22 ms·

An open source initiative to share and compare heat pump performance data

708 points by protontypes 2y ago

rq1 2y ago
This is a great initiative! Especially now with all the integrated circuits and sensors, we can have a clear picture on the products if we could all share these data. I’m looking to get a heat pump too and was leaning towards the NIBE make that these data seem to validate. (They’re incredibly silent too!)
- brabel 2y ago
  I have a new NIBE pump (S735) that replaced my old, also NIBE (Fighter 640P) pump. It's a bit more silent than the older one usually, but sometimes it starts what sounds like a jet engine which is pretty loud. I can hear it from upstairs, far away from the pump, coming from the vents. I am not sure what it's doing when it makes that noise but it made me a bit upset with it, as initially I had hoped for a quieter house, and the pump was pretty expensive!
henearkr 2y ago
Awesome initiative! I really appreciate it! Some (hopefully) constructive critics to make it even better: - fix the left side menu, so that, even when the "Add fields" part is displayed, it can be scrolled up and down (because right now if I unfold "Add fields" and further unfold some of the items inside it, the content becomes hidden below the bottom border of the screen) - add noise level information (the noise level of the compressor), in dB. Some manufacturers don't provide this info, so it would be really useful to gather it here.
- sushisource 2y ago
  Noise level seems huge. I don't have one, but every place I've stayed that has one the noise they make drives me insane. I would be really trepidatious about installing one in my place for this reason.
RedShift1 2y ago
A world map and efficiency/consumption would be nice, so we can see where in the world heat pumps are most effective.
- akira2501 2y ago
  > so we can see where in the world heat pumps are most effective. They're not efficient when the temperature drops below a certain point. This is predictable and based on system design criteria. It doesn't mean it's not effective, it's just that it wouldn't be a reliable source of heating year round. It may still make a worthwhile addition to another system, or combined with several other upgrades, may become an acceptable single solution.
  - brnt 2y ago
    Reliable and efficient are different things. A solution that is inefficient two week a year but efficient the rest can still be cheaper than some hybrid setup. If it is expected it simply won't work a few weeks a year, sure, that's clearly not effective.
    - akira2501 2y ago
      You've summed my points exactly while missing the major one. You don't need monitoring to determine any of this. You can just look at the construction of the building and the weather charts and you're done with the "will a heat pump be effective?" question.
      - sokoloff 2y ago
        Sort of. My house is 100 years old and was built without insulation (some rooms were insulated through remodels over the years). It uses water circulation and cast iron radiators and stays comfortable with my ancient cast iron boiler and 180°F water. To know whether a heat pump (air-to-water) can replace that boiler effectively and maintain comfort, I had to find out whether the house would be comfortable with water temps of 135°F or so. Is there an amount of “that’s just looking at the building construction” to make that analysis? I think maybe technically yes, but practically no. As it was, to get an answer, I abused my old boiler by turning the water temps down (causing condensation and slow damage [planning to replace it anyway]) and seeing what happened on cold days.
carnot 2y ago
Certified performance rating data from virtually any air-to-air, air-to-water, etc., system sold in North America is available here [1]. This includes capacity, COP, and sound data. It also includes integrated performance rating metrics like SEER, HSPF, IEER, etc. [1] https://www.ahridirectory.org https://www.ahridirectory.org
- sokoloff 2y ago
  As-engineered and as-installed/configured figures have the potential for a wide spread. Both are useful, but as a homeowner, I’m interested in seeing my as-installed figures more than the manufacturer or test lab’s figures. As a shopper, I’d want to see a nearby house’s figures as-installed by my prospective contractor.
  - Haemm0r 2y ago
    A big factor for the total energy consumption besides the heatpump is the rest of the heating system. For our house the yearly energy consumption of the heatpump is around 1.4MWh/y (for floor heating, warm water and cooling of the bedrooms in summer;this number is reported by the heatpump control system) but the hole heating system including all the pumps and so on is 2,55MWh/y.
- rainbowzootsuit 2y ago
  It's important to note that those ratings are all tested under specific conditions that includes a rather short (~3m IIRC) lineset and other parameters of installation that in the field can lower the capacity as more energy goes to the pumping of the liquid refrigerant. Particularly the lineset length. Also, the testing varies between "traditional style heat pump" and inverter driven "VRF" equipment. That's not to say that the AHRI information isn't useful, but the numbers can be a little subtle to get to an apples to apples comparison and you should have a selection done based upon some real estimated line lengths and installation conditions.
phkahler 2y ago
Isn't the "crowd sourced"? It's not open source.
- protontypes 2y ago
  Here the repo with the open source license: https://github.com/openenergymonitor/heatpumpmonitor.org https://github.com/openenergymonitor/heatpumpmonitor.org
  - tikkabhuna 2y ago
    Is that just the website? Is there a way to export the raw data?
    - wanderingmind 2y ago
      +1 yes we need a way to export and analyze data to get the insights we want. Would be great if we can share through Datasette which is tailor made for such applications
    - naraic0o 2y ago
      there's an export button at the bottom of the table which copies a CSV to your clipboard.
  - phkahler 2y ago
    The heatpump performance data looks crowd sourced. If the website and DB are run with open source software, that's a different thing and seems secondary.
gopal2604 2y ago
[flagged]
meigwilym 2y ago
Great to see a local project at the top of HN! Good work guys.
Faaak 2y ago
Heat pumps _are_ amazing! The power of physics at play: spend 1 unit of energy to gain 4. Some naysayers will say that it doesn't work the 3 days of the year where it's -15°C outside, without talking about the other 100+ days where it's not that cold and where the heat pump is amazing. Disclaimer: I self installed one for my house (13kWth) and I'm very glad I did
- gjm11 2y ago
  In fairness, the days when it's -15°C outside are exactly the days when you really want your heating to work well...
  - derkoe 2y ago
    Most heat pumps fall back to electric heating when it's too cold. So, on these few days you will need the same amount of electricity a typical electric heating will need.
    - tomohawk 2y ago
      which spikes the electricity demand from the grid and puts it under the most strain when its most critical for the grid to stay up, which means the grid has to be overdesigned, which means that the air based heat pumps are a poor choice for a reliable grid.
      - yurishimo 2y ago
        It depends on where you are. In many places worldwide, extreme cold is also generally quite clear from clouds unless you're literally in a storm, in which case, the high winds are just as likely to cause problems. Rooftop solar should be more than enough to offset your own usage.
        bluGill 2y ago
        In nearly all places extreme code means dark! Sure there are less clouds, but the latitude is high and so there are not only few hours of daylight, the earth's angle is also working against solar.
oakesm9 2y ago
A lot of these are UK based systems which are installed by installers with Heat Geek[0] training. They're an interesting company who's trying to fill in the lack of training that traditional gas heating installers have to properly install air-to-water heat pumps in the UK. They also do homeowner training courses and a guarantee scheme on their certified installers (they'll fix the system for free if the SCOP is below a designed level). They did a series of videos with Skill Builder[1] (who's a bit of a heat pump sceptic) where they fixed a badly installed heat pump that was causing a lot of issues. That install is currently 7th on the linked website[2] with a SCOP of 4.5 (450% efficient). Obviously a bit of a sale pitch from them, but there's loads of interesting information about WHY they're making the changes that they are. [0] https://www.heatgeek.com https://www.heatgeek.com [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BesfqnHPxLU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BesfqnHPxLU [2] https://heatpumpmonitor.org/system/view?id=196 https://heatpumpmonitor.org/system/view?id=196
- naraic0o 2y ago
  it's funny actually, i've been binging their videos the past few weeks, since i'm looking into buying a home in need of renovation, and was happy to see their logos as part of one of the default columns. they claim also to be mainly motivated by the climate crisis and are even, now, developing an open source water heater, which... you don't often hear about in industries such as home appliances or heating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFBbArwAXS8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFBbArwAXS8 i'd love to install an air-to-water heatpump myself, but i'm untrained and i guess i'm feeling a bit of the dunning–kruger effect while learning from the heat geek videos.
- stavros 2y ago
  What's Skill Builder's skepticism based on? Don't heat pumps deliver on their promises?
  - stephen_g 2y ago
