech equipment won’t be working for long.
We installed Sanden CO2 heat pumps (Japanese, COP rating 5.2 ) on our house a few years ago and have been very happy with them. They feed hot water to a tank that is used for both domestic hot water and hydronic floor heating. Fortunately we do not have any cooling needs in our climate.
I'll believe any of these "future of cooling" things are real when they work in Arizona.
Seems to be only good for heating and water
If you're going to say that CO2 is actually better than other refrigerants, it might have been nice to spend a couple seconds actually displaying a comparison between the most common instead of just quoting a metric.
Sounds interesting, hope to see more about this in the future.
Very cool! It seems like a solar hot water heater would be a good addition to a system like this. I've always been amazed that we spend so much money essentially creating heat or cooling instead of simply moving it from place to place. A fridge next to a stove has always been an embarrassing proof of our lack of development.
There are these hybrid solar panels called PVT that have the heat exchanger on the back of a pv panel. Really cool tech. Add in a subterranean part of the exchanger loop so you can tap into the ground as well
Well, the fridge and the stove do a very very good job at insulating… at least with quality appliances. So it’s not a huge concern. Actually maybe the rear of the fridge should face the oven just to really keep the hot together 😂
I was just poking around their page (unfortunately it looks like they are only in California right now) but their FAQ says they work well with solar panels but not with solar thermal. Doesn't say why. Maybe they just don't want something else using the heat battery that they have to manage on their end. A whole-house integrated system would be great, but.. there are reasons why we can't have nice things ;D
@@tonydeveyra4611 That is sensible, pairing PVT with a ground sourced heat pump system.
Yes definitely. Has anyone found/seen a PVT solar panel manf in the US?
Check your audio leveling between recording studios. Audio clarity is fine, but I found the overall level less in the new studio.
Thank you for making this video. This is exactly the kind of technology I was looking for for my home. It is really hard to find good (less biased) information on heat pumps / heating solutions here in America. This one makes a ton of sense.
@tofulnc you are exactly right. The equipment that is needed to withstand the pressures of c02 refrigeration is much harder to design and implement. Stainless steel tubing and fittings. Large compressors. I don’t see this tech ever being implemented in the residential space. Maybe commercial at some point.
So, I work in the industry. Co2 is definitely the future, but it'll be slow going. It's gaining widespread use in commercial settings, especially refrigeration applications. However, as of now, it's much more expensive. There is a huge amount of safeties used to keep the units from becoming a literal bomb, and the copper piping is actually an alloy with (I believe) steel. It's about twice as heavy and actually magnetic. CO2 is probably the best future refrigerant we've got right now, it'll just be a slow roll out.
Indeed, the high pressures are the hurdle for cheaper retail/commercial systems. It's sucks now if you end up in a front end collision that breaks the condenser. Now add some more stored energy to the possible downside.
The refrigerant loop in the SanCO2 is also very short and entirely enclosed in the outside unit. There are no external refrigerant lines at all. Instead, a water loop is piped from the steel hot water tank through the outside unit.and back into the steel hot water tank. So even if the refrigerant loop were to rupture, it wouldn't do much damage if any. Just no gas volume to do damage with.
@@junkerzn7312 that's good to know, so it's basically a water source heat pump, just using the water heater as your condenser water loop. That's cool to know, I'm more used to seeing large rack style systems for grocery stores converting from older refrigerants. The savings they see with Co2 is absolutely bonkers. It's so much more efficient.
While you're at it with videos about heat pumps - have you heard of "LAMBDA Wärmepumpen"? They're a relatively new, Austrian company manufacturing propane heat pumps with some very interesting technical tweaks. Apparently their pumps can run at just 3°C delta to ambient air versus the typical 8°-9° (a big advantage in winter) while still outputting a COP of >5.5 at 55°C target temperature. Most normal heat pumps struggle to get that kind of COP at 35°C.
It doesn't look like they have an English language website, but maybe if you contact them directly they can give you some info :)
I understand that CO2 does well with heating via a heatpump system, but how does it do for cooling? and can a fridge/freezer also work with CO2 as a refrigerant?
