Using swimming pool heater as air source heat pump

[Marco]

In dense urban environments all the sound from heatpumps adds up, it will get worse in a decade or so when bad cleaning and wear add up.

Plus ground source heatpumps can directly provide high grade heat during winter and provide drop in replacement. Without the need for boilers or low temperature heating. People should get low temperature heating, but adoption will be better if they have the option not too.

[Siwastaja]

In dense urban environments all the sound from heatpumps adds up

    

European excuses of not getting heatpumps are total world-class comedy! Couldn't have expected THAT! I truly enjoy these cope threads.

Though about trying to calculate it out for you, but why bother. Visit somewhere with gazillion of heatpumps installed, for example Japan. Makes absolutely no difference if you have any amount of car traffic.

[Marco]

Visit somewhere with gazillion of heatpumps installed, for example Japan. Makes absolutely no difference if you have any amount of car traffic.

Most people have no car traffic at night for the most part. Do you have a free standing property and did you have the ability to put your heatpump on the side of your house away from your bedroom window? Because people in row homes generally do not.  Recently a new housing development here was banned from using air source heatpumps because the combined noise of a street full of them couldn't stay below 40 dB on neighbouring properties, the city said only a single one had to stay below ... the judge disagreed. No excuses, cold hard reality.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8297235/

Recently in Japan, noises from wind turbines and domestic use heat sources sometimes cause an increase in noise annoyance owing to low-frequency tonal components.

The name of the lead author does not sound European to me.

If we want near total adoption in dense urban environments, district ground source solutions make most sense. All the excuses add up and slow down the transition, noise, people expecting near instant heat without changing anything to their radiators, a whole family all wanting to have 15 minute rain showers etc. You can find them middling, but they're still important.

[Siwastaja]

Yes, I do have a heatpump, a relatively large 9kW nominal model, right next to our bedroom. No problem. At full power, 90Hz, it can be heard during night because I live in countyside so it's dead quiet. Doesn't bother anyone. All neighbors have air source heatpumps too.

Reality is what you make it. Yes, by all means accept cold hard reality. With your mindset, it literally will mean cold. And bloody - again literally. Enjoy.

[Marco]

right next to our bedroom.

That does not answer my question. We have a free standing wall next to the bedroom and I am getting an air source heat pump and have no worries about it, but that's a blind wall, not the wall with the windows. A double brick wall is good noise insulation, the noise simply having to go around the corner helps a lot.

My mindset can not overrule the judge regardless of what it is.

[Siwastaja]

"Your" as plural included that judge. It is barely within the realm of reality that this judge was directly or indirectly financed by a certain country which does sell a lot of gas to Europe and also is known to manipulate public opinion. Heatpumps are a huge threat to fossil producers.

I have a ventilation hole (kitchen exhaust) right above the heatpump which lets more noise through than any half decent window. Kitchen is right next to bedroom and we sleep with the door between kitchen and bedroom open. You can hear the compressor during cold winter nights when it's running at full power (compressor at 90Hz) through the wall and through the said ventilation hole, but... by "being able to hear" - just barely. If there is a car passing by - not the house, but even 100 meters away  - that alone makes more noise, and more annoying kind of noise.

Noise problems are usually due to bad wall mounting.

Water flowing in radiators and ventilation also makes noise. Can't make our surroundings completely noise-free.

[Someone]

Water flowing in radiators and ventilation also makes noise. Can't make our surroundings completely noise-free.

and as in the other thread where this came up, try getting the noise specifications for a gas powered heater! Oh look they're louder (but usually with lower duty cycle).

[coppice]

In dense urban environments all the sound from heatpumps adds up

    

European excuses of not getting heatpumps are total world-class comedy! Couldn't have expected THAT! I truly enjoy these cope threads.

Though about trying to calculate it out for you, but why bother. Visit somewhere with gazillion of heatpumps installed, for example Japan. Makes absolutely no difference if you have any amount of car traffic.

I've spent much of my adult life living where most people have heat pumps. Mostly for cooling, rather than heating. The noise from poorly maintained ones can be a huge problem at night.

[Siwastaja]

You just need a control mechanism to deal with people neglecting correct installation and maintenance. Same for broken or removed car mufflers.


BTW, each Finn, me included, has as of today's news been made to pay 1600EUR on average to the German natural gas customers. We Finns are known not to get on streets and put up with a lot of bullshit, thus we are easy to take advantage of. We don't usually get mad.

