How This New Heat Pump is Genius

But what’s a cascading heat pump? And are our homes ready for them?

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[David_Mash]

AC units should be heating our water
Edit: The waste heat from when an AC or Refrigerator is running, should be routed to and recovered/stored in the hot water heater

[veitforabetterworld]

Our heatpump is a normal non cascading pump using the groundwater as heat source. It has a COP of 5-6 over the year and heats our water up to 60°C and works for almost every outside temperature because the groundwater temperature doesn't fluctuate that much

[staceys]

In the early 2000s, a company called Hallowell International based in Maine developed a '2-stage' heat pump that did pretty much this exact thing. It had two different compressors as well as a heat recovery loop which would divert friction heat from the compressors into the refrigerant in heating mode. We had one of their systems and it performed very well, able to heat our house for about the same dollar cost as the gas furnace it replaced, which was unheard of in 2006! (We're in snow country, and it definitely gets cold here.)
Unfortunately, the company didn't survive, mainly due to quality and durability issues with their control boards. Our system eventually died from a bad control board, which we couldn't replace. We ended up replacing it with a variable speed drive heat pump from Amana. Its good to see people are still tinkering with the concepts though!

[chhunter]

The whole heat pump conversation (especially resistance to them) is fascinating to me because we have been using them in Virginia for decades. I'm 43 years old and every house I've ever lived in has had a heat pump. I only recently found out that heat pumps are not the norm everywhere else.

[naterbaternaterbater]

SOMEONE CONTACT TECHNOLOGY CONNECTIONS RIGHT NOW!!!

Edit: Y'all, the running gag is that Technology Connections keeps circling back to heat pumps.

[webx]

I used to work on controls for cascaded refrigeration units for use in medical and scientific applications. Once you have a second stage, it's pretty crazy what kinds of temperature gradients you can have. IIRC, one of them I worked on was a -150C system.

Heat pump is love. Heat pump is life.

[machdeath]

I'm a manufacturers rep for hydronic equipment, and part of what we do is design and sell Air-to-Water Heat Pump systems for radiant heating and radiant cooling. And we need this!!! Looks like it will have built-in buffer tanks, and can cool to pretty ridiculous OA temps. Depends on how big they will be....but I'm looking forward to seeing them in the future. Thank you for all the entertainment!

[janami-dharmam]

today the temp is over 42C inside and outside it is over 44C here in India.

Traditional air conditioners can't handle this load- We had power blackout twice today. Two stage heat pumps must become cheaper so that it is affordable.

[dusdnd]

This is how freeze dryers work. They have to get the internal temperature down to about -40F, which is too much for a single system to handle. So you use them in tandem to create a greater difference in temperature.

[johnculbert]

you know your an odd ball when you see "the prefect heat pump" and get excited. lol love your show broski.

[BiggMo]

Complex systems are only beneficial if reliable.

As a home builder that delivers around 300 homes a year… we are seeing a 38% failure rate of hybrid water heaters. We had a 0% failure rate with electric, 3% failure rate with gas and a 6% failure rate with tankless.

[oldgandy]

I worked for Trane for several years. Our plant built water source systems. This method solves the cold temperature problem in a different way than the units we built. Same eventual result. Our units used closed loop water supply as the heat exchanger part of the system. We built the AC unit, the customer supplied the water component. How they conditioned the water for the efficient transfer of heat was not our problem. Our systems worked, starting with 6, 000 BTU room sized units, all the way up to 300, 000 BTU commercial units, but they were not inexpensive to buy.

[keepthinking]

We use cascading systems for negative 80 Celsius. Freezes and negative 20 Celsius. It's the same principle we just taken multiple little compressors with different freons with different glide and boiling points. I'm just staging them and using the medium. From the fluid as its transfer, instead of the air outside

[topgunm]

We are going for a geothermal Heat Pump (with floor heating) and passive cooling for our new house. Pretty nice as the temperature of the ground is a stable 3-4c and that means the COP is like 4 year around. Its also much more quiet than air-to-air heat pumps and does not need to "de-ice". In the summer we can use that "cold hole" to passively cool in the summer.

[zapfanzapfan]

I'd drill a bore hole and go with ground source heat pump. No need to be able to extract heat from -30 C air when the ground is a constant 8 C.

[malikto]

It's a shame these aren't available now as I'm building a new home and would definitely consider one.

[RyuuKageDesu]

This is definitely something to keep my eye on, for when we expand the house. Right now we have window units (cut through the walls, rather than stuck in a window) in each area of the home. This has had the added benefit of individualized temperature control.

[jackcoats]

I am in TN near Nashville. Here we do get 100+ summers and a few weeks below 0 F in the winter. Our house has a heat pump but with a resistive 'heat kit'. Nothing we have, even our EVs use electricity like the Heat Kit (resistive heater that de-freezes the heat pump).

We stil have people that tell us that 'heat pumps don't work below 32F' and other such drivel. When we need to upgrade our heat pump in a few years I would LOVE to have anything near affordable heat pump that really works! Heat pumps in our area tend to be 'package units' that sit outside the house that includes both 'inside' and 'outside' portions of the heat pump and our return and conditioned air ducts got to the unit that sits just outside our home, this make a compete 'hvac package' (and it sits on a small slab just outside our home, with ducts in our crawl space).

[LucasMachado]

I always wonder if technology outside of the nordic countries is outdated or do we have some well kept secrets, because we simply have much better heat pumps that work very well in our very cold winters.
For example this year I had one installed at home (Mitsubishi RW-35) which can keep a COP of 4 at temperatures as low as -35C (-31F). It's not a cascading heat pump, but just a regular one.
A have another heat pump installed *15 years ago* which can keep a COP above 3 at -25C (-13F)...

[terryrogers]

In my neck of the woods temperatures range from -35 to +35 degrees Celsius and since there not being many heat pumps that can handle the low temps insurance companies mandate that home owners must have another source of primary heat. Flooid's cascading system definitely got my attention.