    Heat pumps require some domain-specific knowledge to build a system that costs less than gas for the same building (the crossover point is near a seasonal average COP of 4.0 at UK's gas and electricity prices, as mentioned in other comments SCOPs of 4.5 are very possible). Yet there are subsidies available and installers without the knowledge (who would normally be installing gas systems) are installing them basically without sizing radiators correctly or by doing things that reduce performance (big buffer tanks, lots of zoning, extra pumps that are unnecessary, etc.). So there are lots of horror stories of companies installing systems that don't work very well and cost a lot of money to run, which makes people think heat pumps are crap. But usually people like Heat Geek trained installers can fix such systems without changing the equipment - often both providing more comfort than gas (less thermal cycling because heat pumps with inverters can modulate their output more precisely instead of hard switching on and off) and costing less to run than gas.
trebligdivad 2y ago
How are the COP values so high? The spec on the Vaillant aroTHERM+ says ~2.9 but that is showing well over 5 on some; what's the difference?
- jnsaff2 2y ago
  COP depends on the temperature difference. A single COP is some yearly average usually but in these measurements it is probably a shorter period. In europe there is a somewhat more rigorous measure of Seasonal COP (SCOP) where the typical climate (in my case nordic) is taken as a standardized test. So x number of days outside temp 0C, y -5C, z -10C, w +10C etc. So in case of Air source heat pump if the outside temperature is +10 or +15 you can easily get COP numbers that are 9 or above. Better technical documentation usually has rated COP for some different outside temperatures or even a graph.
  - Kichererbsen 2y ago
    note also, that the temperature difference is also influenced by the outlet temperature: if you have a radiator system, you'll need a higher outlet temperature than say a floor or ceiling heating system. this is because the energy transported is proportional to area of the delivery system. so that's also something to optimize. add in a decent insulation (less units of heat required to replace lost heat units) and you get a higher COP.
  - trebligdivad 2y ago
    Thanks! At the top of that webpage is a drop down to select the date-range; you can select a year (although there aren't that many entries) - and that is lower, I guess averaged over it.
cess11 2y ago
Where I live every other house is heated by either air-to-air, air-to-water or soil-/ground-to-water heat pumps. -20C a large part of winter isn't uncommon, some places go even lower. So to me it looks a little bit insane when people confidently claim that heat pumps are unfeasible in rather cold climate. The best conditions for heat pumps are places with hard rock just below the soil, so you can drill a heat well and use it for heat storage during summer months, i.e. AC/cooling. In my opinion that's the main drawback with air- and soil-based heat pumps, can't recycle heat from cooling in the summer.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  Is the kind of well that you'd typically drill for a single family dwelling capable of storing enough heat to make that worth it? I know that underground heat storage is popular with district heating, where you've got a hollow mountain storing heat for the whole city, but the square-cube law means that there's a size below which it doesn't make sense. I had only assumed that that size was bigger than was feasible for a typical homeowner.
  - cess11 2y ago
    Don't need to use cooling to make it work, I live in a fairly large house without cooling and a bore down into the mountain below is good enough even though we have -15 to -25C for weeks during winter. It's in a small town so not an isolated location. Most people around here have air-to-water or air-to-air, because it's good enough and cheaper to install. And it's not a hollow, it's a plastic ~1 decimeter pipe with ethanol going through stone some distance down from the surface. Not sure how long this collector is, but 70-200 meters is common depending on how large the house is and conditions in the ground.
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      Interesting, thanks. Ethanol is an interesting choice... lower specific heat when compared with water. Is that to discourage things like tree roots from making a home in your well?
casiejudi 2y ago
[dead]
werdnapk 2y ago
Just got a Daikin heat pump installed this past winter. Electric furnace is still used as a secondary heat source. Will have to compare more data over the last 12 months, but so far, power usage is way down. I can also integrate home assistant with the Daikin which can control all of the functions and it's also able to retrieve a lot of useful data that you can use for adjusting furnace and heat pump parameters. I can get credit from the power company during peak usage times and I'm able to have home assistant interface with the heat pump to maximize those credits as well. Very happy with the setup so far.
- janten 2y ago
  Can you share what you use for the HA integration?
  - werdnapk 2y ago
    I'm using "Home Assistant Container" on my NAS, but I'll likely move to a version installed on a raspberry pi. Daikin integration is at https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/daikin/ https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/daikin/.
wenebego 2y ago
It would be nice (but potentially difficult) to add the sensible and latent capacity for heating and cooling given 3 design days: humid, hot, and cold. The btu ratings are useful to compare efficiencies but not sizing the system
matthiaswh 2y ago
If you're interested in installing heat pumps, there is a similar open data initiative started by some redditors to aggregate heat pump pricing quotes. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hBebytdBOzLQ4eoAbdFQl2PbNjWdzHqijVa4BfaYHSc/edit#gid=1022076347 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hBebytdBOzLQ4eoAbdFQ...
- stephen_g 2y ago
  Really shocked at those prices, I really don't understand what's going on in the US/Canada. I could get a 7kW Mitsubishi Electric single-head mini-split installed with change for AU$3000 here (US$1950) if I buy the unit online and get one of the many, many installers around to put it in (fairly simple install if it's near an external wall is around AU$750 at the moment), but that document has prices in the $7K to $12K for that size?!?
  - Sytten 2y ago
    I paid 15k CAD for 2 Daikin units two years ago, the pricing is kinda stupid but it depends on the quality of the model. Chinese models are way cheaper than Japanese models.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Which is why mini splits are not very popular here. The install ends up costing so much. Labor is not cheap in US/Canada, and install is a lot of labor. Still seems like it should be cheaper though.
    - dalyons 2y ago
      Labor is even more in australia, so that's not what's going on here.
  - kleiba 2y ago
    Wait until you see prices in Germany...
  - dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
Sytten 2y ago
If you are in North America, I highly recommend to check out https://ashp.neep.org/#!/ https://ashp.neep.org/#!/ to compare heat pumps. It has efficiency and technical data on almost all models easy to compare without the marketing bullsh*t of manufacturers. The tests are conducted independently and instead of one COP you get the COP depending on the outside temperature which very important in cold climates like Canada.
_spduchamp 2y ago
We moved to heat-pump a few years ago and disconnected from gas. It's been working great. Our biggest expense was insulating our house. It is an old house and the 2nd floor was very drafty. You could feel a breeze coming through cracks in the wall. When we opened the wall there were just a few newspapers in there and no insulation. We had the 2nd floor siding removed, an extra layer of insulated wall added to the outside and then cladded with siding. It was like putting a big insulated hat on our house. Now the temperature is very consistent and absolute no drafts. The architect said to me that we'll never fully recoup our costs of putting the hat on the house. To which I replied that we don't always to things for economic reasons, and just do them because they are the right thing to do. My only regret was going with a Rheem heat-pump water heater in this mix. It does not perform well at all. With hindsight I would have looked for a way to perhaps have water heating integrated with our air heat-pump system. There is a company called Arctic that has those systems. Also with regard to heat-pump water heater, out big problem is that a hydronic floor heating system (installed when we were on gas) is now constantly drawing off heat from our tank. I'd like to find a small standalone unit to handle floor hydronic heating separate from my main water heating.
- belter 2y ago
  How noisy is it? I heard of people installing them, and getting complaints from the neighbors.
  - WirelessGigabit 2y ago
    They're as noisy as an AC. So here in Arizona no one cares. But in Belgium this was an issue as they run more in winter and in winter sound travels further.
    - belter 2y ago
      Uhmm...I see a problem for countries where you have wall to wall connected urban environments...If all 60 connected houses on a street, install external heat pumps, it will add up.
zmully 2y ago
