400L Heat Pump - Sydney Northshore - FREE! « Alternative Technology Assn Forums

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400L Heat Pump - Sydney Northshore - FREE!

(19 posts) (6 voices)

Started 5 years ago by munter
Latest reply from munter

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munter
Member

Hi All,
I am giving away a used Taitron heat pump. I bought the unit to supply my hydronic floor but I have found that it isn't suited for that purpose. The heat pump is a rectangular block and contains 2 x 200L stainless steel storage tanks. The unit has been modified slight slightly to integrate it with my solar collection system. This is available free for anyone to remove from my nature strip where it is currently sitting.

Before you hook up your trailer and come and collect, be aware of the following:
The unit needs a circulation pump (any unit from ebay will do).
The unit needs to be hard wired in
The unit has a few peculiarities which would make it better suited to a person with a strong DIY bent to make best use of it.

That said - this is a >$k unit which I am giving away for free. The unit is located near Chatswood in Sydney. First person with a trailer and enough strong blokes to lift it in can take it away. PM me for the address.

Posted Monday 10 Jul 2017 @ 2:40:44 am from IP #
arttt
Member

I was tempted for a minute but reading you're previous post http://www.ata.org.au/forums/topic/46326#post-95931

I can see moving it to a colder climate isn't going to work.
Hope you find a 'buyer'

Posted Monday 10 Jul 2017 @ 4:24:15 am from IP #
munter
Member

Yes - it was a disappointment in my application. I think I was asking too much of the unit. It really isn't suitable for a cold climate application. I think it would probably go ok as a regular domestic system as long as the owner needed a large tank capacity and the climate isn't too cold.

The price of "free" really gives the buyer a lot of room to work with here

Posted Monday 10 Jul 2017 @ 7:15:27 am from IP #
munter
Member

Well the heat pump is finished. Some mean minded individual ripped out several components and trashed the casing. It off to get degassed and then into the scrap pile.

Posted Wednesday 12 Jul 2017 @ 2:39:36 am from IP #
darrynm
Member

Any chance the tanks are available?

Posted Tuesday 25 Jul 2017 @ 12:06:57 pm from IP #
munter
Member

Well one tank is now in use, the second will go up on ebay to try to recover some costs to pay for the de-gassing. I'll send you a link if you are interested? I'm not looking to recover much by way of costs, I really just want to use ebay to lock in a transaction that will go through to completion. Transactions where you give stuff away for free seem to be fraught with people not following through on their commitments and stuffing you around (not suggesting that you would do so Darrynm - just a general observation).

Posted Wednesday 26 Jul 2017 @ 2:53:25 am from IP #
alberto
Member

Too bad. I don't live in Australia.

Posted Wednesday 26 Jul 2017 @ 4:03:02 am from IP #
darrynm
Member

Sounds good.

Can you let me know more about the tank - specifically the number of ports & connection size.

Also I'll PM you my mobile and email.

Posted Wednesday 26 Jul 2017 @ 7:44:57 am from IP #
munter
Member

So this tale has an unexpected twist. I removed this big heat pump because it didn't seem powerful enough to supply heat to our floor. My thinking was that I would replace it with a ducted air con system which will run on home solar electricity. I decided to simply hook my solar thermal collectors up directly to the floor(with a small balance tank) just to try to take the edge off thebslab. It seemed unlikely that it would do much but better than nothing. I finished the replumbing last Saturday. Since then it has been wonderfully sunny in Sydney and the collectors are supplying a steady stream of solar hot water for 7 hours per day which is resulting in thebewarmwst floor I have ever had. The performance has been better in this configuration than when I was burning 30kwhrs/day in the heat pump plus the solar. The slab has warmed several degrees and water exiting the slab is no longer stone cold but actually temperate. It is an incredible turn of events for what I thought was a failed system. Lol.

Posted Thursday 10 Aug 2017 @ 11:03:52 am from IP #
darrynm
Member

Wow....so does that mean the heat pump simply wasn't working? Do you need to add a tempering valve or something to limit the slab heat and avoid cracking?

Posted Thursday 10 Aug 2017 @ 7:37:34 pm from IP #
munter
Member

The water seems to gain no more than 10 degrees as it passes through the collectors so as long as I continue to feed water in at less than 40 degrees I don't think it will get too hot. The thermal mass of the slab is enormous so any temperature rise in the feed water is very, very slow. I might look to put a max temp cut-out switch in there somewhere though. I don't think a tempering valve would work in this case as it is all low pressure.
I honestly can't work out why the heat pump system didn't work. I know it produced heat but somehow it was always way too little. Even when I had the solar loop connected as well as the heat pump I didn't get this much heat. I'm baffled. But happy.

