How Does A Heat Pump Work?

hello I'm Roger Bisby from the skill Builder Channel and when we first did our videos on John's disastrous heat pump and Adam came along and changed it for a better one and changed the system so he's now got a really efficient heat pump but a lot of people watch a video and they said how does a heat pump work so in a few minutes we're going to show you very quickly very simply how a heat pump works now this is the heat pump and people talk about it being a fridge in Reverse in other words it's taking heat out of the air and it's sending it into the house to heat your house as simple as that so what we've got it's a big two fans actually in this one and it's sucking air in at the back of here and it's blowing icy cold air out so that heat that's extracted from that air is going in to a heat exchanger and that's round here we see some pipes the back flow and return from the heating system we get a lot of people going well you can't do that you can't create matter you can't create energy out of nothing we're not we're taking the heat from the air 16° C so that would be the air temperature coming in at the back of the heat pump there being sucked into the heat pump remember that 16 15° C now we put it on this side when the air has been extracted by the refrigerant inside the heat pump by the compression the temperature is dropping now down down down oh we're getting way down now we're getting down to 5° C so that's a good 10° that we've dropped in temperature that's that's quite incredible now all that heat is going in so let's go and find Adam who's in the warm as usual and uh find out what's going on in there your flow which goes off to your uh cylinder for your hot water or radiators and your return that comes back slightly cooler after it's deposited the heat we've gone we put a heat meter in here that's not required for every job that's just required because we want to monitor John system to see exactly how well it's performed and from a third party company so we know it's fair um uh this one we've also connected the gas boiler into for uh uh the customers um security that they've always going to have some heating they're not fully convinced yet after some uh historical bad installations of heat pumps but very simply your flow comes in we've got a deor in here again not needed we've given him some special extra treatment here uh that basically gets gas out the system but it comes to a threeway valve which diverts the H the heat from the heat pump into your cylinder exactly this same as you'd see from a gas boiler and then that goes around the coil to heat up the hot water and back into the return or sends it round to uh the various radiator circuits that we have here um this has actually got a couple of different circuits a slightly larger house not necessarily for most homes but um essentially to sort boil it down we have one flow going in which is spit off to hot water or Heating and then that joins back into one return that goes back out to the heat pump to gather some more heat from outside now this pipe that's going in here goes into what is really quite a massive coil that goes all the way around the cylinder and as it's going around the cylinder inside it's giving up its heat to the domestic hot water but it's not the same water that you get out your shower or your bath they completely SE separate the water in the heat pump is just recirculating around this and it's going back so that is the heat exchanger and the key to this is to have a really good cylinder where you got a massive heat exchanger not just an ordinary cylinder so that you can get that heat transfer efficiently as possible out of that heat pump and into your hot water now when they first had this system the hot water wasn't quite hot enough so what happened there so when we first installed this system we had an air loock in here which meant that we weren't getting enough circulation around it um we didn't realize this so uh I I noticed it next day thanks to our monitoring uh we sent out the um uh Tom Plum a local engineer who just went and blasted some water around it and that immediately resolved it um I would say that this coil and this cylinder are probably the best Market best you can have on the market at the moment you can make most cylinders work with heat pumps pretty well actually it's just that we wanted obviously the the highest end install and again that's down to to make normal Cinders work you down to sort playing with settings and uh some fine tuning uh if you want to get the most out of that from your heat pump and I notice here we've got a backup immersion heater so this has been installed because John would like to divert some of his solar PV into the cylinder this is kind of a temporary solution because actually what we want to do is send any solar PV which generates electricity from sunlight we actually want to send that to the heat pump and multiply that energy through the heat pump this heat pump uh operates at a scop or efficiency of around about 450% if we generate 1 Kow from the roof we want to turn that into 4 and a half not not turn the 1 kilowatt straight into 1 kilowatt hours worth of heat if that makes sense and it's highly likely that in the summer with that heat pump extracting heat from hot air yeah much hotter there and the solar panels working at a maximum efficiency that you're going to get a way higher multiplication if you like the heat pump will work at more uh probably over 500% efficiency in the summer uh and what that means is that with all the the Sola PV that's generated you'll have more left over after this is heated up for other appliances in the house or storage in a home battery or export to the grid which you can be paid for so um rather than chucking all of your solar energy in here we're using less of it getting the same amount of heat and then having more left over to sell back to the Grid or using the the rest of the home I'm going to ask you this question because everyone wants to know the answer to it this is expensive kit this is not a cheap installation how long before John sees himself break even on it there's a lot of variables uh in these installations so if if we were talking about without the solar panels Etc and it was just this installation you'd be looking at about a 10-year payback uh on the current uh energy price caps however John has solar PV which means this is probably going to pay back in um perhaps even half that time because of the electricity produced by solar if you had battery as well you could be buying cheap electric from the grid and save even more money uh and that would reduce it to sub five years so it depends on what your specific setup is not everyone can experience or expect that kind of savings it depends on the price cap the type of system you have to have installed the amount of work to be done etc etc so the bottom line is if you want a good installation and you want to get the maximum efficiency out of your heat pump you've got to find the right installer to do the job and the right installer in this case according to Adam anyway is uh the heat key guys the n network of independent installers who have all been trained and bonafied by heat geek and we're so confident in that we guarantee their performance

Channel: Skill Builder

Views: 22,846

Keywords: heat pump, how does a heat pump work, how heat pumps work, heat pumps explained, air source heat pump, air source heat pump system, what is a heat pump, how a heat pump works

Id: 6WFEzZOZ7vA

Length: 7min 10sec (430 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2024