Harry Veeder wrote:
What happens when you begin to use the hot water?
Harry
It may be of interest to the proponents of heat pumps to hear of my
experience of using a system in my 1st house in 1956!
The system was built by Ferranti - a major electrical manufacturer in
England - marketed as the Ferranti fridge-heater.
I had our house designed around this system with a heavily insulated walk-in
cold room which also housed the heat exchanger and compressor. The idea was
to circulate the water, which was heated by the "reversed refrigerator"
extracting the heat content of the items stored in the insulated room,
through the indirect heating coil in the hot water storage tank.
The theory was that in warm weather the cooling of the food storage room
supplied enough heat to keep the domestic hot water tank at a predetermined
temp. and maintain the temp of the food etc. at a safe level. In cold
weather the Ferranti "Engineers" expected the process to continue with the
food store simply getting colder in order to maintain the hot water at the
set level.
Needless to say they were wrong. What actually happened was that in warm
weather the storage tank water rapidly reached the max. temp for safe
domestic use, which cut out the compressor in the cold room, and the heat
from outside warmed the food until hot water was drawn off in sufficient
quantity to re-start the compressor.
After a year of useless work by Ferranti and several replacement heat-pump
units, the company withdrew the product from the market. I then installed a
traditional gas-fired boiler for the hot water and a standard fridge in the
cold room!
The lesson here as I see it is to forget trying to balance out the hot/cold
heat flows with a simple thermostat set-up, and rely on the inherent COP of
heat pumps utilising a large enough source of heat to remove any possibility
of imbalance.
Norman Horwood
- [Vo]: Re: Loop closed? norman horwood
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