Heat Pump Project for your home

What type of heat pump to choose? – PART 3

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 08:22:00 +0000

After you found out that your building does not have too much specific heat losses and would be suitable for installing heat pump, you must consider what type of heat pump to install and how powerful should it be.

For choosing a type of heat pump you must first decide what will be the source of energy. I would recommend deciding according to the following sequence. If you have a plenty of land space around your house, at least double or triple of house quadrature, I would recommend installing horizontal collector based heat pump. If you have underground water sources I would recommend to install ground water based heat pump – in that case you must drill two wells 20 – 50 meters deep to reach underground water. If you don’t have neither a lot of space around your house, neither underground water, I would recommend installing vertical geo-collector based heat pump as I did. This option is expensive but very reliable; you must drill one or two wells from 60 to 150 meters. In case none of above options suits your situation, then I would recommend installing air sourced heat pump that is using outdoor air as source of energy. This is the cheapest solution, but also less effective in comparison to others. I would not recommend installing outdoor air sourced heat pump if winter temperatures frequently drops under -5 degrees Celsius.

To be on a safe side I would recommend making few calculations before deciding. Find an engineer and decide together. Maybe you would be able to decide what type of heat pump to choose, but you will definitely need help when deciding how powerful the heat pump should be and how much of energy resources it will require – there are a lot of factors to be considered (type of heating, winter temperatures, specific heat loss, peak winter temperatures…).

What type of heat pump to choose? – PART 2

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:11:00 +0000

First step is to calculate how much specific heat loss your building has per square meter of usable floors (heat loss in W/m2). If your house has more than 60W/m2 maximum specific heat loss then I would not recommend installing heat pump. You should first think of additional insulation of the house. Typical house where heat pump is much recommended:

Net floor area = 150m2

Needed heat per year = 45kWh/m2 per year

Max Specific Heat loss 35 W/m2

To calculate heat loss you need a bit of engineering and mathematics, but I would recommend finding an engineer who has experience in calculating building heat loss. It also depends in what climate area you are living, what are your additional heat sources during the winter (solar roof, windows to the south…).

What type of heat pump to choose? – PART 1

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:50:00 +0000

Winter is knocking on the door and I started my heat pump again. Since last post one idea occurred to me and that is answering quite frequent question: What type of heat pump to chose. I prepared relatively simple decision making model for choosing a heat pump for heating the house during the winter. Everybody knows that we have several types of heat pumps multiplied by number of producers and you can get 1000 of different heat pumps … O.K. it is not so bad :-) … actually we have few types of heat pump to choose between – in general: air to air heat pump, air to water heat pump, ground sourced heat pump (water to water). To be able to choose the right one you must consider: type of heating to be used, current/new building conditions, available heat sources, legislation, building restrictions, climate, heat losses, preparing also hot water, heating regime (low or high temperatures), and financial part.

In general one could say – every heat pump is better than no heat pump. But let us check in details in PART 2 … coming soon.

Parts and producers of my Heat Pump System

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:33:00 +0000

Few days ago I was moving around my heat pump and checking few things. I was wondering how many companies and parts are included in this heat pump system. I made a simple list of producers of most important parts of my heat pump system. You can check them also on the internet. Here it is:

Termotehnika – Slovenia (http://www.termotehnika.com/)
Grundfos –Denmark (http://www.grundfos.com/)
Lowara – Italy (http://www.lowara.com/)
Taconova– Switzerland (http://www.taconova.com/)
Kovina – Slovenia (http://www.kovina.si/)
AquaSystem – Italy (http://www.aquasystem.it/)
AlfaLaval – Sweden (http://www.alfalaval.com/)
ESBE – Sweden (http://www.esbe.se/)
Austria Email – Austria (http://www.austria-email.com/)
Danfoss – Denmark (http://www.danfoss.com/)
Totraplastika - Slovenia (http://www.totraplastika.si/)

Somebody wants to be a sponsor of this blog … be my guest :-)

By the way, my heat pump is operating during the summer only 20 minutes per day for hot water (300 liters of hot water).

My Heat Pump Project Video

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 20:13:00 +0000

I've made a short video presenting my geothermal heat pump system on YouTube. In short presentation you can se the most important information about my system, some photos and links to this site. Thank you for reading and supporting my work.

Detailed installation Schema for Geothermal Heat Pump Project

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 14:15:00 +0000

After receiving few questions about installing heat pump, connecting to the heating system and to the water heater, I decided to publish detailed installation schema. Here you can see every valve, pump, pipes, heat pump, water heater and other parts needed to operate the heat pump.

