Heat Pumps 2: More Pumping More Now!

I had high hopes for the dehumidification aspect of hybrid water heaters when I got mine installed. It didn't work out, though. In the summer the incoming water temperature is about 70°F and the heat pump just doesn't have to run very long to heat the tank up to its set point, so it doesn't run long enough to effectively dehumidify my basement and I still have to run a traditional dehumidifer to prevent mold and manage stank. In another house I owned I had a propane-fired tankless heater and it was AWESOME. It was a small house and the pipe runs were short enough that the heat-up time wasn't awful. Someone else here mentioned that it caused problems for their high-efficiency washing machine, which I can understand. I didn't have an HE model back then so I can't speak to that, but if it were a problem I'd just run the hot water for a bit to prime the system (like I do with my dishwasher now).

Circuitmike

Recently, there are some datacenters connected to district heating.There are people heating their homes with cryptomining and there was also a commercial product available for that, but, obviously, the initial price, need for configuration and unstable crypto prices make it... not for everyone.

M@trixX

Another step in heating with a lot of potential that could be talked about is reclaimed heat from data centers. Why purely make metal warm when that metal could be a CPU doing useful work? Could we heat homes with crypto mining? Might be a silly question, but maybe :O

Its funny, even without knowing you could almost tell sometimes as it has the same habit of trying to run as long as possible before hitting the heat srip, at which point boom its much warmer.

Jonathan OConnor

It bothers me a good bit that you had a Tesla Model 3 on screen while complaining that some brand new EVs don't have reversible air conditioners... when Model 3s HAVE had heat pumps in them for about 5 months, now.

coredumperror

Yessssssss TMBG!!!

Sarah Betterton

FYI to all, the reason that EVs don't have heat pumps is because the AC is used, sometimes even in the winter to cool the batteries and other electrical systems.

Benjamin Kier

You're okay with your police department wasting your taxes on a Tesla? They could have bought 4 regular cruisers for the same price. And where are the hybrid police cruisers?

Stephen Gillie

Electric cars have (I believe) traditional A/C systems. Like you were saying about your home A/C system, these could be made with reversable valves. It's the same situation - save a little bit on parts and make a slightly simpler product at the expense of efficiency that is just becoming known.

Stephen Gillie

At a certain level of efficiency, we get more heat by burning natural gas to create the electric power to run a heat pump, than we would by burning that natural gas for the heat. This is a really cool concept, which is why these videos keep getting made, but the point is a little esoteric and hard to state simply. Golf courses could be a good place to dig up and put the ground loops. These areas are already denuded of arborial blockages.

Stephen Gillie

Wow - that would pay for 2 years of housing for me. Hope it lasts a long time.

Stephen Gillie

A hair dryer is an electric heater in gun form.

Stephen Gillie

That audio gag must have been real subtle, because even though I kept an ear out for... something... I noticed nothing out of the ordinary :D Also, heat pumps are cool! Too bad Iceland has practically free heating and practically no need for cooling, so consumers have neither of the two versions here.

Arni Bjorgvinsson

FYI, my 2013 Nissan Leaf has a reversible heat pump. It will handle all the heat down to about 5*F and still takes a lot of the load down to about -5*F. The drilling alone for our ground source heat pump, off the road system in Alaska, cost $27,000. All-in our GSHP system came to $50,000 including drilling, excavation, electrical, and plumbing (we have a desuperheater that handles most of our hot water). We had to remove out tankless water heater to put in a dual tank system. I HATED that tankless heater; it was either hot or cold - not warm. It also didn’t start fast enough to use for laundry. By the time it started up, our high-efficiency washer was full of ice cold water.

It's funny that when you talk about electric cars needing to have heat pumps more, the one you show on screen is a Tesla Model 3...... My Model 3 and my police departments two Model Y's are the first with them. It is a great thing.

Jonathan OConnor

The "Too Deep" alert is hilarious! And the audio is quite in line with the rest of it so it's not jarring. Nicely done! (I see that the design is based on 80s/90s Star Trek movies, if I'm not mistaken? Nice throwback!)

