ENERGY SAVING
finish - there is none of the ‘90 days, end of month’ so common in the commercial sector. The homeowner makes you cups of tea as you work and the margins are good. Then there’s the cherry on the cake with, thanks to Greta Thunberg’s message ‘it’s time to take some responsibility for your carbon output’, homeowners are getting
on board in their droves - the market is growing at 35% a year and the plumbers are cleaning up.
Heat pumps are more like air conditioning than boilers. They all have inverter fans, inverter compressors, pcb’s from air
conditioning units, electronic expansion valves, sensors from air conditioning units and so on. Fault finding is very similar to working on an air conditioning condenser so it’s easy - they even have the same fault codes. The only real difference is that they heat water not air. Sure, underfloor heating and hot water cylinders are new to air conditioning engineers, but they really are not very complicated.
In the last 10 years, the heat pump market has adapted to the industry and the people working in it. Everyone uses aftermarket controllers to replace the ones that come with the units to make them easier to use - and most of the heat pumps installed in the UK are monoblocs where the plumber brings the water to the unit just like with a chiller. In many cases when the homeowner wants the unit well away from the house, it’s easier for the plumber to run a 28mm insulated plastic pipe in the ground instead of asking the fridge engineers to run some 3/8 and ½ inch pipework.
My favourite criticism when I’m speaking to air conditioning and refrigeration engineers is that they’re worried that heat pumps don’t work. Really? You’ve spent all day working on a chiller or a fridge plant dumping warm air into the sky and you’re worried that you’re not going to get any heat?
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to cool them in high temperatures. Heat pumps are the same - the garden is the cold room and the radiators are the water-cooled condensers. My concern about the uptake of heat pumps by the refrigeration and air conditioning industry doesn’t end there. In 1990 Carrier was the go-to company and would sell you a massive chiller for the roof, connected to hundreds of fan coils around the building all using water and we had to do pipe size and duct calculations to design a system. In the late 1980’s split air conditioning came along and it was easy - you bought two boxes, tubed them together and you had a running system. Then VRF turned up and changed the world. But what’s all of this got to do with heat pumps? We see them as the gateway to the future of air-conditioning and refrigeration. With the introduction of the new flammable or slightly flammable refrigerants there is no way anyone is going to allow large volumes of refrigerant in the occupied space. To the consumer it’s like sleeping with a gas bottle by the bed.
The smart money is predicting that we are going back to water being pumped around buildings with new intelligent chillers in the car park. I hear that supermarkets are experimenting with local terminal units cooled by water to keep refrigerant volumes down and it looks like Mitsubishi is way ahead of the game with the hybrid VRF system. What they’ve done is apply VRF technology to water. So maybe getting into heat pumps is a great way to start the transition to water as the refrigerant of choice – it’s nice and easy to start small. A good supplier will hold your hand and some of the best will even size up the unit and tell you how to set the units up. Surely if you know anything about
When you’re working on a cold store at
-25°C on a summer’s day, the biggest problem is getting rid of the heat. Back in the old days people used to spray the condensers with water
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Maintains thermal effifficiency at 100% and 50% airflow
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TRA LOW ENERGY HE AT VENTILATION FOR CLASSR Patented variable mass heat
LT ATION FOR CL
refrigeration it would be interesting to try this technology at home? You never know, you might like it and then enter the wacky world of renewable heating.
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WEL COME T O THE COMFOR T ZONE 31
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