Most new supermarket refrigeration systems use CO2 in the UK at least
Heating or cooling wouldn't be a problem for CO2. I'm question the number COP numbers. Also don't see any gain from store the heat in hot water as well.
It's has the ability to cool to lower temperatures than other commercially used gasses for heat pumps, the disadvantage is that it needs specialised compressors and much thicker piper work and heat exchanges for the high pressure. Advantage over other heat pumps is it can directly heat beyond 65C, so above critical temp to kill legionnaires, other heat pumps can only heat to about 48c and need an electric element to do the rest for safety, so they drop efficiency. The higher heat temperatures mean water is easier, but also needed because it functions as a way of using an 80c heat source to heat a home to room temperature.
Seems great for the southwest, but here in the PNW, we're only cooling maybe two months out of the year, and even then, only for a few hours a day. So, we wouldn't get the energy benefit of the hot water heater.
Most power plants are only 32% efficient (not counting line losses) because they are boiler plants. Therefore a heat pump needs to have an efficiency of 300% in order have the same carbon footprint as a natural gas heaters for heating. 600% if the power comes from a coal power plant.
Burning things is a cheap way to produce heat, yes... with the downside of outputting huge amounts of pollution. If the only specification is to heat water as cheaply as possible, a natural gas water heater with a desuperheater is incredibly efficient. But that's not the only specification that matters.
And if the heat pumps can be powered by solar or wind, this setup becomes a very efficient carbon-neutral system.
This isn't entirely true, many plants easily exceed 32% efficiency, and increasingly power generation is being done by power plants that produce no CO2 (wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, even nuclear is still kicking around). Any given heat pump also continues improving as the power mix shifts to lower carbon production, whereas a gas furnace always emits the same CO2 (actually it can wind up emitting more CO2 depending on the gas source since a lot of gas wells directly emit trapped CO2 as well). Heat pumps are also not just displacing gas furnaces, they're also displacing space heaters, which are using that same electricity at much lower efficiencies. And under most circumstances they can easily beat an effective efficiency of 300%.
@@bosstowndynamics5488 A power plant powdered by a natural gas gas turbine engine is up to 63%. 2020. The most inefficient natural gas furnace I have ever seen was 67%. Internal Combustion engines are way more efficient than steam. It's 88 years old now.
Do you know it costs twice as much to generate electricity with coal as natural gas? Steam. I had to look that up.
No one talks about that. Or LED lighting.
The only country to ever hit Paris Accord targets was the USA under President Trump.
Methane natural gas has CH4 produces 1 CO2 and 2 water molecules when burning and natural gas appliances have the highest energy conversion efficiency. Convert an electric furnace to a high efficiency natural gas furnace and produce 1/6 the CO2 to heat the building. If it wasn't online... the baseline load drops, which ones will they turn off and close?
As for the 32%, that's average. But some are upto 63%. But that's peak.
China builds lots of coal plants. To bad JT and JB are doing thier best to squeeze out natural gas. (and oil)
That’s false most modern power plants are 50% - 60% en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_cycle_power_plant
@@yolo_burritoyes upto 64% from 63%, the peak efficiency. But most power plants are still coal and natural gas fired boilers. A natural gas gas turbine engine with a steam engine heated by the exhaust gasses. With a duel turbine.
From what you've said it sounds like these may be better for heating in cold environments than cooling in hot? Unless maybe they can dump the heat from cooling the house into the water tank
Good luck with the new home Matt! It's nice to see someone practice what they preach. May you have many years of great content ahead for all of us to enjoy. Cheers!
I think there is huge potential for CO2 heatpumps for large refrigerant/heatpump setups as on a large scale. It is almost impossible to prevent leakages on a large scale and many refrigerants are potent greenhouse gases or harmful for the environment in general. With CO2, a little leakage isn't a huge problem, a system slightly leaking over a year likely wouldn't produce more CO2 than a person driving to work with a gas engine vehicle over the course of a week. It might even be economical for systems, especially large ones, to have some sort of system for collecting their own CO2 to replenish themselves from the air around them, thus making them carbon neutral (not counting however they get their energy).
So, would this co2 heat pump and thermal battery combo be applicable for also cooling a house in summer in the southern United States?