Posted Thursday 10 Aug 2017 @ 9:53:16 pm from IP #
scott drew
Member

Hi munter,

Can you please explain a bit more about your solar thermal collector?

What dies it consist of? Evac tubes? Flat plate collector? Thermosyphon or pumped?

Posted Friday 11 Aug 2017 @ 5:14:59 am from IP #
JB
Member

I was thinking about a heat pump to run my hydronic slab heating in Melbourne, maybe I'll stick with gas.

Posted Friday 11 Aug 2017 @ 1:32:13 pm from IP #
munter
Member

About the collector, it is basically 2 x 20 tube collectors plus a 30 tube collector with numerous tubes removed such that the total number of tubes is 55. The collectors are vertically mounted on the north wall of my house and the reason tubes are removed is that there are windows along that wall also and I didn't want tubes crossing those windows.
All the collectors were bought from fx larkin down south before they closed down.
I use a generic solar controller with three temp sensors to control the circulation pump. Whenever the collector temp is 8 degrees warmer than the small balance tank I have it circulates through the collectors and then straight into the floor. There is now only a single pump doing all the circulating. I run it on the slowest pump speed as faster speeds were resulting in lower water temps.
Piping is a mix of copper and pex. Copper near the collectors but pex further out. The system has two air vents so should remain unpressurized so I figure the pex should be ok ( though I have seen pex failures in pressurized solar hot water applications). It's a very simple system now.

Further results as at today. The floor is now a bit over 22 degrees which is 4 degrees warmer than the part of the slab without hydronics.

Posted Saturday 12 Aug 2017 @ 11:43:45 am from IP #
munter
Member

JB - don't write off heat pumps based on my experience alone. My system is an amateur build using eBay sourced parts for the heat supply. My piping is all top grade rehau but the heat source is my own work. A properly and professionally designed and installed system would probably work fine. Mine was just a hack. I think it was a warm environment heat pump and didn't like temps under ten degrees.

Posted Saturday 12 Aug 2017 @ 1:01:21 pm from IP #
scott drew
Member

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

What do/will you do over summer? Vertically mounted, are they shaded by eaves?

Did you build from scratch and have the pipes in slab from original?

SD

Posted Monday 14 Aug 2017 @ 5:17:57 am from IP #
munter
Member

The vertical tubes stay in place over summer. They are partially shaded by our narrow eaves but the sunlight that does hit is so incidental that I don't worry about any surplus heat collection. The system drains back so it will just sit empty.

I built (and rebuilt, and rebuilt...) the system as a hobby project. We had the builder put the pipes in the slab when building (at exorbitant cost) and then I took over the heat supply problem. I have previously had a few problems with leaks here and there but there aren't any at the moment. The parts were mostly sourced off ebay apart from the collectors which I mentioned previously.

The floor is at 22.9 degrees today (sunny in Sydney) which is quite comfortable under foot.This compares to around 18 degrees before we started heating it. I'm still amazed that the revised system is working so well. With the sunny weather of the last week or so I think the slab temp is still slowly increasing (though there is always a degree of inconsistency in my measurement via IR sensor).

Posted Monday 14 Aug 2017 @ 11:58:22 am from IP #
scott drew
Member

Thanks for sharing your experience.

That type of system has been in the back of my mind for some time. I'd never thought to mount evac tubes vertically and had the problem of what to do in summer.

Ideally I would like a thermosyphon system rather than pumped but im not sure it would work. Im a while off building but the forum keeps on giving me ideas and solving problems!

Cheers, SD.

Posted Monday 14 Aug 2017 @ 10:07:32 pm from IP #
munter
Member

I put the tubes in vertically because of space constraints as much as anything else. Mounting them flush to the north wall was much easier than any attempt at an angled frame. I suspect the heat pipes would work even better if they were at a slight angle to help with convection currents inside the tube but don't really know. They do still seem to work ok and I couldn't find any real papers or research on the topic. Wall space is far less precious than roof space where the PV belongs to get year-round solar access.
If you're in Sydney and want to have a look, let me know and I'd be happy to show you (some parts are not pretty though!)

Posted Tuesday 15 Aug 2017 @ 4:33:35 am from IP #

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