On the upper left corner of the schema you can see the legend for better understanding of the schema. I hope I didn’t forget anything – I cannot guarantee :-)

Electrical part of schema is missing (wiring) because I’m still working on it. Hope I will finish and publish it soon.If somebody finds an error in the schema please add a comment to this post. I case somebody have further question … please do not hesitate to post your comment.

What was the investment in my Heat Pump Project?

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 20:48:00 +0000

I described almost everything but forgot to describe the most important :-). What was the investment actually? The majority of investment represents the vertical geothermal collector. One meter of geothermal collector (drilling + installing + testing + material) cost me about 50 Euro. Nowadays the price is higher. I have 220 meters of geothermal collector so it cost me about 11.000 Euro. Another high investment is heat pump, it cost me 3100 Euro. The total investment was 16.500 Euro.

Geothermal Collector = 11.000 Euro
Heat pump = 3.100 Euro
Water heater + pumps = 600 Euro
Pipes, valves, heat exchanger, other work = 1.800

I also received a subsidy of 2000 Euro for installing high efficiency heating system using renewable resource. So my investment was actually 14.500 Euro. If I would install oil furnace instead of heat pump the investment would be of course lower, but the operational costs would be higher (3 to four times higher). According to my calculations and simulations the cumulative costs (investment + operational costs (electricity)) of my heat pump would met the cumulative costs of oil furnace (investments + operational costs (oil + electicity)) in approximately 10 years. See also the Graph. This is I think called return of investment in 10 years – but I’m not economist so please excuse me.

How my Heat Pump was operating in winter 2007/2008

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 21:56:00 +0000

Here I’m describing shortly how my heat pump was operating last winter 2007/2008, what were the temperatures, what were the costs and other parameters.
An average temperature in year 2007 was around 12 degrees Celsius – Slovenia, central location (this temperature is above average for our location). The winter 2007/2008 was not so cold but lower temperatures lasted quite long time. Here is the data what was happening in heating season 2007/2008:

We switched on heating in September 24th 2007 and was stopped in May 10th 2008. The heating season lasted 229 days.
Heat pump was operating 680 hours (approximately 3 hours per day on average)
Total costs of operating for the whole season were 230 EUR (2550 kWh) - 1 Euro per day.
Minimum outer temperature was -9.9 degrees Celsius. This peak requested heat pump to run 4,5 hours per day.
Room temperatures were from 20 – 21 degrees Celsius (night temperatures around 19)
Temperatures of medium from vertical collector to Heat Pump were from 7 (coldest days) to 12 degrees Celsius (at the start and end of season).
Temperatures of water in floor heating were adjusted from 26 up to 30 degrees Celsius (talking for returning line – water temperature coming from floor heating back to the Heat Pump).

No maintenance was needed, no problems, just paying bills for electricity :-) I just switched on the heat pump in September and switched it off in May. If anybody has similar experience or totally different please add a comment. Thank you for reading and supporting this page.

Installing Heat Pump and Water Heater

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 21:37:00 +0000

My Heat Pump does not have all needed installation integrated (pumps, valves, expansion…) – it is not “Plug’n’Play” like someone from computer science would say. So the next step was preparing installation schema for external installations (pipes, pumps, wires, heat exchanger and water heater). Luckily I have some background on that subject so it was quite easy for me to prepare all schemas. At that time (2005) not many plumbers in our country have knowledge and skills to install heat pump … so learning again J. Nowadays many plumbers have required knowledge and skills. Here is the photo of already installed Heat Pump and Water Heater with all needed parts that enable heating and cooling. If somebody is interested in detailed installation schema please add your comment bellow with your opinion what do you think about this blog and don’t forget to add your e-mail and preferred language of the schema (currently: Slovenian, English). I will send the schema to you.
Coming next: How my heat pump is operating?

Buying a Heat Pump

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 14:40:00 +0000

Outer collector and pipe installations were already finished and it was time to select and buy the heart of the system, so called Heat pump. In Europe we have from 5 to maximum 10 well known and high quality heat pump production companies. I was investigating many of them and after that decided to buy a quality product from my country. When buying a heat pump you should be careful what to buy. You should consider many options:

Do you plan to use the heat pump only for heating or also for hot water

Do you plan to use a heat pump also for cooling the house during summer

Do you prefer active (needs reversible heat pump) or passive cooling (less energy used for cooling)

Do you prefer a product out of the box (this kind of heat pump already includes automatics, electric connections, pumps, valves, and also boiler) or do you prefer only bare heat pump with basic regulation and security automatics (you will have to install some parts additionally)

And most important: don’t forget to calculate carefully how much power you will need for heating the house. I have bought the heat pump with output power of 14kW, input power 3,1kW. It has a scroll compressor. It also has additional pipe heater of 6 kW for extremely cold winters (I didn’t use it so far). You can see the heat pump on the photo.