I have the same interest. Being in Texas, where we just experienced 75 days of 100F (38C) or higher temperatures, good cooling efficiency would be essential here.
cooling works only if ambient temperature outside is below 30 degree celsius
@@3harath
Is that rule universal? Or does it depend on the type of coolant being used?
Can it make hot water for showers and cool the house?
@@se777en73120 co2 refrigerant is in "supercritical state" when compressed 8:23 , so cooling efficiency increase as temeperature decrease, so colling mode works only in cold countries -spring season, not works in place like dubai saudi qatar, but there is another way to make this work by using other refrigerant along with co2 (cascade refrigeration)
I added a hybrid heat pump when I did a renovation. That said, there is no temperature where it is cheaper to heat my house using electric over the gas "back up" line. I am not arguing efficiency - I am only talking cost to me. Once gas prices rise or electric prices drop, I will happily switch to the heat pump only mode.
True, but cost is not the only factor when making decisions. Poisoning ourselves with gas to save a buck just doesn’t make sense.
I’m hoping for the day when all our heating and cooling needs are served by a heat pump network in the home.
Imagine if AC, pool, refrigerator, freezer, water heater etc were all interconnected. Maybe one day :)
I've imagined. 😉Maybe I can set up my heat-pump hot water heater to cool the coils on the back of the refrigerator? 😄
I've thought about this for a long time. With the new multi-head heat pumps it's not too much of a stretch. LG can actually do it most of it with their Multi V line with a hydro kit.
Co2 could be the answer for uk style hot water central heating system. Traditional heat pumps operate at too low temperature to suit existing hot water systems but if co2 heat pumps can heat to 60’c needed for these systems. This means not having to upsize radiators & keep the same units. Possible good solution for uk housing stock going net zero / replacing gas combi-boilers.
What you said makes no sense.
If CO2 heat pumps have a lower COP, why would you choose CO2 over conventional with all other factors the same?
Saying storage makes it more efficient makes no sense because you could use the same storage with conventional heats pumps.
Where I live in Europe (Spain) heat pumps are the most common air conditioning units. They, however, are not used for heating even though they have the capability. This is because heating is usually done by on-demand type gas boilers in each unit because they a a bit less expensive to operate and the construction style here is much more conducive to running pipes for hot water radiators rather than ducts for forced air heat. The most common units use R32 for their refrigerant. This is because it is the least expensive option and the installers recommend what they are most familiar with (new tech adoption can be a little slow here). I have seen some new CO2 units being installed in new construction on more commercial uses. I saw a SANCO2 unit going in on one, but did not know what it was and why it was different. Keep up the good work and I am looking forward to the next video from your new studio.
The same heads that produce cold air can produce warm air. No need for ducting.
Gas heaters cheaper to run than a heat pump 😅 Is that because of high electricity price?
I am thinking that your climate probably leads to considerably more air-conditioning demand than heating demand measured on an annual basis. It may be more economically viable to just use natural-gas heating to cover the relatively small heating demand in winter.
Yes, European electricity prices can be double that of the US. @@krashanb5767
Yes, but there are limits as to how many heads on unit can support. Heating a seven-room apartment on say the 5th floor will require multiple units or are too large to hang on an outside wall and are cost prohibitive.@@percyfaith11
I wish I had known about CO2 heat pumps when we were adding solar to our house, because we replaced out standard electric cool and gas heat furnace with a Freon heat pump.
@UndecidedWithMattFerrell581 Okay, sure.
"C02 won't explode" -- Not from fire. But from pressures, sure it can. If you go from solid to gas, or liquid to gas, in a container that can't handle the pressures. it will. You yourself stated in the beginning that "due to high pressures you need specialized equipment" and the high pressures was why they didn't use it in the first place. What do you think the specialized equipment are for? (you don't need fire for an explosion).
Tesla uses R1234yf. Lower pressures give critocal weight, reliablity and N, V, H advantages over CO2, but it is mildy flamable - which is more of an issue for ICE
Congrats on the new house and studio! How long have you been waiting to do that bit with the new and old studio?
