*ULTIMATE* Real World Test of 3 Heat Pump Water Heaters

hey there welcome to Ben's Eco Adventure today we're going to talk about heat pump water heaters in cold climates I've actually owned three different ones over the past few years and so now I have a real world test to share with you as to how well they work are you gonna have a cold shower let's find out [Music] all right so this video is going to go over a couple of things first of all I'm going to do some housekeeping then I'm going to give my rankings of which water heater I thought was the best and which I thought was the worst and whether or not I recommend any of them and finally I'm going to talk about some stuff that I think if you're getting your first heat pump water heater is important to know as far as getting your house ready to install one so the first maybe most obvious question you might have is why did I have three different heat pump water heaters in my house over the span of just a few years and that's a great question so the short answer is two of them unfortunately didn't work out for entirely different reasons which we will get into and the third one has worked out so that's good but I do want to make it clear this is not a paid video this is not a sponsored video I'm not being compensated to say anything good or bad about any of these units I just figured my experience might be valuable to you and I'm going to share it with you all right so let's go over some Basics about the setup in my house so I live in Ohio where we have a pretty varying climate it's pretty cold in the winter where January lows are around 20 degrees Fahrenheit and pretty warm in the Summer where July highs might be around 85 maybe sometimes 90. and it is humid in the summer not so much in the winter so in our house we have three people and each of us takes a shower bath in the evening so our evening demand is pretty high and not so much for the rest of the day the incoming cold water temperature and that's a key factor something you may want to check at your house to know what it is before you install one there our incoming cold water temperature here can get as low as about 45 degrees Fahrenheit so any water heater regardless of how it's powered has a big hill to climb in the winter to bring that water up to a comfortable temperature for you so the other important thing to know is I have set all the heat pump water here as I've owned to a setting of 140 degrees Fahrenheit now if you do that and you may decide that that that's good to do in your house it is really important that you install a thermostatic mixing valve somewhere in your plumbing after the water heater what that does is that brings that 140 degree water down to 120 degrees which is much safer if you just have 140 degree water going out directly to your sink or your shower that's extremely dangerous and not to coat at all and I do not recommend doing that so make sure you have your plumber and saw mixing valve they're not very expensive and they're relatively easy for any qualified person to install so some other things to know about the setup here I have all of the water heaters have been installed here in my unfinished basement the floor space here is about 400 square feet in the just the basement and the ceilings are about seven feet now why that's important is if your water heater is stuffed in a closet somewhere you're going to need to make sure that that is vented somewhere heat pump water heater stuff in a closet will not work it needs to have enough air to change with to get heat from in order to work properly so make sure you know that about your house the temperature down here also matters in the winter it's around 65 degrees Fahrenheit so that's pretty good if you have some place that gets pretty cold let's say below 50 degrees Fahrenheit any heat pump water heater is going to start to struggle a little bit to recover quickly at that temperature most of them will still work but not as well so it is nice to have it in a space that's relatively comfortable but it doesn't have to be comfortable for an average person necessarily so I think the last thing I want to say is before I had any heat pump water heater I actually had a regular conventional natural gas fired water heater it was a 40 gallon unit and it worked okay the reason I replaced it was just that it was getting quite old and would occasionally be finicky where the pilot light would go out so that's one nice thing with the heat pump water heater you never have to worry about pilot lights going out or venting or anything like that they are easier in that sense but the 40 gallon gas is kind of the Baseline of what my experience is what my expectations are as far as recovery and making sure we have enough hot water all right let's get into the results so starting from a very distant last place we have the Bradford White aerotherm Now understand I really wanted to like this unit this was actually the second unit that I bought replacing the first one that failed so I had high hopes that it would do well but unfortunately this one was by far the worst performer at least in my house so that's even more surprising given the fact that the unit I had was a 65 gallon unit which was larger than either of the other units that I've had so it should have had a leg up in that regard but unfortunately it didn't it has a few things going for it the build quality is very good it seems very well put together I like that it's made here in the Midwest by my neighbors and it seems like it should be good but unfortunately it was not so I'm not going to get too much into the weeds here about why I think this one performs so poorly in fact I made a companion video to this one kind of going in a deep dive of why this one wasn't working for me why I think there were some maybe problems with the design and if you want to watch that you can but suffice to say I don't recommend this unit if you live anywhere where it's cool or cold climate but it might work okay in warmer climate so the last thing I'll say about the Bradford White is I did have conversations with a company I had a technician come and check it out twice to make sure that everything was working that nothing was broken and they replaced the sensor for something but that really didn't make any difference in terms of how it performed so I will give some credit to the company here I just said I'm really not satisfied with this can I get my money back and they did applied to their credits so I do want to point that out at least they did at the end of the day stand behind their product but let's get on to the runner-up all right coming in second place is the AO Smith voltex now this unit goes by a lot of different names under a whole lot of Brands AO Smith owns many many brand names but they all appear to be pretty similar mine was a Kenmore branded unit which is no longer sold this was the first heat pump water heater I actually bought back in 2016. and I'd say overall it was okay but not amazing I think the biggest deficit it had was really just the fact that it