Geothermal Heat Pump Project LOGO!

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 21:01:00 +0000

I have created new LOGO for my Heat Pump Project Blog. Hope you like it. Thank you for supporting my Blog.

Connecting and Testing Vertical Collector for the Heat Pump

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 21:14:00 +0000

The first photo is showing a testing procedure for vertical collector. Each vertical collector should be tested before connected to the heat pump. It is very small possibility of leaking, but you must be 100% sure. Testing is accomplished with water and a water pump (hand driven) which can produce a pressure up to 5 bar. Pressure meter must be stable at least 1 hour – 1 hour the same pressure.

The second photo is showing pipes already connecting vertical collector and heat pump. There is a 0,75 to 1 meter deep channel where pipes are placed.

Pipes for Geothermal Collector

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 18:20:00 +0000

Pipes for geothermal collector are very important part of heat pump system. For 100 meters of vertical geothermal collector that is inserted into drilled hole, we usually need 400 meters of strong pipes (2 pipe loops inserted in one hole). If we calculate the water pressure at the end of 100 meters collector (100 meters deep under the surface) we get 10 bars (1 bar / 10 meters). We must add another 2 bars to get optimal working conditions for the heat pump. That is way pipes must be strong and must stand at least 12 bars of pressure for 100 meters collector. We have used 16 bar pipes (32mm in diameter, 3 mm wall thickness, PE 100, SIST EN 12201) from Slovene (Europe) producer.

Drilling the hole, close-up

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 16:48:00 +0000

This is a close-up photo of drilling the hole for my heat pump project. Parallel to drilling we have chosen pipes for vertical geothermal collector. Special pipes were used. We have used more than 1000 meters.

Drilling the hole (well) for geothermal vertical collector

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:23:00 +0000

And then we started … I went into action and made a deal with one drilling and mining company from my country to drill holes. It is important to make a real contract for this service and to sign the contract from both parties (you and company). Important things about the contract:

article with deadline and penalties for not meeting the deadline must be included

article about possible damages made by company and their responsibilities (e.g. in case where the driller damages your house, because he was not careful enough when he was moving the drilling machine – see it on the picture)

If you are not sure, see legal advisor

We first planned to drill two holes for 100meters. The first one was O.K. When drilling the second one some problems occurred, the hole (well) was not stable enough and we only reached about 60 meters. According to the calculations 160 was not enough, so we made the third well for another 60 meters. Together we have 220 meters.
Important things:

wells or holes should not be to close together, it is recommended to keep 10m distance between two wells

It is quite noisy when drilling,… your neighbors will complain if you will not inform them in advance

It could be quite messy around drilling machine and underground water could erupt from the hole

If you already have a house with nice colored façade and the machine in near the house, be sure to protect the house and window

We were drilling about 14 days.

Choosing service & product providers for my heat pump system

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:16:00 +0000

With clear vision, goals, implementation plan and installation schema I started searching service and product providers/companies for my heat pump system. I started with my local companies and technical stores to find out what kind of product they are offering, what the quality is and what are the experiences and prices. The most of the time I spend for choosing providers for heat pump device, water pumps and water heater. Other parts are not so complex and it was easier to decide. I spent also a lot of time finding the right service provider for installing the system and for drilling the holes for geothermal collector. Finally I decided for local service companies in Slovenia. At that time (2004/2005) service providers were not so connected and trained to work together as a team … connecting them was also an issue for me. I'm not showing the list of those companies because I will first ask them for being the sponsor of this heat pump blog. I hope I will be successful :-)

Finalizing Heat Pump Implementation schema and installation schema

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 20:54:00 +0000

After all parameters for my home heat pump project were calculated, all kilowatts, meters, centimeters, constants were known, I have prepared final implementation schema (partly shown it the picture) and detailed installation schema for pipes, valves, other pumps, collectors, electrical installation and other stuff. Installation schema was later used by service providers for implementing my project. If you would like to have a copy of detailed installation schema, please send me an e-mail to: toskog@gmail.com.

Calculation of energy losses and energy needs for the building

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 21:27:00 +0000

Building insulation is the most important factor when calculating energy loses or on the other hand energy needs for heating. Heating system must be aligned according to building energy loses. Here are my final numbers and calculations:

Building parameters:

Building square meters (room surface): 180 square meters to heat
Type of heating: ground heating
Building walls: 30 cm brick and 10 cm isolation (glass wool)
Building roof: wood structure with, 21 cm of isolation (glass wool), standard knauf
Building ground floor (to the ground): 5 cm concrete, 8 cm isolation, 5 cm concrete, 40 cm sand layer
Windows: thermo glass

Coefficients:

Windows thermal transmittance: U=1,1W/m2K
Glass wool thermal conductivity: 0,035 W/mK

Final calculation for heat pump system installation. We need:

Heat pump with output power: 14kW + 6kW Optional Extra Heater for Extreme Low temperatures
Geothermal vertical collector according to ground structure: 2x100m
Water Heater: 300 liters

There were also other numbers and quite complicated parameters and calculations. I think shown numbers are enough to get an impression. I will put some calculations in PDF to this blog for download in near future.