What would make this even more useful (if possible) would be including 1) the UK equivalent of an ASHRE Manual J and 2) an ACH rating for the dwelling. Heat pumps are great, but suffer from piss-poor installations and shitty salespeople. When I renovated my DC rowhouse, I talked to 6 different companies about the HVAC install. Only one, ONE, would do a Manual J. I had already done a Manual J myself (it's not hard at all) so I could compare their calculations to my own. They were slightly different (they calculated a greater load than I, but at the time, the insulation systems I used in the house were uncommon, so most of this difference was due to their lack of familiarity). In the end, my rowhouse needed such a small unit (1.5T IIRC) that I couldn't get the SEER I wanted because no one makes high end units that small... I ended up slightly oversized at 2T, but that was necessary to get a unit from a good manufacturer (Lennox), rather than a pile of garbage flipper grade unit from someone like Goodrich. What the heat pump industry is going to suffer from is the utter and blatant disregard to right-sizing units. The other 5 companies I talked to? They just walked around the house and then said shit like "This gonna need a 5T unit" and left. Also, flex duct is bane of any central non-high velocity system. If an installer mentions flex duct for anything other than a short run to a register, run away from them. Flex duct is the sign of a lazy installer who is going to cut corners everywhere else they can, and especially where you can't see it. In the same vein, if the installer doesn't have their own sheet metal shop, make damn sure they're buying your ductwork from a sheet metal shop and not from HomeDepot. One company I interviewed refused to do a Manual D (duct sizing) and said that a standard (i.e. we're going to get it at HomeDepot) 9x13 duct will be "plenty" for the return. The return (per the Manual D) ended up barely fitting in the chase alloted for it which is something like 30"x 24". So be educated consumers: - Do a Manual J and Manual D yourself, they're not hard - Right size your unit. It should be running 90% of the time for max efficiency, so yeah, a smaller unit might take longer to cool or heat, but you shouldn't be turning the unit on or off but two or three times a year. A super high efficiency unit that is oversized is going to be terrible and inefficient. Don't fall for their shitty sales tactic of "but it's not going to be able to cool your house down as quickly as this 5T unit!". - Demand good work. Like a plumber, never ever ever let an HVAC installer in your house unmonitored. I had to fight with my installers because they wanted to move a chase to the middle of the room "because it'll be easier for us". No, you have the plans, you quoted on the plans, so I don't give a shit that it's hard. - Insulate and seal your duct work. You can't go back and do this, so make sure it's in your contract, and make sure they actually do it. - Make sure you service your unit annually, it's a couple hundred bucks of peace of mind.
dopylitty 2y ago
This guy[0] has done quite a few deep dives on heat pumps that cover a lot of the myths (eg they don't work in the cold). It's pretty interesting material if you're thinking about a heat pump. It has always seemed silly to me that we spend money to keep a box of cold (fridge) inside the houses we're spending money to heat in the winter and spend a lot of money to heat up dryers, stoves, etc in the houses we're spending money to cool in the summer. Watching these videos made me think there's a real possibility at some point to have something like a whole home heat pump that just moves heat from where it is to where you want it and in the process reduces the need for systems working against each other to heat/cool specific parts of the house. I understand there's something in commercial settings that has this capability but I'm blanking on the name. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto&t=0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto&t=0s 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_refrigerant_flow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_refrigerant_flow
- FredFS456 2y ago
  My parents have always had an "outdoor fridge" that is a stainless steel equipment box that my dad salvaged from the junk pile at work. They put food in there that is less prone to spoiling, and use it through the fall/winter/spring months.
  - dopylitty 2y ago
    That's a great way to keep the raccoons out! If I make a big pot of soup in the winter I will cool it down outside before putting it in the fridge. That way it gets down below the zone where bacteria grow much faster than if it were inside. From an energy perspective it would be better to put it in the fridge so the heat would be removed by the fridge and stay in the house rather than dissipated outside but as far as I know the heat would also end up in the other goods in the fridge causing potential spoilage. It would be nice to have some kind of remote chiller pot hooked to a heat pump that would just pump the heat out of the soup and into a cold room.
    - brnt 2y ago
      > heat pump that would just pump the heat out of the soup and into a cold room. You already have one, it's your fridge ;)
changadera 2y ago
My neighbour has a heat pump and it's kind of annoying when running because the 180hz hum is audible in most of the rooms in my house. This in the UK and our houses are detached, but fairly closely spaced.
- dv_dt 2y ago
  I wonder if there is some isolation dampers that could be added to the mounts (sounds fancy, but think rubber or silicon grommets).
  - timbit42 2y ago
    Most heat pumps mounts I've seen have rubber grommets but older heat pumps will make audible noise as they wear out.
- switch007 2y ago
  A constant hum from a neighbour's heating unit would drive me crazy. We have lots of terraced and very-close-together housing in the UK... Low frequency noise can travel quite far (and through mass), so not even distance helps that much
nirolo 2y ago
A very big database comparing a lot of relevant data can be found at https://www.eurovent-certification.com/ https://www.eurovent-certification.com/ I only used it for air-to-air heatpumps (or air conditioners as they are sometimes called). He the data is oretty good. I can't say anything about the other types of heatpumps but I've found the database quite useful.
apexalpha 2y ago
How do these people monitor the heat output of the heatpump? Is that something you can get from the device itself? I recently installed a Nibe S2125 in my house, it's been running great except I don't monitor electricity consumption of just the heat pump, nor do I know how to get the heating output. I somehow doubt all these people have a specific electric meter on their heatpump, or do they? Mine runs on 400V and the meters are a bit expensive to get just for the data.
willcipriano 2y ago
Anyone make/is it feasible to make: a window unit heat pump?
- apexalpha 2y ago
  Midea Window AC is what your looking for I think.
  - willcipriano 2y ago
    Yeah close, they don't seem to support "heat and cool" with those heat pump style units yet but that's a minor requirement. I'll probably try one this year. Looks cool if nothing else. https://www.midea.com/us/air-conditioners/window-air-conditioners/10000-btu-u-shaped-air-conditioner-maw10v1qwt https://www.midea.com/us/air-conditioners/window-air-conditi...
matznerd 2y ago
I love to see Hacker News geeking out on heat pumps and that this is currently on top of the home page! Don't forget that this community has an outsized influence on the world as early adopters and innovators.
- kleiba 2y ago
  Heat pump technology is certainly out of the "early adopters" phase. It is basically the standard for new buildings in Europe (at least Northern Europe, I'm not sure about the South), and has been for years. In Germany, where I currently live, they recently passed a law that constrains what kind of heating system you're allowed to put into your house to a point where basically only a heat pump fulfills all criteria (perhaps with the exception of pellet heaters).
danans 2y ago
It wasn't clear to me what kind of monitoring equipment is being used to gather this data, or whether it's just being manually gathered and reported by each system owner. If the former, I'd like to get the generic equipment to use to monitor my heat pump system, and if the latter I wonder if the resulting inaccuracy results in improbable outliers like the system with 6.0 COP. EDIT: it's a bit buried, but the systems are monitored using Open Energy Monitor (https://docs.openenergymonitor.org/applications/heatpump.html https://docs.openenergymonitor.org/applications/heatpump.htm...), and it seems like heatpumpmonitor.org was created by them.
supermatt 2y ago
I love my ground-source heatpump. I did the entire install myself, submerging the loop in the pond by my house. We get a COP of approx 3.0 in the middle of winter when its -25C air temp outside :)
- WaitWaitWha 2y ago
  do you have your setup documented online somewhere public?
joshlk 2y ago
Is there an explanation of the acronyms/metrics used? E.g. COP
- karussell 2y ago
  COP is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance (the higher the better). And SCOP is seasonal COP.
- timbit42 2y ago
  COP or CoP means co-efficient of performance. An electric heater has a CoP of 1. New heat pumps usually have a CoP of 4 or higher. My 11 year old heat pumps have a CoP of 3. This means they can produce 3 or 4 times as much heat as an electric heater, assuming the same amount of electricity, or produce the same amount of heat with 1/3 or 1/4 of the electricity. At a CoP of 3, they are more efficient than electric heaters down to -15C. At a CoP of 4, down to -25C. There are better heat pumps coming with a CoP of 5.
adev_ 2y ago
My still-running heat pump from 1981 is not in the list. Unacceptable ! :)
karussell 2y ago
There is another very helpful list of heat pumps (German): https://cloud.skip.scientists4future.org/s/xwxiykjZnXaAtng https://cloud.skip.scientists4future.org/s/xwxiykjZnXaAtng This is based on the "Bafa" list but filterable und sortable (https://www.bafa.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Energie/beg_waermepumpen_anlagenliste.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=5 https://www.bafa.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Energie/beg_waer...)
