Quote:
Originally Posted by Azure
I would be very curious to see some numbers on this.
Alberta doesn't have cold temperatures all winter (chinooks, etc), and you probably have 8 months out of the year where the temperature would be around 10 C? In that situation you aren't actually using a lot of energy to heat your home, and taking the ambient air from your utility room to heat your water shouldn't actually really be removing THAT much heat from the air.
I get that the warmer the climate, the more efficient the get, but I wonder what the line is.
Also, if you have this thing in the basement, and you have floor heat, the radiant heat coming out of the slab in your utility room should really help, and I would think the utility room doesn't have to really be that warm, so its not like you need to recover the heat it pulls out.
Really curious how well it would work.
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I mean, there isn't a whole lot to it. If you're pulling 100K btus out of your ambient air to heat your water, you're going to need to replace that during the heating months if it's in a conditioned space. Whether that's forced air, radiant heat, or whatever, or at -30º vs 10º outside, a heat pump water heater is going to drop the air temperature of the room its in and increase the space heating needs by the amount of btus it pulls out of the air. If it's warm enough out that youi're not heating, then it's extremely efficient. But for most of the year, there aren't really any efficiency gains (and it's a net loss in places with electricity that's generated from gas because of the inefficiencies in that process).
In a region with cleaner electricity generation, the environmental benefits vs. gas are worth it. But burning gas to produce electricity and then using that electricity to heat water is way less efficient than just burning gas to heat water, even if you're gaining some efficiency with a heat pump water heater.