I know this is not Germany's fault, it's the fault of our own corrupted leaders who think financing other countries is the job of Finnish taxpayers. Regardless, I want to appeal to all our German friends, consider using this 1600EUR subsidy I have had to pay to install a heatpump and thus reduce your dependency on the gas we are paying you. Paying your bills, I think I have the right to at least make this humble request. Also do note we are not that rich. Once we run out of money, you have to pay for your own gas after all. Thank you in advance for taking it into consideration.

But I'm afraid the effect is opposite; cheap gas paid by someone else just makes people hesitate and not install heatpumps.

[woodchips]

Glad this thread still alive, been so hot recently that done nothing at all about the swimming pool heater. Finally got it off the trailer ready to play with, now need some water pipe connections.

Umm, Finland contributing 1600EUR to Germany, hasn't made the UK news. Did hear that Europe has been told to reduce gas consumption by 15%, but not cash handouts.

Interesting times?

[Siwastaja]

Glad this thread still alive, been so hot recently that done nothing at all about the swimming pool heater. Finally got it off the trailer ready to play with, now need some water pipe connections.

Umm, Finland contributing 1600EUR to Germany, hasn't made the UK news. Did hear that Europe has been told to reduce gas consumption by 15%, but not cash handouts.

Interesting times?

As always, it's not a direct handout of money, but a deliberate act that has been in motion for a few years so that the final blow can be sold to us by saying "oh, somebody else fucked this up (and let's not tear open the old wounds) and now we can't do anything but to accept our fate", and so no one has to even resign.

And obviously it only makes news in Finland, and pretty limited discussion here too thanks to the self-censorship.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniper

So basically what happened, somebody with good free lunches got an idea that Finnish taxpayers should buy majority share of a struggling German fossil fuel company in freaking year 2017, during active war in Ukraine and all that. Every imaginable expert said don't do it, and Uniper itself appealed to the Finns by buying front page advertisements basically saying "we are a crap company with near zero value, don't do hostile overtake on us". Yet that still happened. Fast forward a few years, and 8 more billion were pushed into this zero-value endeavor obviously because again somebody gets a free lunch. Finally, we were told that hey, everybody was right and this company has no value, so let's sell it to Germans again for peanuts to get rid of it, because if it went bankrupt, it would be Very Bad for Germans, and we don't want that.

And the root cause to company being in trouble - their business strategy is to sell Putin's gas to German customers with massively long (I think they were like 10 years) fixed contracts, regardless of what the cost of buying that gas is. What could go wrong!

So in essence, no money is being sent now. It has been already sent during the last 5 years. We have already enabled Germans to have Putin's cheap gas for years. Sad part is, almost no one knows about this. So no one is saying "thank you".

This is the core issue in fossil fuels: they are not only bloody, but they are fundamentally expensive, being a limited resource requiring massive investments to extract. They can be only made artificially cheap, and indeed one of the many ways to do that is to suck the money from Finnish taxpayers endless pocket because Finns are known to tolerate pretty much anything. 90% of us are too nice and even vote as being told to, and in the big picture it doesn't help that I'm not nice (at least to the criminals).

But now it's over, we taxpayers here won't have basically any more money left. I think we will see some 5-10 billion still extracted for <some super important thing happening somewhere in Europe> but that will be literally the last before the collapse of our society, hopefully not a violent one.

Sorry for going so much OT, I'm following your project with interest because those swimming pool air-to-water heatpumps sometimes go for really cheap, like 500EUR for a new unit, and they are powered by standard plug so no electrician is needed, just plumbing. These will obviously not work when it's -15degC outside and you need +50degC water in your distribution, but if they worked at Tout = +7 to provide 35-degC water, at decent COP say at least 3, that would already be a huge saving as you would need to burn the fossils only small part of the winter.

But as always with air-to-water heatpumps, lowest possible distribution temperature is the #1 key to success. This is true even with state-of-the art expensive units, but of course even more important with the swimming pool heater, because I think no one heats up a swimming pool beyond +35degC or so, so the units might fail by refrigerant overpressure, hopefully giving a soft error message instead of getting actually damaged, but being cheap, I suspect protections will be lacking.

And low distribution temperature might be surprisingly easy to achieve: for example, install 1-2 fan coil units in parallel with the old radiators, something like that.

