The Truth about Heat Pumps: Debunking the Myth.

we have all heard at least one hit pump horror story by now what if i showed you a different story a story in which a heat pump works perfectly providing clean and efficient heating for your home i'm going to show you a full process of an airsource heat pump installation by the end of this video you will be able to understand why some of ursa's heat pumps do not work correctly so today we're starting another heat pump install and this time we're doing it with heat geek and it's already getting so much better than the last one because the equipment was here at nine o'clock and we are ready to go from day one we're putting a 17 kilowatt grand arana heat pump it will go in this location here and we're going to connect our primaries through the cellar that's where the cylinder will go so there's plenty of space there you won't be able to stand up there but it should be relatively easy to run the pipework and insulate it and run the wiring i've positioned my cylinder and i'm gonna connect cylinder today so they can have hot water from the immersion heater so we can remove the boiler i was trying peter how to mark the pipe work accurately so you can save on your fittings so no elbows used on that one two three four bends [Music] if you ever wondered if a retrofit heat pump on your own is visible in my opinion it's absolutely not because just so much so much pipe work to run you need two usually two people so peter is in the cellar now we've got our primaries and flow in return for central heating and hot water taken out and it's just not the kind of work you can do on your own someone has to be passing the pipes through someone has to be really helping you and in here i'm waiting for anti-freeze valves so i cannot finish my primary piper to the heat pump that's going to be connected on those flexible hoses now i'm gonna put antifreeze valve on this one right here because that's the lowest point second antifreeze valve will go on the pipework here and we'll put this really nice uh external insulation from what they called condensed pro con i don't remember what they called i think they were starting with doing uh insulator for spoiler condensate and they stuck to the name contents pro i think it's called it looks nice it's a good installation i think this installation we're doing with a heat geek under the heat pump a short installation if you want to learn more about that uh scheme there'll be a link to heat geeks video right here so what's different between installing a heat pump under heating scheme and some bigger companies out there the main difference is we do take care about the system design we start with the proper heat loss calculations proper pipe work sizing and sizing of heat emitters we've calculated every single room to a specific uh temperature we're not zoning the system at all even existing underfloor heating 20 square meters in the kitchen will not be zoned and controlled by a different thermostat because that way we can use the full volume of the system uh for the heat pump we're not putting buffers on the system because there's always the chance of losing efficiency if you install a buffer so instead of that we're just using a small volumizer on the system it started everyone's really excited is it noisy you can hardly hardly barely hear it so it's not too bad right now in here we've got our uh flow and return going to the first floor upgraded to 28 millimeters then we've got pipe work running from the heat pump itself back to the cellar that's primary pipe workflow and return then we've got flow and return going for central heating then we've got new 22 millimeter copper pipe work supplying hot water back to the kitchen and then yet again another 22 millimeter pipe work running from the unvented cylinder temperature and pressure relief valve going through a high temperature pump back to the outside and here we've got new joule unvented cylinder high grain cylinder with a coil of size of almost three square meters then we've got a new balanced cold going to the property and new cold supply uh new main supply and 22mm copper as well and this is an interesting item which is a high temperature pump to pump away our system pressure relief and cylinder temperature and pressure relief and this is the only pump that i'm aware of that can continuously pump water close to 100 degrees c it's quite expensive it's about 700 pounds but i'm not aware of any equivalent or a cheaper equivalent to this pump so if you know of a better solution or a cheaper solution comment below let me know because i would be curious to know if there is actually anything that can do what this little pump does moving on here we've got primary flow bypass diverter valve this diverter valve is a just a three wire diverter valve when it's energized it opens to the cylinder when it's not energized it's uh closing the cylinder off primary flow central heating flow central heating return right here central heating return right here cylinder return and uh bypass so we've got our three t's bypass is the first tee then we've got cylinder t then we've got both ground floor and top two floors returned for the common return right here and if we follow that common return it goes to the filter and then to a low loss header that we are using as a volumizer we don't have a low loss header on the system and that way we don't have to use a secondary central heating pump and we are avoiding any potential distortion on the low loss header and we avoiding any potential loss of efficiency on the cylinder we also have this little gate valve that links flow and return this is in case the flow through the cylinder from the heat pump is so big that it causes a cylinder coil resonance so you then use balance the cylinder coil by slightly opening that