class3shock 2y ago
I just want to throw this out there to this audience. As someone that has worked in and been interested in energy efficient housing for 10+ years, I have been heartened to see the start of proliferation of heat pump units. However, as a whole, the market seems to be flooded with units of as good quality as your normal store bought air conditioner. That is to say, as soon as something goes wrong with them, they are garbage. How come we only talk about efficiency/environmental friendliness of use and not of the unit itself (and all it's embodied energy/cost)? If I save 60% on energy for heating every year but then require all the energy needed to build a new heat pump every 5-10 what am I really doing? I would love to see an effort to create an open source heat pump itself, based off of COTS parts and raspberry pi or something similar where you are not locked out of the software and dependent on a supplier to have replacement parts that they probably stopped stocking 5 years after releasing the product.
- londons_explore 2y ago
  Quality cones with design refinements learnt after the technology has been in people's homes for decades. There is nothing theoretically unreliable about a heat pump - it would totally be possible to design it to work for 50+ years with just basic filter replacements.
- Kerb_ 2y ago
  >If I save 60% on energy for heating every year but then require all the energy needed to build a new heat pump every 5-10 what am I really doing? >As good quality as your normal store bought air conditioner. That is to say, as soon as something goes wrong with them, they are garbage. Sounds like you're still saving 60% on energy because the status quo is also disposable appliances. It absolutely sounds better than nothing to me, but I am also hopeful for more maintainable and accessible heat pumps in the future. I haven't heard about any efforts for an open source heat pump, but I'm definitely interested in something like that myself
- Pxtl 2y ago
  > store bought air conditioner Yup. Saving the world is going to be ruined by Chinese shovelware-quality equipment re-stickered with American brands, but in this case it's even worse since you're hiring a professional installer and those guys will only work with a short list of manufacturers, so getting somebody to install an expensive quality European model will be basically impossible (if they're even certified for use in North America).
Cort3z 2y ago
I recently had to get a replacement heat pump. In the process I discovered that the EU has a database of energy ratings for almost (actually?) all electric appliances sold in the eu. This includes heat pumps. I scraped the heat pump data and am the proud owner of 100% of this information. What I found is that some of the available data is inaccurate and much of the energy ratings (A-G character rating) is inconsistent with the performance of the device, probably due to changing standards over the years. It’s nice to see initiatives like this which hopefully will provide better and more normalized data. As a side note. Air-to-air heat pumps have, as most people know, two parts to it. The indoor unit, and the outdoor unit. Many models can be used interchangeably, so the domain of heat pumps is a bit more complicated than I first anticipated.
- jonasdegendt 2y ago
  To my knowledge, the A-G energy rating is a rolling standard. It gets a little bit tougher to make A grade every year. NCAP works the same way.
  - Cort3z 2y ago
    Indeed. The data available includes most of the things you would expect, but some of it is just wrong. I’m only at my computer now, so don’t have a concrete example, but some models had vastly higher values for some fields than is possible.
qsdf38100 2y ago
Are all the compared heat pumps working at the same temperature levels? Otherwise, the COP isn't a good comparison metric, as even for an ideal heat pump with a COP = 1 / carnot_efficiency, it depends on the temperatures. For instance, a heat pump lifting heat from 20°C to 100°C with a COP of "only" 2 is excellent, whereas lifting heat from 20°C to 30°C with a cop of 3 is not impressive.
tgtweak 2y ago
How is the heat output calculated and validated?
twic 2y ago
Heat pumps are obviously great in many ways. But fitting one is a big deal - they are quite expensive, they take a lot of work to fit, really require extensive additional insulation, and there are all sorts of caveats to them that mean they aren't a straightforward replacement for a boiler. So i'm slightly mystified that we basically don't hear anything about fitting drainwater heat recovery [1], in which the lukewarm drain water from your shower is used to pre-warm the incoming cold water. It's extremely simple, pretty cheap, simple to fit, and can recover ~50% of the waste heat, of something which is tens of percent of the energy consumption of a household. By all means, get a heat pump. But get a heat exchanger on your shower first! [1] https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/drain-water-heat-recovery https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/drain-water-heat-recovery
- averageRoyalty 2y ago
  This sounds like an American viewpoint. In Australia, New Zealand and much of Europe they are pretty cheap to install, and rarely require additional insulation. It may be that they're relatively new to your area, so the demand is outstripping supply of installers who have been doing this for 30+ years and as such are charging to that effect.
- SomaticPirate 2y ago
  For most single family US homes (which are single story) this would likely be a nightmare to install and maintain. Definitely a cool idea but a leak or any maintenance might quickly undercut the cost savings
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    Just as an FYI: > Information obtained from the US Census Bureau’s Survey of Construction (SOC) and tabulated by NAHB, shows that the rising trend of single-story homes reversed in 2021. The share of single-story homes decreased in 2021 and the share of two or more stories homes started was greater than one story homes. This is in line with recent NAHB analysis of new single-family home size trends. https://eyeonhousing.org/2022/07/share-of-two-or-more-stories-new-homes-increased-in-2021/ https://eyeonhousing.org/2022/07/share-of-two-or-more-storie...
braiamp 2y ago
I see tables, I am exited. But I can't make sense of what anything is? I know COP, but what is Training, what is Source? MID seems to be a kind of sensor? Some of the table headers have a tool tip explaining things, but are the ones that aren't the most needed. Also, some about page about what the table aggregates and how it gets there? Seems to be some kind of aggregator for information gathered from an appliances called "emonHub" which is a rPi that gathers data from an assortment of other devices. There are some jargon that you have to parse, ("supply" means the electric cables that "supply" your heat pump) to understand what's going on. The best guide I could find is buried all the way down of the documentation https://docs.openenergymonitor.org/applications/heatpump.html https://docs.openenergymonitor.org/applications/heatpump.htm... That's it.
elric 2y ago
I'm surprised to see that basic things like heatpumps and insulation are apparently still controversial in 2024. By law, houses in my neck of the woods are required to be well insulated, where the definition gets stricter every couple of years. Newly built houses have to be compliant. When renovating existing houses, efforts towards compliance have to be made up to a certain level. Every house that's sold or rented must advertise its energy consumption expressed in kW/m², and you can be damned sure that high energy loss results in severe impact on sales price. Any kind of heater obviously has less work to do when heat loss is minimized by good insulation. Good options have been available for literally decades for most types of buildings. The roof is typically the easiest, with many options. E.g. on the inside between the rafters. Or you can remove the tiles, insulate on the outside, add framing and retile. My roofer simply tore out the ancient roofing, slapped on some insulation, and finished things with EPDM. Easy peasy. Floors can be tricky depending on the house and how much effort you're willing to put in. Easy if you have a crawlspace or basement, not so easy if not. I tore up and dug out the floors in my 100+ year old house and added 10cm of PIR insulation. This was not much fun, but after a hundred years the floor looked like shit anyway. Walls have lots of options. Cavity walls can be filled with insulation by drilling a couple of holes and blowing it in. I insulated my brick walls on the outside, 12cm of XPS, with a layer of reinforcement, and finished with silicone plaster rendering. Don't forget about the windows. Old windows are very leaky. Not just the glazing (double or triple for the win), but the framing is equally important. Also great for keeping out noise. And then there's ventilation. I installed a forced air ventilation system with heat and moisture recovery. This had a bigger impact than expected, the indoor air is much nicer, and I don't lose any heat by having to open windows in the winter. In all cases, of course, moisture has to be taken into account. You may or may not need a moisture barrier, some parts may have to be breathable, etc. Over here, subsidies are available for most of these improvements, and our energy prices are high enough to make it worth the effort. I pay under 200eur/year (not a typo) for heating, and most of that goes towards hot showers.
NiggersofHN 2y ago
[flagged]

