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Sorry, but I don't see any novelty here. Everything described in the article is commercially available. At least here in Germany. Heat pumps are used to heat a
by PinguTS 4y ago
Sorry, but I don't see any novelty here. Everything described in the article is commercially available. At least here in Germany.
Heat pumps are used to heat a storage container called buffer, a water container of 200l or more of water. This is used to run the heat pump when energy is cheap to warm up the buffer. That is for example in daytime when energy is available from the photovoltaic. If you don't have photovoltaic you can also have a good energy price when running this at night.
Also the storage of the heat in summer is nothing new. These systems are also commercially available for years. It is only that they are so expansive that many companies have backed out of those.
The idea here is that in summer time you heat up a big tank in the ground like with a thermal system on your roof. Then in winter time you use that "saved" energy to run the heat pump. At the end of the winter the water in the tank will likely be freezing. That state change of the water will give an additional energy boost, because it is the same amount of energy you need to boil water. All this is well known and working and commercially available for years.
- sschueller 4y agoThis is like when Apple introduces some new feature that existed on Android for years and claims it as some sort of revolutionary thing. In this case it's just that the mainstream US has discovered heat pumps when they have been mainstream in Europe for many years.
- dboreham 4y agoI lived in a townhouse in Santa Clara in the mid 1990s that had heat pump heating (combined with ac).
- nemo44x 4y agoMillions of people have used them for years. They just weren’t as popular due to gas being cheaper and available everywhere. There’s been a bigger push the last 10 years as gas prices have gone up. So they’ve been there but it didn’t make sense to use. You have to remember that things like gas are much cheaper in the USA. There’s just more natural resources here.
- caf 4y agoThe novelty claimed is directing excess remaining heat in the refrigerant on the normal heating cycle, after it has passed through the heating coils in the house, to the buffer tank. Not the idea of the buffer tank itself.
- jwilliams 4y agoSeems you're describing something a bit different? In this case, this energy is used to run a cycle defrost on the evaporator rather than run the heat pump.
- klyrs 4y ago> Sorry, but I don't see any novelty here Some irony on a story with the title "Heat pumps of the 1800s..."
- 2rsf 4y agoHow big should the tank be? Googling a little shows that it should usually be a small lake size or a big pond, not something you put in your yard.