I’ll be building a home in southern Nevada and have been looking into the most efficient ways to do everything from cooling the house to heating the water by using water to cool PV panels and storing that heated water for use later. It’s a daunting task to say the least. I wish there was a single place I could go to find all the resources for green living in a desert.
look up "John saves energy", the guy has an amazing set of resources and he lives in Utah.
May your new studio serve you well for the next 5 years and well beyond!
Here in new zealand, most heatpumps were changed from coming with r410, to r32. I have recently changed my 3 from r410 to m60, which is an HCr, which i did wonder how safe it would be if something went wrong. But i was surprised to learn a few days ago that - R32 will detonate, given the right circumstances (See the Tokyo University Report) . H C Refrigerants don’t detonate(note detonate is a huge order above burn or explode). ps- change reduced my (winter) heating energy usage by approx 15% ).
So i find the idea of co2 good, as it should be a lot safer than others, (i assume) - was my trade for around 40 years.
Awww I'll miss the old studio :-) I like the desk behind you and all the stuff on the shelf. Congrats on 5 years!
Another concern with newer technology is when things break, you might be without for months while parts are sourced. This has been a huge issue with high efficiency HVAC units the last few years.
It's not new technology.
We used Co2 refrigerant for the cooling the cargo of ships in the 1950’s but the compressors had to be very heavy duty due to the pressure required. Also the dangers of leakage.
I’ve worked on CO2 racks in grocery stores here in the US. It’s a great way for stores to keep their GWP numbers down as CO2 has a GWP of 1 and all other refrigerants are much higher.
As an Engineer, I can state with authority that CFCs are designed for, and better at making phase changes at appropriate temp and pressure. And look! The ozone layer didn’t vanish, any more than Miami went underwater back in 2020 from climate change. CO2 isn’t optimal in most climates
Compare the pressure temperature charts of R744 (co2 refrigerant) to the common R410A refrigerants used in your home. “Higher pressure” is a bit of an understatement. Using water to transfer heat is a requirement to contain that beast. I also find it unlikely you’ll only be paying 2x as much to have it installed in a home even if their marketing is based on the most expensive competitive equipment installed by the most expensive contractor.
For people saying 2000 psi is too much, typical home pressure washers are between 1000-4000 PSI, the fuel rail in your direct injection gas car is 2000-3000psi and for diesel engines it's between 2000 - 30,000 psi. Yes 30,000 PSI. The biggest benefit of CO2 being used as a refrigerant is that it's dirt cheap and you don't have to worry about it being 'phased' out, special recovery systems, etc. Releasing to the atmosphere is basically inconsequential. It's a technology in its infancy but give it a few decades and it can easily supplant all the other refrigerants.
Fun fact...proton bombardment from CMEs devastate the ozone layer, which quickly recovers
CO2 is not the only competitor in the race to environmental-friendly refrigerants. Ammonia was already widely used in commericial food refrigeration, and propane is making its way into small refrigerators and AC units for its low material and low liquidation pressure. Technology Connections had also made a video on his small fridge that uses propane.
Propane all the way. If I have a leak, I'll take flammable over toxic any day
sound is so much better in the new studio.
I might be missing something, but I thought CO2 wasn't suitable as a refrigerant because it tends to turn to a solid when it gets really cold? Basically it turns into dry ice and would not work in a traditional compressor style system. Legacy refrigerants are preferable because they can change state from a gas to a liquid and is able to mix with oil to keep the compressor lubricated and cooled.
1:45: 90 Celsius? That will take you skin off in about a second. I have my heatpump water heater set to 45 Celsius. Perfect, and I don't get scalded. But, that's the key to "heat harvesting", using the higher CO2 working temperatures to heat water to much higher temperatures. That translates into more energy per liter of water, and a more useful temperature for heating.
Usually it's mixed with cold after a tank
I’ve had a heat pump in the last two EVs I’ve leased: Hyundai Ioniq Electric & Kia Niro EV. It’s a drastic decrease in energy use compared to past hybrid/gasoline cars I’ve leased. Which makes it even better for camping/Utility Mode/Dog-Mode. The only other EV company using heat pumps is Tesla.
here in EU heat pumps are already sought after and they can reach COP of 3-4-5-6 -> 5-6 if you optimize your home and make it as a passive house standard (something americans barely have a few such houses