708 points by protontypes 2y ago

rq1 2y ago

This is a great initiative! Especially now with all the integrated circuits and sensors, we can have a clear picture on the products if we could all share these data. I’m looking to get a heat pump too and was leaning towards the NIBE make that these data seem to validate. (They’re incredibly silent too!)

brabel 2y ago
I have a new NIBE pump (S735) that replaced my old, also NIBE (Fighter 640P) pump. It's a bit more silent than the older one usually, but sometimes it starts what sounds like a jet engine which is pretty loud. I can hear it from upstairs, far away from the pump, coming from the vents. I am not sure what it's doing when it makes that noise but it made me a bit upset with it, as initially I had hoped for a quieter house, and the pump was pretty expensive!

henearkr 2y ago

Awesome initiative! I really appreciate it! Some (hopefully) constructive critics to make it even better: - fix the left side menu, so that, even when the "Add fields" part is displayed, it can be scrolled up and down (because right now if I unfold "Add fields" and further unfold some of the items inside it, the content becomes hidden below the bottom border of the screen) - add noise level information (the noise level of the compressor), in dB. Some manufacturers don't provide this info, so it would be really useful to gather it here.

sushisource 2y ago
Noise level seems huge. I don't have one, but every place I've stayed that has one the noise they make drives me insane. I would be really trepidatious about installing one in my place for this reason.

RedShift1 2y ago

A world map and efficiency/consumption would be nice, so we can see where in the world heat pumps are most effective.

akira2501 2y ago
> so we can see where in the world heat pumps are most effective. They're not efficient when the temperature drops below a certain point. This is predictable and based on system design criteria. It doesn't mean it's not effective, it's just that it wouldn't be a reliable source of heating year round. It may still make a worthwhile addition to another system, or combined with several other upgrades, may become an acceptable single solution.
- brnt 2y ago
  Reliable and efficient are different things. A solution that is inefficient two week a year but efficient the rest can still be cheaper than some hybrid setup. If it is expected it simply won't work a few weeks a year, sure, that's clearly not effective.
  - akira2501 2y ago
    You've summed my points exactly while missing the major one. You don't need monitoring to determine any of this. You can just look at the construction of the building and the weather charts and you're done with the "will a heat pump be effective?" question.
    - sokoloff 2y ago
      Sort of. My house is 100 years old and was built without insulation (some rooms were insulated through remodels over the years). It uses water circulation and cast iron radiators and stays comfortable with my ancient cast iron boiler and 180°F water. To know whether a heat pump (air-to-water) can replace that boiler effectively and maintain comfort, I had to find out whether the house would be comfortable with water temps of 135°F or so. Is there an amount of “that’s just looking at the building construction” to make that analysis? I think maybe technically yes, but practically no. As it was, to get an answer, I abused my old boiler by turning the water temps down (causing condensation and slow damage [planning to replace it anyway]) and seeing what happened on cold days.

carnot 2y ago

Certified performance rating data from virtually any air-to-air, air-to-water, etc., system sold in North America is available here [1]. This includes capacity, COP, and sound data. It also includes integrated performance rating metrics like SEER, HSPF, IEER, etc. [1] https://www.ahridirectory.org https://www.ahridirectory.org

sokoloff 2y ago
As-engineered and as-installed/configured figures have the potential for a wide spread. Both are useful, but as a homeowner, I’m interested in seeing my as-installed figures more than the manufacturer or test lab’s figures. As a shopper, I’d want to see a nearby house’s figures as-installed by my prospective contractor.
- Haemm0r 2y ago
  A big factor for the total energy consumption besides the heatpump is the rest of the heating system. For our house the yearly energy consumption of the heatpump is around 1.4MWh/y (for floor heating, warm water and cooling of the bedrooms in summer;this number is reported by the heatpump control system) but the hole heating system including all the pumps and so on is 2,55MWh/y.
rainbowzootsuit 2y ago
It's important to note that those ratings are all tested under specific conditions that includes a rather short (~3m IIRC) lineset and other parameters of installation that in the field can lower the capacity as more energy goes to the pumping of the liquid refrigerant. Particularly the lineset length. Also, the testing varies between "traditional style heat pump" and inverter driven "VRF" equipment. That's not to say that the AHRI information isn't useful, but the numbers can be a little subtle to get to an apples to apples comparison and you should have a selection done based upon some real estimated line lengths and installation conditions.

phkahler 2y ago

Isn't the "crowd sourced"? It's not open source.

protontypes 2y ago
Here the repo with the open source license: https://github.com/openenergymonitor/heatpumpmonitor.org https://github.com/openenergymonitor/heatpumpmonitor.org
- tikkabhuna 2y ago
  Is that just the website? Is there a way to export the raw data?
  - wanderingmind 2y ago
    +1 yes we need a way to export and analyze data to get the insights we want. Would be great if we can share through Datasette which is tailor made for such applications
  - naraic0o 2y ago
    there's an export button at the bottom of the table which copies a CSV to your clipboard.
- phkahler 2y ago
  The heatpump performance data looks crowd sourced. If the website and DB are run with open source software, that's a different thing and seems secondary.

gopal2604 2y ago

[flagged]

meigwilym 2y ago

Great to see a local project at the top of HN! Good work guys.

Faaak 2y ago

Heat pumps _are_ amazing! The power of physics at play: spend 1 unit of energy to gain 4. Some naysayers will say that it doesn't work the 3 days of the year where it's -15°C outside, without talking about the other 100+ days where it's not that cold and where the heat pump is amazing. Disclaimer: I self installed one for my house (13kWth) and I'm very glad I did

gjm11 2y ago
In fairness, the days when it's -15°C outside are exactly the days when you really want your heating to work well...
- derkoe 2y ago
  Most heat pumps fall back to electric heating when it's too cold. So, on these few days you will need the same amount of electricity a typical electric heating will need.
  - tomohawk 2y ago
    which spikes the electricity demand from the grid and puts it under the most strain when its most critical for the grid to stay up, which means the grid has to be overdesigned, which means that the air based heat pumps are a poor choice for a reliable grid.
    - yurishimo 2y ago
      It depends on where you are. In many places worldwide, extreme cold is also generally quite clear from clouds unless you're literally in a storm, in which case, the high winds are just as likely to cause problems. Rooftop solar should be more than enough to offset your own usage.
      - bluGill 2y ago
        In nearly all places extreme code means dark! Sure there are less clouds, but the latitude is high and so there are not only few hours of daylight, the earth's angle is also working against solar.

oakesm9 2y ago

A lot of these are UK based systems which are installed by installers with Heat Geek[0] training. They're an interesting company who's trying to fill in the lack of training that traditional gas heating installers have to properly install air-to-water heat pumps in the UK. They also do homeowner training courses and a guarantee scheme on their certified installers (they'll fix the system for free if the SCOP is below a designed level). They did a series of videos with Skill Builder[1] (who's a bit of a heat pump sceptic) where they fixed a badly installed heat pump that was causing a lot of issues. That install is currently 7th on the linked website[2] with a SCOP of 4.5 (450% efficient). Obviously a bit of a sale pitch from them, but there's loads of interesting information about WHY they're making the changes that they are. [0] https://www.heatgeek.com https://www.heatgeek.com [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BesfqnHPxLU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BesfqnHPxLU [2] https://heatpumpmonitor.org/system/view?id=196 https://heatpumpmonitor.org/system/view?id=196

naraic0o 2y ago
it's funny actually, i've been binging their videos the past few weeks, since i'm looking into buying a home in need of renovation, and was happy to see their logos as part of one of the default columns. they claim also to be mainly motivated by the climate crisis and are even, now, developing an open source water heater, which... you don't often hear about in industries such as home appliances or heating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFBbArwAXS8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFBbArwAXS8 i'd love to install an air-to-water heatpump myself, but i'm untrained and i guess i'm feeling a bit of the dunning–kruger effect while learning from the heat geek videos.
stavros 2y ago
What's Skill Builder's skepticism based on? Don't heat pumps deliver on their promises?
- stephen_g 2y ago
  Heat pumps require some domain-specific knowledge to build a system that costs less than gas for the same building (the crossover point is near a seasonal average COP of 4.0 at UK's gas and electricity prices, as mentioned in other comments SCOPs of 4.5 are very possible). Yet there are subsidies available and installers without the knowledge (who would normally be installing gas systems) are installing them basically without sizing radiators correctly or by doing things that reduce performance (big buffer tanks, lots of zoning, extra pumps that are unnecessary, etc.). So there are lots of horror stories of companies installing systems that don't work very well and cost a lot of money to run, which makes people think heat pumps are crap. But usually people like Heat Geek trained installers can fix such systems without changing the equipment - often both providing more comfort than gas (less thermal cycling because heat pumps with inverters can modulate their output more precisely instead of hard switching on and off) and costing less to run than gas.