Craig P Steffen

Heat Pumps 2: Pump Harder

Stomat

After months of teasing "heat pumps" I must say I was intrigued with this miracle heating and cooling device of the future . . . then all was revealed . . . a reverse -cycle air conditioner that has be ubiquitous in AU for decades . . . I was expecting perpetual motion or some AC equivalent ;-) . . . I enjoyed the history and descriptions, but I won't be rushing out to buy (another one) anytime soon . . . ;-))

Bill Donnelly

Ah, there is difference! There are condensing dryers which are essentially electric driers with built-in dehumidifiers but heat pump dryers go a step further by replacing the heating elements with the condenser. Miele sells a heat pump dryer that operates on 120V 15A and that's not nearly enough power for a heating element to make meaningful heat. Eventually the energy consumed in a heat pump dryer makes it into the room, of course - it still has an exhaust, but what comes out of the exhaust will be dry as it's passed over the evaporator. The air being drawn in is passed over the condenser and thus heated, with up to 6kW of heat output with 1.5kW's work in the compressor. Edit: I noticed that some of the models that operate on 240V only use the heat pump in "eco" mode and otherwise will operate as condensing dryers with standard heating elements. The Miele I referenced can't do that, though, as there's not enough electricity at its disposal.

Technology Connections

Do one on the passive house! Do one on the passive house!

Mo Cassidy

Heat pump dryers are neat -- but as far as I know, they don't actually take heat from the room to heat the inside, but rather basically act as dehumidifiers with a closed air loop inside the unit that's getting repeatedly dehumidified (passed over the cold evaporator, and then the hot condenser.) I think they might use heating elements, or just the waste heat from the loop, to get that initial heat -- and then they actually discharge excess heat into the room, since otherwise the waste heat from dehumidification would cause the temperature to keep rising! One kinda neat thing to think about here is that a big chunk of the heat is actually coming from capturing the latent heat of the water that's being removed.

We should all want them! Now all we need is to get some policymakers' gears turning...

Technology Connections

I agree that it could be a lot worse, but when you consider that the pallet full of cans at every Walmart is only getting sold because enough cars are out there that needed another pallet full of cans and it adds up pretty fast. Luckily the atmospheric lifetime of R-134a doesn't seem to be that long. Although - and this is some inside baseball as I might do a video on refrigerant management as an entire topic - some of the worst offenders are supermarkets and other industries with huge refrigeration systems. The bigger the system, the more potential for leaks, the bigger the charge, and the greater the sunk cost. Loads of these systems get recharged without their leaks being addressed, and it's a huge issue we need to be solving. Personally I'm hoping that C02 refrigeration systems become more widespread, and apparently they're already kind of big in Japan.

Technology Connections

Ah, so I'll do some more digging and pin a comment but it's my understanding that the reason stuff like isobutane isn't used in A/C systems is just down to the size and thus charge. Leaks have the potential to be much more dangerous so for the most part flammable refrigerants are limited to small systems like refrigerators.

Technology Connections

Great Video! I’m curious why you didn’t mention Hydrocarbon refrigerants like r600a. Climate friendly and no patents! Yea they are flammable but so is natural gas and we have been dealing with that I homes for ages. There are lots of new refrigerators and freezers using this gas and minisplits should be coming to the us at some point.

At risk of sounding like a republican, I must declare that as "bad" as R134 is, it's really not THAT bad. The average charge in a vehicle is 20oz. Releasing all 20oz is about the CO2 equivalent of burning 89 gallons of gasoline and that doesn't include the other bad stuff coming out of the tailpipe like NOx, sulfur, etc... ANYWAYS, hopefully it's as easy to convert to 1234yf as it was to convert from R12 to R134A when they phase it out. On another rambling note, when my dehumidifier leaked out all of the refrigerant and started freezing over, I recharged it with propane and it worked for another year before locking up! haha.

Garrett Rabenold

Damn it. Now I want a geothermal heat pump.

Aaron Carson

Yay, now I have a TMBG song stuck in my head! (This is never a bad thing.)

tim1724

This video has me pumped! :P

Jason Wellband

Yay! So glad to see my footage in here and the praise for hybrid water heaters

Heat Pumps 2: 2Hot2Pump

Can't wait to listen to this after work.

Scott Kemp