gate valve and allowing a little bit less flow to go through the coil at the moment we don't have any noise problems so that gate valve is fully shut and moving on we've got existing manifold for underfloor heating for a kitchen that does around 20 square meters what i've done i've removed the circulating pump for that manifold and i've removed thermostatic controls because the heat pump setup we're installing is low temperature anyway and the pump on the unit is fully capable of supplying underfloor heating and radiators overcome the pressure loss of the system so we don't have to use a circulator for the manifold and behind this door is all the piper that we had to run that's yet to be insulated as well i'm sure peter will have fun crawling back there and insulating it all i'm not going there myself no way by the end of the project we had a visit from the man himself adam chapman from hidki there's a bit of banter he lives in there that's very neat little chat about heat pump efficiency yeah yeah one less pump less valves less gubbins to install easier for people to understand if you ever want to replace it or work on it we also had a good chat about a certain roger so i've invited him loads of times and um he always says to me i've invited you to chat this out with me and you still haven't responded and every time i post underneath yes i have email me at this email address and i've sent him a load of emails and uh he's not so hold on you've said you've sent him pretends to invite me and then ignores my response saying yes roger does yeah two or three times he's done it now okay really irritating what's going on roger you're chickening out from the debate right it was all good fun with adam and i'm gonna post a link to his channel hit geek right here on this video and now we have to do another very important part of the job which is upgrade the radiators and we've got those monstrous huge rats to put in and we've got 12 12 radiators to replace and some radiators to add to the existing ones as well so now we've changed all the radiators at the property because the system will be running at lower flow temperature and the radiator's average radiator temperature which we call mean water temperature will also be much lower so give you an idea if you've got a condensing boiler your flow might be 70 return 50 and average temperature 60 is usually probably higher but 60 is most cases enough here we'll have the maximum flow temperature slightly below 50. we designed it for 50 degrees but i think we can run it at around 48 we're gonna run the system at delta t5 and therefore the radiators will heat up to around 45 46 degrees so mean water temperature of radiator is going to be 46 degrees celsius what it means is is that you need to calculate the heat loss on the room by room basis this room if you look around it's a music room has a quite a large heat loss of 1.7 kilowatt what it means is that i had to put two very large vertical radiators those are 600 by 1800 are they really heavy they are well over 60 kilograms so there's no chances you can install one of those on your own you really need someone strong to give you a hand installing them now those radiators when they are rated for our heat pump at 46 minute water temperature they're gonna supply us around 850 watts each so from those two radiators we're gonna get exactly 1700 watts and that will satisfy the heat loss of this room so although they just warmish to touch they about you know 40 degrees right now or even less because you're running on weather comp so they don't have to work at the highest uh design temperature yet because it's around six degrees outside hey it's quite it's really warm here look i'm i'm in a t-shirt uh because although they only heat up to right now below 40 degrees they hit the ramp to 21 degrees because they still supply enough energy into the room to heat it up to our design temperature so if you hear that heat pumps don't work and rooms are cold well they will be if the system is not designed correctly if you don't do the proper heat loss calculations and if you don't size your emitters correctly yes you run into trouble now i'm gonna balance the system and i've got those really interesting imi radiator valves that allow me to adjust the flow through the radiators very accurately to around 10 liters per hour so now i have to set the flow on my underfloor heating so right now i'm getting delta 3 so i have to turn the flow restrictor slightly down forced it to around delta 5. this is a really old manifold i don't want to break it those are so stiff this is a really important part of commissioning that you are getting around delta 5 on your underfloor heating and on your radiators by now you should start to appreciate the multi-stage process of a heat pump installation we always start with a side survey and room by room heat dust calculations followed by a system design and heat pump and amateur sizing you may have to upgrade some of your pipework and also you may have to upgrade your existing electrical supply more often than not some of the existing radiators will have to be upgraded as well to allow for the system to operate correctly at lower temperatures the whole process needs to be uncarefully from start to finish fail at any of those steps and you will get the answer to the question of why heat pumps don't work who knows you may even become famous when this guy does a video about your hit map installation hopefully it doesn't come to that

Channel: Urban Plumbers

Views: 366,340

Keywords: renewable energy, heat pump, heat pumps, heat geek, heat pumps explained, heat pump installation, heat pump installation uk, air source heat pump installation uk, air source heat pump noise, urban plumbers

Id: ZEJ0VUINV0s

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 08 2022