trebligdivad 2y ago

How are the COP values so high? The spec on the Vaillant aroTHERM+ says ~2.9 but that is showing well over 5 on some; what's the difference?

jnsaff2 2y ago
COP depends on the temperature difference. A single COP is some yearly average usually but in these measurements it is probably a shorter period. In europe there is a somewhat more rigorous measure of Seasonal COP (SCOP) where the typical climate (in my case nordic) is taken as a standardized test. So x number of days outside temp 0C, y -5C, z -10C, w +10C etc. So in case of Air source heat pump if the outside temperature is +10 or +15 you can easily get COP numbers that are 9 or above. Better technical documentation usually has rated COP for some different outside temperatures or even a graph.
- Kichererbsen 2y ago
  note also, that the temperature difference is also influenced by the outlet temperature: if you have a radiator system, you'll need a higher outlet temperature than say a floor or ceiling heating system. this is because the energy transported is proportional to area of the delivery system. so that's also something to optimize. add in a decent insulation (less units of heat required to replace lost heat units) and you get a higher COP.
- trebligdivad 2y ago
  Thanks! At the top of that webpage is a drop down to select the date-range; you can select a year (although there aren't that many entries) - and that is lower, I guess averaged over it.

cess11 2y ago

Where I live every other house is heated by either air-to-air, air-to-water or soil-/ground-to-water heat pumps. -20C a large part of winter isn't uncommon, some places go even lower. So to me it looks a little bit insane when people confidently claim that heat pumps are unfeasible in rather cold climate. The best conditions for heat pumps are places with hard rock just below the soil, so you can drill a heat well and use it for heat storage during summer months, i.e. AC/cooling. In my opinion that's the main drawback with air- and soil-based heat pumps, can't recycle heat from cooling in the summer.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
Is the kind of well that you'd typically drill for a single family dwelling capable of storing enough heat to make that worth it? I know that underground heat storage is popular with district heating, where you've got a hollow mountain storing heat for the whole city, but the square-cube law means that there's a size below which it doesn't make sense. I had only assumed that that size was bigger than was feasible for a typical homeowner.
- cess11 2y ago
  Don't need to use cooling to make it work, I live in a fairly large house without cooling and a bore down into the mountain below is good enough even though we have -15 to -25C for weeks during winter. It's in a small town so not an isolated location. Most people around here have air-to-water or air-to-air, because it's good enough and cheaper to install. And it's not a hollow, it's a plastic ~1 decimeter pipe with ethanol going through stone some distance down from the surface. Not sure how long this collector is, but 70-200 meters is common depending on how large the house is and conditions in the ground.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    Interesting, thanks. Ethanol is an interesting choice... lower specific heat when compared with water. Is that to discourage things like tree roots from making a home in your well?

casiejudi 2y ago

[dead]

werdnapk 2y ago

Just got a Daikin heat pump installed this past winter. Electric furnace is still used as a secondary heat source. Will have to compare more data over the last 12 months, but so far, power usage is way down. I can also integrate home assistant with the Daikin which can control all of the functions and it's also able to retrieve a lot of useful data that you can use for adjusting furnace and heat pump parameters. I can get credit from the power company during peak usage times and I'm able to have home assistant interface with the heat pump to maximize those credits as well. Very happy with the setup so far.

janten 2y ago
Can you share what you use for the HA integration?
- werdnapk 2y ago
  I'm using "Home Assistant Container" on my NAS, but I'll likely move to a version installed on a raspberry pi. Daikin integration is at https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/daikin/ https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/daikin/.

wenebego 2y ago

It would be nice (but potentially difficult) to add the sensible and latent capacity for heating and cooling given 3 design days: humid, hot, and cold. The btu ratings are useful to compare efficiencies but not sizing the system

matthiaswh 2y ago

If you're interested in installing heat pumps, there is a similar open data initiative started by some redditors to aggregate heat pump pricing quotes. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hBebytdBOzLQ4eoAbdFQl2PbNjWdzHqijVa4BfaYHSc/edit#gid=1022076347 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hBebytdBOzLQ4eoAbdFQ...

stephen_g 2y ago
Really shocked at those prices, I really don't understand what's going on in the US/Canada. I could get a 7kW Mitsubishi Electric single-head mini-split installed with change for AU$3000 here (US$1950) if I buy the unit online and get one of the many, many installers around to put it in (fairly simple install if it's near an external wall is around AU$750 at the moment), but that document has prices in the $7K to $12K for that size?!?
- Sytten 2y ago
  I paid 15k CAD for 2 Daikin units two years ago, the pricing is kinda stupid but it depends on the quality of the model. Chinese models are way cheaper than Japanese models.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Which is why mini splits are not very popular here. The install ends up costing so much. Labor is not cheap in US/Canada, and install is a lot of labor. Still seems like it should be cheaper though.
  - dalyons 2y ago
    Labor is even more in australia, so that's not what's going on here.
- kleiba 2y ago
  Wait until you see prices in Germany...
- dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago

Sytten 2y ago

If you are in North America, I highly recommend to check out https://ashp.neep.org/#!/ https://ashp.neep.org/#!/ to compare heat pumps. It has efficiency and technical data on almost all models easy to compare without the marketing bullsh*t of manufacturers. The tests are conducted independently and instead of one COP you get the COP depending on the outside temperature which very important in cold climates like Canada.

_spduchamp 2y ago

We moved to heat-pump a few years ago and disconnected from gas. It's been working great. Our biggest expense was insulating our house. It is an old house and the 2nd floor was very drafty. You could feel a breeze coming through cracks in the wall. When we opened the wall there were just a few newspapers in there and no insulation. We had the 2nd floor siding removed, an extra layer of insulated wall added to the outside and then cladded with siding. It was like putting a big insulated hat on our house. Now the temperature is very consistent and absolute no drafts. The architect said to me that we'll never fully recoup our costs of putting the hat on the house. To which I replied that we don't always to things for economic reasons, and just do them because they are the right thing to do. My only regret was going with a Rheem heat-pump water heater in this mix. It does not perform well at all. With hindsight I would have looked for a way to perhaps have water heating integrated with our air heat-pump system. There is a company called Arctic that has those systems. Also with regard to heat-pump water heater, out big problem is that a hydronic floor heating system (installed when we were on gas) is now constantly drawing off heat from our tank. I'd like to find a small standalone unit to handle floor hydronic heating separate from my main water heating.

belter 2y ago
How noisy is it? I heard of people installing them, and getting complaints from the neighbors.
- WirelessGigabit 2y ago
  They're as noisy as an AC. So here in Arizona no one cares. But in Belgium this was an issue as they run more in winter and in winter sound travels further.
  - belter 2y ago
    Uhmm...I see a problem for countries where you have wall to wall connected urban environments...If all 60 connected houses on a street, install external heat pumps, it will add up.