[Marco]

Fan coil units are ridiculously hard to get in my country at decent cost. Still gotta check with distributors, but for direct consumer sales there is pretty much nothing affordable (to the point I can just buy a minisplit for the cost of a single FCU). They seem to be big in Italy, also affordable.

I want to see if it's possible to get a monoblock which can do cooling and supplementary heating through a couple FCUs, blocking the normal radiators from the water loop during cooling to prevent condensation, but switch automatically to re-supplying a boiler for domestic hot water when required. I'm afraid it will be gibberish to installers here.

[NiHaoMike]

Fan coil units are ridiculously hard to get in my country at decent cost.

Look at using car radiators and then finding PSC or BLDC fans to match.

[Dankoozy]

Further thoughts, why not dunk the condenser in a bucket of water so it extracts the heat from water rather than air, much more concentrated.

If you have a large body of water, this is an excellent idea. It is doable if you have a lake next to you.

If you go to some of the stately homes in the UK, which are now open to the public as tourist spots, you can often find this setup. These places tend to have a lake or river not far from the main house. Several of them have a small building by the lake or river, built in the late Victorian period, where a heat pump was used to heat the house from the energy in the water. Some of these are 150 years old, so the original installations presumably used steam engines.

Really? Are there any pics of such an ancient heatpumps?

I was dragged around loads of National Trust houses by my ma back in the day and never saw such a thing. I did see plenty of ice houses from the time before mechanical refrigeration though

[coppice]

Further thoughts, why not dunk the condenser in a bucket of water so it extracts the heat from water rather than air, much more concentrated.

If you have a large body of water, this is an excellent idea. It is doable if you have a lake next to you.

If you go to some of the stately homes in the UK, which are now open to the public as tourist spots, you can often find this setup. These places tend to have a lake or river not far from the main house. Several of them have a small building by the lake or river, built in the late Victorian period, where a heat pump was used to heat the house from the energy in the water. Some of these are 150 years old, so the original installations presumably used steam engines.

Really? Are there any pics of such an ancient heatpumps?

I was dragged around loads of National Trust houses by my ma back in the day and never saw such a thing. I did see plenty of ice houses from the time before mechanical refrigeration though

I saw them 50 years ago, visiting places with my parents. I can't remember which houses I saw them at. However, I haven't seen many stately homes, and I've seen more than one Victorian heat pump at one, in its own little building down by the lake or river, so I assume there must have been quite a few around. Trying to Google things like "Victorian stately home heat pump" just gets me stuff about people trying to install new heat pumps in old houses.

[Marco]

A little search for heat pump history tells me Swiss seem to think they originated commercial heat pumps for heating around WW1. Victorian England seems a little early by comparison.

[coppice]

A little search for heat pump history tells me Swiss seem to think they originated commercial heat pumps for heating around WW1. Victorian England seems a little early by comparison.

Are you talking about electrically powered ones? WW! sounds about right for that. Early electric fridges also date from around that time, too. In the Victorian era heat pumps for refrigerated warehouses, and the ones I saw heating stately homes, used a steam engine.

[Marco]

Even if you used the heat from the steam engine for conventional heating too (most of the energy goes to heat after all, maybe 20% to motion), just using the heat pump to boost the temperature of the already hot water ... it just doesn't seem worth the investment.

Ohh, you get maybe twice as much useful power out of the coal ... for the cost of a steam engine and a state of the art heat pump which probably uses ammonia, so which can easily kill you.

[coppice]

Even if you used the heat from the steam engine for conventional heating too (most of the energy goes to heat after all, maybe 20% to motion), just using the heat pump to boost the temperature of the already hot water ... it just doesn't seem worth the investment.

Ohh, you get maybe twice as much useful power out of the coal ... for the cost of a steam engine and a state of the art heat pump which probably uses ammonia, so which can easily kill you.

I guess they didn't necessarily have to work especially well. Wealthy people loved to show off how very up to date they were. If you had a large heat pump, in its own building, with a viewing gallery, all your friends could be impressed when they visited. Its rather like buying an EV to look very up to date, when all the electricity in your area is produced from brown coal.

[Siwastaja]

Using the river for a micro hydro power installation, and using that power to run a heat pump sourcing heat from the very same river would be an interesting way to heat your house, if you live by a river, of course. This would make total sense for very small rivers/creeks which cannot provide more than a few kW of electrical power, which alone isn't enough to heat a house, but multiplied by the heatpump COP would suffice.