Why Hybrid Solar Heat Pumps are the Future of Home Energy

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Chapters
00:00 - Intro
01:04 - PaXos & LONGi
06:05 - Quick SAHP History
07:21 - Drawbacks
08:43 - SAHP vs Solar Roof

[DaveBjornRapp]

My grandfather had the heat pump thing going since the 70s. He had hoses through the roof of the house and garage, in the summer they heated the pool, in the winter cleared the driveway of snow and ice. Then he added some very low output pv cells up there... they provided way more electricity than they 'should have' because the heat pump was sucking the heat away. It's a great idea to marry the two in one device.

[vsznry]

Lol putting cooling tubes under a solar panel was an idea that won me a junior award at the California Science Center during a State contest for future technologies. like 13 years ago or so.
I tested & discovered that heat was a problem with those early toy panels & measured the difference in efficiency levels.

[EVILBUNNY]

In my previous job of working as an Estate Agent here in the UK, I sold a few houses in a Green Initiative Development. All of the houses were built with eco-efficiency in mind and all houses had SAHPs installed. The average house's electricity bill for the whole year was ~£40. The windows were all triple glazed, had rainwater runoff collection, EV chargers pre-installed on every house. Truly is amazing what can be done if more houses were built to this standard. That being said a 2-bedroom house in the neighbourhood sold for £285k which is well above the average in South Wales, so there's definitely incentive for the initiative

[Handyman.]

I had a customer who uses heat pumps to heat his entire house, roof, driveway, patio, pools, garage, and walkways. The place is amazing, a virtual museum. Hell of a guy too.

[AllenLeland]

I'm glad that you always state in your videos that like most things "it's complicated". Too many people believe in Black or white solutions.

[TheNewAccount]

The biggest need for cooling the panels is during the summer months. And during those months my heatpump is mostly used for cooling, so running hot air through it would be counter productive...

[herfkr]

Here in the Netherlands SAPH is called PVT (PV+Thermal for the heat pump). We have two major brands who produce these PVTpanels on basis of pretty normal solar panels, They deliver the whole system behind it with buffer tanks, piping, heat pump and software. The brands are Triple Solar and Qsilence (from HR-energy). No, it is not cheap, but they have hundreds of installations, big and small, on gouvernment buildings as well on regular houses.

[toddh]

One use case that jumps out to me where this could be interesting is pool heating. One of my largest summer time electric consumption areas is the pool with the pump and heater. The system can electrically power the pump and leverage the panel heat to warm the pool seems like a win win.

[thormeyer]

4:08 - try checking out Dual Sun. They make panels that are standard size and has a liquid heat exchanger on the back. Does the exact same thing but with normal panel size.. 😊

[FreekHoekstra]

You want to cool your solar panels in summer.
But that’s also when you’re not trying to heat your house .
The rest of the year you don’t need to cool your solar panels, but then there’s also no significant extra heat to be harvested by the heat pump.
It’s a cool idea, (haha) but ultimately it generates power when you don’t need it.
A ground source heat pump makes a lot more sense, because when it’s really cold, the ground is still warm when it’s really hot the ground is still cool.

[erfquake]

Matt, you & your bro need to do an honest economic deep-dive into the costs of these things versus what the avg person can possibly afford. Because we're the choir, we don't need convincing, we just need it within rational financial reach. The rebate programs only alter the equation from 'hilariously unaffordable' to 'utterly unaffordable ' and are about to be taken away. Solar companies are ringing alarm bells saying tariffs are coming, climatologists are ringing alarm bells saying the tipping points are all around us. It's as if clean energy proponents are all saying, "the Earth is dying! Don't just stand there, take out a $40k loan!" The fact is for most people, these systems have not been affordable, are not now affordable, and will likely be even less affordable in the future. The core problem is we're hardwired into trying to solve socioenvironmental crises exclusively through capitalism. It's as if the goal were to save capitalism itself, even at the expense of the human race. If climate change is the crisis everyone says it is, and it definitely is, then we need to think beyond the private sector model to fix it. So as it is, I'm sorry but every time I watch one of your episodes I just get more depressed. Please do a TBD on this. Thank you.

[Chinoman]

A few months ago I also did a research on this; I'm Portuguese.
I actually found a Spanish installer that had these hybrid panels available; but the cost was absolutely prohibitive... 30-40+ years to pay-off the difference!

[matzke]

FYI -- You can minimize or eliminate several drawbacks by integrating a geothermal heat exchanger into the mix. In the summer, you save by dumping all that extra heat into the ground, which saves energy immediately while simultaneously *reversing* one of the biggest drawbacks in geothermal heat exchangers - long-term thermal drift. This means you can reduce the geothermal loop size, which saves on installation cost, which makes it all more financially viable.

....but you know what really turbocharges the whole thing? Demand-responsive time-of-use electricity rates.

[MayankJairaj]

Back in 2012, when I was just a kid, I put together a little setup using a spare 50W solar panel, an old PC cooler (it was a Zalman, which many gamers today probably haven’t heard of), and a cheap thermoelectric module. At the time, thermoelectric coolers (TECs) were all the rage, so I decided to give it a shot. Since I lived in a tropical climate, maintaining a significant temperature difference was easy, and while the energy output wasn’t much (around 0.1W to 0.5W), it was enough to charge rechargeable batteries.

One thing I noticed was that using the cooler with the solar panel actually improved its efficiency by about 15%! That’s pretty decent for such a small setup. If we were to scale it up, say with a 10kW solar array, and use a better energy storage system - PCM, the results could be pretty substantial

[christiaang]

In the Netherlands we have a company that's doing SAHP for quite some time now. It's called Tripple Solar PVT.

[cirelancaster]

A big hurdle is storage. People tend to use hot water mostly in the morning for showers or the evening for dishwashers/laundry. The peak hot water generation would be midday when most houses are empty.

[burningsporkdeath]

I like it in concept and would be ok with it as an array in the yard or field. I have serious concerns with it being roof mounted. Roofs don't last forever and adding solar alone significantly increases re-roofing cost. Adding heat pump plumbing to that will drive it up even more.

One benefit of this in areas like where I am in N. Idaho is that you could send heat to them from the heat pump to clear snow off of them.

[M.E.O.W.clypse]

Technology is getting closer and closer to an idea i had in my teens that I've not had a chance to work on, but this is exciting to me!!

[Thorod]

Living in Arizona this would be the most amazing thing!
I'm a plumber by trade and would love to install a full SAHP on my roof today!!
Free hot water in the day time(with recirculation), cooled solar panels so they last longer in the AZ heat, and now a shaded and vented/cooled roof over the attic
This is savings all around!!!

[Itsallgoodtogo]

Heat pumps are often represented as a dual unit one inside and the temparature exchanger outside.
If you have a house with a cellar there is also a great option to buy a heatpump that is all in one and put it in there. It keeps the cellar cool in the summer and during winter the temparature is much higher compared to outside offsetting the energy loss from not having the exchanger outside during summer(you don't use much energy during summer anyway). Great stuff.