zmully 2y ago

What would make this even more useful (if possible) would be including 1) the UK equivalent of an ASHRE Manual J and 2) an ACH rating for the dwelling. Heat pumps are great, but suffer from piss-poor installations and shitty salespeople. When I renovated my DC rowhouse, I talked to 6 different companies about the HVAC install. Only one, ONE, would do a Manual J. I had already done a Manual J myself (it's not hard at all) so I could compare their calculations to my own. They were slightly different (they calculated a greater load than I, but at the time, the insulation systems I used in the house were uncommon, so most of this difference was due to their lack of familiarity). In the end, my rowhouse needed such a small unit (1.5T IIRC) that I couldn't get the SEER I wanted because no one makes high end units that small... I ended up slightly oversized at 2T, but that was necessary to get a unit from a good manufacturer (Lennox), rather than a pile of garbage flipper grade unit from someone like Goodrich. What the heat pump industry is going to suffer from is the utter and blatant disregard to right-sizing units. The other 5 companies I talked to? They just walked around the house and then said shit like "This gonna need a 5T unit" and left. Also, flex duct is bane of any central non-high velocity system. If an installer mentions flex duct for anything other than a short run to a register, run away from them. Flex duct is the sign of a lazy installer who is going to cut corners everywhere else they can, and especially where you can't see it. In the same vein, if the installer doesn't have their own sheet metal shop, make damn sure they're buying your ductwork from a sheet metal shop and not from HomeDepot. One company I interviewed refused to do a Manual D (duct sizing) and said that a standard (i.e. we're going to get it at HomeDepot) 9x13 duct will be "plenty" for the return. The return (per the Manual D) ended up barely fitting in the chase alloted for it which is something like 30"x 24". So be educated consumers: - Do a Manual J and Manual D yourself, they're not hard - Right size your unit. It should be running 90% of the time for max efficiency, so yeah, a smaller unit might take longer to cool or heat, but you shouldn't be turning the unit on or off but two or three times a year. A super high efficiency unit that is oversized is going to be terrible and inefficient. Don't fall for their shitty sales tactic of "but it's not going to be able to cool your house down as quickly as this 5T unit!". - Demand good work. Like a plumber, never ever ever let an HVAC installer in your house unmonitored. I had to fight with my installers because they wanted to move a chase to the middle of the room "because it'll be easier for us". No, you have the plans, you quoted on the plans, so I don't give a shit that it's hard. - Insulate and seal your duct work. You can't go back and do this, so make sure it's in your contract, and make sure they actually do it. - Make sure you service your unit annually, it's a couple hundred bucks of peace of mind.

dopylitty 2y ago

This guy[0] has done quite a few deep dives on heat pumps that cover a lot of the myths (eg they don't work in the cold). It's pretty interesting material if you're thinking about a heat pump. It has always seemed silly to me that we spend money to keep a box of cold (fridge) inside the houses we're spending money to heat in the winter and spend a lot of money to heat up dryers, stoves, etc in the houses we're spending money to cool in the summer. Watching these videos made me think there's a real possibility at some point to have something like a whole home heat pump that just moves heat from where it is to where you want it and in the process reduces the need for systems working against each other to heat/cool specific parts of the house. I understand there's something in commercial settings that has this capability but I'm blanking on the name. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto&t=0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J52mDjZzto&t=0s 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_refrigerant_flow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_refrigerant_flow

FredFS456 2y ago
My parents have always had an "outdoor fridge" that is a stainless steel equipment box that my dad salvaged from the junk pile at work. They put food in there that is less prone to spoiling, and use it through the fall/winter/spring months.
- dopylitty 2y ago
  That's a great way to keep the raccoons out! If I make a big pot of soup in the winter I will cool it down outside before putting it in the fridge. That way it gets down below the zone where bacteria grow much faster than if it were inside. From an energy perspective it would be better to put it in the fridge so the heat would be removed by the fridge and stay in the house rather than dissipated outside but as far as I know the heat would also end up in the other goods in the fridge causing potential spoilage. It would be nice to have some kind of remote chiller pot hooked to a heat pump that would just pump the heat out of the soup and into a cold room.
  - brnt 2y ago
    > heat pump that would just pump the heat out of the soup and into a cold room. You already have one, it's your fridge ;)

changadera 2y ago

My neighbour has a heat pump and it's kind of annoying when running because the 180hz hum is audible in most of the rooms in my house. This in the UK and our houses are detached, but fairly closely spaced.

dv_dt 2y ago
I wonder if there is some isolation dampers that could be added to the mounts (sounds fancy, but think rubber or silicon grommets).
- timbit42 2y ago
  Most heat pumps mounts I've seen have rubber grommets but older heat pumps will make audible noise as they wear out.
switch007 2y ago
A constant hum from a neighbour's heating unit would drive me crazy. We have lots of terraced and very-close-together housing in the UK... Low frequency noise can travel quite far (and through mass), so not even distance helps that much

nirolo 2y ago

A very big database comparing a lot of relevant data can be found at https://www.eurovent-certification.com/ https://www.eurovent-certification.com/ I only used it for air-to-air heatpumps (or air conditioners as they are sometimes called). He the data is oretty good. I can't say anything about the other types of heatpumps but I've found the database quite useful.

apexalpha 2y ago

How do these people monitor the heat output of the heatpump? Is that something you can get from the device itself? I recently installed a Nibe S2125 in my house, it's been running great except I don't monitor electricity consumption of just the heat pump, nor do I know how to get the heating output. I somehow doubt all these people have a specific electric meter on their heatpump, or do they? Mine runs on 400V and the meters are a bit expensive to get just for the data.

willcipriano 2y ago

Anyone make/is it feasible to make: a window unit heat pump?

apexalpha 2y ago
Midea Window AC is what your looking for I think.
- willcipriano 2y ago
  Yeah close, they don't seem to support "heat and cool" with those heat pump style units yet but that's a minor requirement. I'll probably try one this year. Looks cool if nothing else. https://www.midea.com/us/air-conditioners/window-air-conditioners/10000-btu-u-shaped-air-conditioner-maw10v1qwt https://www.midea.com/us/air-conditioners/window-air-conditi...

matznerd 2y ago

I love to see Hacker News geeking out on heat pumps and that this is currently on top of the home page! Don't forget that this community has an outsized influence on the world as early adopters and innovators.

kleiba 2y ago
Heat pump technology is certainly out of the "early adopters" phase. It is basically the standard for new buildings in Europe (at least Northern Europe, I'm not sure about the South), and has been for years. In Germany, where I currently live, they recently passed a law that constrains what kind of heating system you're allowed to put into your house to a point where basically only a heat pump fulfills all criteria (perhaps with the exception of pellet heaters).

danans 2y ago

It wasn't clear to me what kind of monitoring equipment is being used to gather this data, or whether it's just being manually gathered and reported by each system owner. If the former, I'd like to get the generic equipment to use to monitor my heat pump system, and if the latter I wonder if the resulting inaccuracy results in improbable outliers like the system with 6.0 COP. EDIT: it's a bit buried, but the systems are monitored using Open Energy Monitor (https://docs.openenergymonitor.org/applications/heatpump.html https://docs.openenergymonitor.org/applications/heatpump.htm...), and it seems like heatpumpmonitor.org was created by them.

supermatt 2y ago

I love my ground-source heatpump. I did the entire install myself, submerging the loop in the pond by my house. We get a COP of approx 3.0 in the middle of winter when its -25C air temp outside :)

WaitWaitWha 2y ago
do you have your setup documented online somewhere public?

joshlk 2y ago

Is there an explanation of the acronyms/metrics used? E.g. COP

karussell 2y ago
COP is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance (the higher the better). And SCOP is seasonal COP.
timbit42 2y ago
COP or CoP means co-efficient of performance. An electric heater has a CoP of 1. New heat pumps usually have a CoP of 4 or higher. My 11 year old heat pumps have a CoP of 3. This means they can produce 3 or 4 times as much heat as an electric heater, assuming the same amount of electricity, or produce the same amount of heat with 1/3 or 1/4 of the electricity. At a CoP of 3, they are more efficient than electric heaters down to -15C. At a CoP of 4, down to -25C. There are better heat pumps coming with a CoP of 5.