Planning the Heat Pump project

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 09:52:00 +0000

After studying the technology of Heat Pumps, existing solutions in the region, local providers and companies, documents and other things related to the project, I have started with detailed planning of the project. I first tried to figure out and list all activities needed for the project, after that I tried to arrange them in to the correct order – what to do first and what to do next. I checked my list with several companies discussing this issue and that is how I supplemented my plan and also verify my project plan. After having all activities in right order I started to plan costs and deadlines of the project. To be as much as possible exact, I have spoken with several providers, drillers, manufactures to discover all costs and realistic deadlines. The result was almost 4 month long project plan. Of course, it is possible to finish after one month, but in that time it was not possible, because you have to wait for the equipment, for the drillers, for calculations… at that time only few installations existed and it was hard to get quality and available company for implementation.So what to do first… the first thing in my plan was activity “Calculation of energy losses and energy needs for the building”

Choosing renewable resource (source)

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 19:43:00 +0000

When deciding which renewable resource to use (air, ground water, water from lake or river, ground source – geothermal - heat of rocks) it is necessary to consider many aspects, the most important are:

what resources are available in the neighborhood and what are temperatures (e.g. temperature of underground water)
what resources you are allowed to use according to the local regulation (e.g. in some countries it is prohibited to use underground water in others you should get special permission from the government)
what is your climate (winter air temperature)
how much money are you prepared to spend for the project (e.g. air sourced heat pump installation is probably the cheapest, ground sourced heat pump (geothermal) installation with vertical collectors is probably the most expensive)
are you planning to use your heat pump also for water heater
are you planning to use your heat pump also for cooling
how much isolation coat are you planning to put on to your house and what would be the energy loss of your house
what kind of heating are you planning to implement (low temperature floor heating, high temperature)
what is or should be coefficient of heat pump performance (I will explain this term latter)

When considering described issues you should definitely involve someone who is familiar or even better professional in those calculations. At the end you should know all calculations, energy loss, primary source temperature, type of heating (e.g. floor heating) and other parameters.
For my project I have engaged one local professional who was very familiar with this numbers and calculations. I have paid to him 100 € and it was worth paying. Finally I have decided to use ground sourced heat pump with vertical underground collectors (geothermal).

What is heat pump – explanation for beginners

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 20:27:00 +0000

You have probably noticed that warm air is rising behind your fridge when operating. Well your fridge is your every day heat pump cooling your food and at the same time heating your kitchen. This is the basic working principle for heat pumps – cooling down one medium (in case of fridge this is the food you have putted in) and at the same time warming up other medium (in case of fridge this is air in your kitchen). Similar to your fridge is also the operating principle of air conditioning device for cooling your home, deep freeze and other devices.
Why so much talking about heat pumps to be on of the cheapest ways to heat you home … it is because of simple calculation: for example you input in your heat pump about 80% of renewable resource, which is for free (e.g. water, air, earth), and 20% of electrical power = and you get 100% of energy for heating your home. That means that you pay only 20% of electricity to get 100% of heating power mostly because of renewable resource (see simple picture in this post). That is something to think about.

Maybe you are thinking now… is it possible to design cheap home made heat pump using old fridge or more of them… well, it is possible, but I will describe this maybe some other time.
Next … Choosing renewable resource for my Heat pump project.

Privacy Policy for heatpumpproject.blogspot.com

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 06:30:00 +0000

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How I started with Heat Pump Project

noreply@blogger.com (Tosko) — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 08:41:00 +0000

I was always amused with new technology that could help our earth to be cleaner and that could be used for more environment friendly living… so that is how it started. When internet era came I used my computer to search for solutions and I then I have found the right one at the right moment. I started to build my own house and I needed also heating. At this time (2000 – 2002) in my country (Slovenia) only some pilot projects concerning reusable energy were present and no advanced technology was available. I have searched the web and solutions in northern EU countries and worldwide. Then I found technology for using renewable energy with heat pumps for heating. I started to search the whole web for some solutions, pilot project, documentation, articles and so on. I learned a lot about this technology about renewable resources and that is how my project started.

See my next post: Heat Pump Project planning