I'm going to buy a small heat pump dedicated to pools (around 3.5 kW total output). The pump would not be used for 6-7 months a year (autumn/winter); can I plug it into an existing water heating system to pre-heat water before it gets into the gas boiler (to use the pump year round and save on the heating bills)?
Yes, there are tangible savings from switching to a heat pump (it's around 2x cheaper than using gas boiler in my location). If you're unfamiliar with heat pumps: they're NOT electrical boilers, these are sci-fi devices that give out more heating power than their electrical consumption. The unit that I want to buy uses ca. 0.6 kWh of electricity but provides ca. 3.5 kWh of heat.
Please note that there is a dedicated heat pump unit that essentially does what I want (work in conjunction with an existing boiler), and it is supposed to be installed inside the boiler room (with an option to vent the cold air outside). I don't remember the brand so couldn't find it online; but this dedicated HP is rather expensive and, most importantly, I'll invest in a pool heat pump anyway that won't be used for 7 months in a year.
Those are my concerns / ideas why it might not work / possible problems, am I missing something obvious but critical?.. 🙂
- Pool heat pumps [PHP for short] work when air temperature is higher than ca. 12C/50F — I will run it in the house, in the boiler room
- PHPs are designed to heat water up to max. 35C/100F — not a problem, I'll use it for additional heating only (e.g. wire the heat pump instead of a recirculation pump)
- Maybe PHP will never be switched on because the water in the tank will always be hotter than 100F?.. — the boiler is programmed to run during the day only, I think the water gets quite cold during the night
- PHPs are built to handle corrosive pool water — hmmm that doesn't sound like a problem, more like a pro 😉
- BUT maybe PHPs won't be able to handle water heated to 50C/120F?..
- Maybe PHPs won't be able to hold/run water at around 2 bars pressure (what I have now in the tank)?
Anything else I might be missing?
Best Answer
There's no free lunch. Really.
Saying a heat pump is an over-unity engine ignores why it works: It takes something from something else; i.e. it creates an externality. Ignoring those is a common error of over-unity believers.
Heat energy is the level of excitation of atoms. It generally stores on a per-atom basis not a per-gram basis. What's relevant there is that water is the densest thermal media known, because it has 3 fairly lightweight atoms in a small space. Raising 1kg of water 1 degree requires reducing a great deal more than 1kg of other stuff 1 degree. 1kg of air is a lot of air.
Also heat pumps aren't always one particular efficiency. Their efficiency varies based on conditions. For instance if you have 10C/50F pool water on a 35C/100F day, the heat pump is "pumping downhill" as I like to say, and it will be quite efficient there. Raising 20C pool water to 23C/75F on a 11C/52F day is a great deal harder and less efficient. The 6:1 efficiency you claim is only valid in certain test conditions.
"To keep the heat pump in its working range, I'm placing its condenser inside the utility room".
The heat pump will steal heat from the room and place it in the water. That gives you 2 choices, neither one good:
"I'll just eject the chilled air outside, then. SOLVED!"
Except when you push air out of your house, you draw a vacuum (negative millibar) inside your house, and air simply leaks in somewhere else. This "makeup air" now needs conditioning. Now you have 2 problems.
Some of this latent energy goes into the water - the heat pump's evaporator (of freon) condenses water, and that 2,258 J/g went into the hot water, which at least isn't "humidifying the great outdoors", but still presents the same problems I discussed in the first part. Your humidifier must make up for this lost humidity, by boiling water into the air, again at 2,258 J/g. Even if it's a sparger humidifier (which sprays a fine mist which spontaneously evaporates, there's still no free lunch; that evaporation happened by stealing the 2,258 J/g out of the air, reducing its temperature and the heater must work harder to compensate.
If you want a heat pump water heater, just buy one.
They are readily available. However they solve none of the above problems. They're not the panacea one might make them out to be.
However... if the heat pumps could be water sourced.... (i.e. their interchange fluid is water instead of air)... different deal. Now you can pump water out of the aquifer and put the heated/cooled water back in (at a different height obviously, so you aren't trying to chill water you just chilled).
And if you're where I think you are, you have a second option, as long as you don't mind a house that is 7' or 13' wide (depending on if you're willing to limit yourself to broad canals). You can interchange to canal water (uptake from one end of the boat, discharge to the other). Or simply run a bunch of glycol loops before you pour floor insulation, and use the boat's entire steel bottom as your heatsink, without ever having to clean a clogged filter! Covering an entire boat roof and upper sides with walkable solar panels has not been done. So much opportunity for innovation!
Other complications
Placing the heat pump on the intake line to the water heater is a lost cause. Water only moves through that pipe while hot water is being used. (cold water pushes out the hot water, that's how the pressurization works; the volume of actual water in the tank remains the same). Doing that would be like having a "tankless on-demand heat-pump water heater" and that would require a positively enormous freon engine and evaporator, we're talking 20,000 joules/second (aka watts).
Having the heat pump recirculate through the water heater (out the drain valve, in the cold) won't work either, because its maximum temp is below the water heater's minimum temp.
"It will work at night when the water heater gets super cold" Actually, any competent, modern tanked water heater will hold usable temperature for at least 12 hours after power loss; and if it doesn't because it's old, they make rockwool insulation kits for them. Of course, hot water won't be replaced as it's used, but yeah, you can get a shower before the system turns the heat back on.
"Storing water around 100F, what could possibly go wrong?" Actually it'll breed all sorts of bacteria, including legionella. (you may not have heard this because it's relatively new science, partly arising from the fiasco in Flint, Michigan. Tiny amounts of bacteria were in water pipes because of a botched water-supply changeover [from the regional lake-water system shared by most suburbs, to obsolete plant drawing from the Flint River]. That, plus the "petri dish" effects of water heaters kept at 40-55C, created a perfect storm.)