adev_ 2y ago

My still-running heat pump from 1981 is not in the list. Unacceptable ! :)

karussell 2y ago

There is another very helpful list of heat pumps (German): https://cloud.skip.scientists4future.org/s/xwxiykjZnXaAtng https://cloud.skip.scientists4future.org/s/xwxiykjZnXaAtng This is based on the "Bafa" list but filterable und sortable (https://www.bafa.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Energie/beg_waermepumpen_anlagenliste.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=5 https://www.bafa.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Energie/beg_waer...)

class3shock 2y ago

I just want to throw this out there to this audience. As someone that has worked in and been interested in energy efficient housing for 10+ years, I have been heartened to see the start of proliferation of heat pump units. However, as a whole, the market seems to be flooded with units of as good quality as your normal store bought air conditioner. That is to say, as soon as something goes wrong with them, they are garbage. How come we only talk about efficiency/environmental friendliness of use and not of the unit itself (and all it's embodied energy/cost)? If I save 60% on energy for heating every year but then require all the energy needed to build a new heat pump every 5-10 what am I really doing? I would love to see an effort to create an open source heat pump itself, based off of COTS parts and raspberry pi or something similar where you are not locked out of the software and dependent on a supplier to have replacement parts that they probably stopped stocking 5 years after releasing the product.

londons_explore 2y ago
Quality cones with design refinements learnt after the technology has been in people's homes for decades. There is nothing theoretically unreliable about a heat pump - it would totally be possible to design it to work for 50+ years with just basic filter replacements.
Kerb_ 2y ago
>If I save 60% on energy for heating every year but then require all the energy needed to build a new heat pump every 5-10 what am I really doing? >As good quality as your normal store bought air conditioner. That is to say, as soon as something goes wrong with them, they are garbage. Sounds like you're still saving 60% on energy because the status quo is also disposable appliances. It absolutely sounds better than nothing to me, but I am also hopeful for more maintainable and accessible heat pumps in the future. I haven't heard about any efforts for an open source heat pump, but I'm definitely interested in something like that myself
Pxtl 2y ago
> store bought air conditioner Yup. Saving the world is going to be ruined by Chinese shovelware-quality equipment re-stickered with American brands, but in this case it's even worse since you're hiring a professional installer and those guys will only work with a short list of manufacturers, so getting somebody to install an expensive quality European model will be basically impossible (if they're even certified for use in North America).

Cort3z 2y ago

I recently had to get a replacement heat pump. In the process I discovered that the EU has a database of energy ratings for almost (actually?) all electric appliances sold in the eu. This includes heat pumps. I scraped the heat pump data and am the proud owner of 100% of this information. What I found is that some of the available data is inaccurate and much of the energy ratings (A-G character rating) is inconsistent with the performance of the device, probably due to changing standards over the years. It’s nice to see initiatives like this which hopefully will provide better and more normalized data. As a side note. Air-to-air heat pumps have, as most people know, two parts to it. The indoor unit, and the outdoor unit. Many models can be used interchangeably, so the domain of heat pumps is a bit more complicated than I first anticipated.

jonasdegendt 2y ago
To my knowledge, the A-G energy rating is a rolling standard. It gets a little bit tougher to make A grade every year. NCAP works the same way.
- Cort3z 2y ago
  Indeed. The data available includes most of the things you would expect, but some of it is just wrong. I’m only at my computer now, so don’t have a concrete example, but some models had vastly higher values for some fields than is possible.

qsdf38100 2y ago

Are all the compared heat pumps working at the same temperature levels? Otherwise, the COP isn't a good comparison metric, as even for an ideal heat pump with a COP = 1 / carnot_efficiency, it depends on the temperatures. For instance, a heat pump lifting heat from 20°C to 100°C with a COP of "only" 2 is excellent, whereas lifting heat from 20°C to 30°C with a cop of 3 is not impressive.

tgtweak 2y ago

How is the heat output calculated and validated?

twic 2y ago

Heat pumps are obviously great in many ways. But fitting one is a big deal - they are quite expensive, they take a lot of work to fit, really require extensive additional insulation, and there are all sorts of caveats to them that mean they aren't a straightforward replacement for a boiler. So i'm slightly mystified that we basically don't hear anything about fitting drainwater heat recovery [1], in which the lukewarm drain water from your shower is used to pre-warm the incoming cold water. It's extremely simple, pretty cheap, simple to fit, and can recover ~50% of the waste heat, of something which is tens of percent of the energy consumption of a household. By all means, get a heat pump. But get a heat exchanger on your shower first! [1] https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/drain-water-heat-recovery https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/drain-water-heat-recovery

averageRoyalty 2y ago
This sounds like an American viewpoint. In Australia, New Zealand and much of Europe they are pretty cheap to install, and rarely require additional insulation. It may be that they're relatively new to your area, so the demand is outstripping supply of installers who have been doing this for 30+ years and as such are charging to that effect.
SomaticPirate 2y ago
For most single family US homes (which are single story) this would likely be a nightmare to install and maintain. Definitely a cool idea but a leak or any maintenance might quickly undercut the cost savings
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  Just as an FYI: > Information obtained from the US Census Bureau’s Survey of Construction (SOC) and tabulated by NAHB, shows that the rising trend of single-story homes reversed in 2021. The share of single-story homes decreased in 2021 and the share of two or more stories homes started was greater than one story homes. This is in line with recent NAHB analysis of new single-family home size trends. https://eyeonhousing.org/2022/07/share-of-two-or-more-stories-new-homes-increased-in-2021/ https://eyeonhousing.org/2022/07/share-of-two-or-more-storie...

braiamp 2y ago

I see tables, I am exited. But I can't make sense of what anything is? I know COP, but what is Training, what is Source? MID seems to be a kind of sensor? Some of the table headers have a tool tip explaining things, but are the ones that aren't the most needed. Also, some about page about what the table aggregates and how it gets there? Seems to be some kind of aggregator for information gathered from an appliances called "emonHub" which is a rPi that gathers data from an assortment of other devices. There are some jargon that you have to parse, ("supply" means the electric cables that "supply" your heat pump) to understand what's going on. The best guide I could find is buried all the way down of the documentation https://docs.openenergymonitor.org/applications/heatpump.html https://docs.openenergymonitor.org/applications/heatpump.htm... That's it.

elric 2y ago

I'm surprised to see that basic things like heatpumps and insulation are apparently still controversial in 2024. By law, houses in my neck of the woods are required to be well insulated, where the definition gets stricter every couple of years. Newly built houses have to be compliant. When renovating existing houses, efforts towards compliance have to be made up to a certain level. Every house that's sold or rented must advertise its energy consumption expressed in kW/m², and you can be damned sure that high energy loss results in severe impact on sales price. Any kind of heater obviously has less work to do when heat loss is minimized by good insulation. Good options have been available for literally decades for most types of buildings. The roof is typically the easiest, with many options. E.g. on the inside between the rafters. Or you can remove the tiles, insulate on the outside, add framing and retile. My roofer simply tore out the ancient roofing, slapped on some insulation, and finished things with EPDM. Easy peasy. Floors can be tricky depending on the house and how much effort you're willing to put in. Easy if you have a crawlspace or basement, not so easy if not. I tore up and dug out the floors in my 100+ year old house and added 10cm of PIR insulation. This was not much fun, but after a hundred years the floor looked like shit anyway. Walls have lots of options. Cavity walls can be filled with insulation by drilling a couple of holes and blowing it in. I insulated my brick walls on the outside, 12cm of XPS, with a layer of reinforcement, and finished with silicone plaster rendering. Don't forget about the windows. Old windows are very leaky. Not just the glazing (double or triple for the win), but the framing is equally important. Also great for keeping out noise. And then there's ventilation. I installed a forced air ventilation system with heat and moisture recovery. This had a bigger impact than expected, the indoor air is much nicer, and I don't lose any heat by having to open windows in the winter. In all cases, of course, moisture has to be taken into account. You may or may not need a moisture barrier, some parts may have to be breathable, etc. Over here, subsidies are available for most of these improvements, and our energy prices are high enough to make it worth the effort. I pay under 200eur/year (not a typo) for heating, and most of that goes towards hot showers.

NiggersofHN 2y ago

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