was only a 50 gallon unit and that puts it at something of a disadvantage but I did make adjustments to temperature raising it up to 140 degrees and the performance was passable I'd say so the reason this ended up getting replaced was the compressor failed after about three and a half years and the refrigeration system is not serviceable by anybody professional or otherwise so the only way to fix it is to replace the entire unit which is a bit disappointing so I would say Sears Kenmore warranty support was not good I really had to hassle them and get my state attorney general involved in order for them to honor the warranty but if you're dealing with AO Smith I actually called them to try and just get some information even though I know that they weren't going to be the one to warranty it they wanted to help me out they wanted to process my claim and get me a new one and all that so if you buy from them it seems like they have very good customer service which is great um the biggest Advantage I'd see to this unit is availability I've seen this exact one at my local Big Box hardware store so if you need a water heater today this is one that you may actually be able to get it also has either one or two year labor warranty I'm not sure and a 10-year Parts warranty so I think it's important to note in spite of the fact that my particular unit failed I'd actually still recommend this unit I think you got to know that just because somebody has a problem somewhere that's not a statistically significant sample size eyes and given the fact that the only recourse was to replace the entire unit I am sure that AO Smith has figured out what went wrong and fix the issue because if they didn't they would go out of business very very quickly so I would say if you can buy a larger tank size you'll probably have a pretty good experience with this one but overall this one's okay I'd recommend it if you maybe have lighter usage as well it'll probably work fine but let's get into the winner coming in first place Head and Shoulders Above the Rest is the steeple Altron accelera this is the 220e it's a 58 gallon unit this unit is by far the best of the three it works very very well even during the winter months and there are a couple of things I think that they've done differently on this unit that really help it stand out so the number one thing that I love that they do is they let you change as the user something called the reload factor and that's maybe a little bit of a nebulous concept but basically what it means is the water temperature in the tank has to drop a certain amount before the heat pump will come on and bring it back up and you can change basically how aggressive that is does the water temperature drop a lot or a little bit I think the biggest problem I was having particularly with the Bradford White was that unit would let the water temperature get way too cold before it would kick on the heat pump and start recovering because all heat pumps recover slower than a Standard Electric they need to be a little bit more aggressive on when they kick on and because you can adjust this you can make it in the winter months be very aggressive so it comes on and starts heating things up and doesn't kind of fall behind and stay behind so you have a very consistent supply of hot water so that's great now there are a couple other design features that I really like about this the other thing is although it only has a 1800 watt element compared to the 4000 plus watt elements in some of the other units it actually still works well even when the water gets very cold even if you've had a huge amount of water usage and the reason that is is because instead of basing this off of a conventional Standard Electric Design This is a purpose-built heat pump water heater so they place the electric element right up at the top of the unit here right by where the water flows out and goes to your sinks and showers so that means when that kicks on it's given you good hot water very consistently even when the rest of the water in the tank might be pretty cold so really good design really love to see it and I think another thing you should know about this is if you look at the department of energy at the specifications the first hour rating is one of the things I do this unit doesn't actually appear to be all that impressive when it comes to first hour rating and that kind of stuff but I think that kind of goes to show you the tests aren't always relevant to the real world the tests are done under certain conditions and not the conditions that I'm experiencing in my house I have colder incoming water and our demand pattern is different and things like that so don't be afraid just because you see that rating is low I can speak from experience in the real world this does very very well even under high demand so that's all the good points about the accelera I'll talk about a couple caveats which may or may not matter to you depending on what your expectations are this unit has a standard 10-year Parts warranty however as of right now it does not come with any kind of in-home labor service warranty now given how good their customer service seems to be and I have talked to their customer service just to ask them some questions and kind of get a feel for how they interact with customers and I was impressed with with how they did I would say if you had a problem with this very early in its lifetime I would give those folks a call explain your situation and see maybe if they might actually cover the cost of any kind of Labor Service with that said from what I can tell these units are very very reliable you're not likely to have any kind of major issues with these but that is something to know another criticism I would have is although I like that you have so many settings in the menu you are probably going to have to read the manual to really understand what's going on with the controls and what all the different settings do they have little pictographs and things like that so it's not super intuitive to use without really reading through that manual so I highly recommend you do that and I'd say the last disadvantage is if you need a water heater today these are probably not in stock at any kind of local store to you they might be you can check but I had to order mine and I ordered it as over a year ago now during the supply chain Crunch and I had to wait probably good three four weeks before it actually showed up at my house so that's something if you have a water heater that's kind of on the brink and might fail soon now is the time to go ahead and order the best time to get a replacement water heater is when you don't actually need it because you never know what kind of delays or problems you might have in getting the one you actually want and I guess the last thing I'd say is as far as price goes uh this unit is the most expensive of the three although if you compare apples to apples and that is if you compare either this is a 58 gallon and I compare this more to the 65 gallon units from the other manufacturers it's pretty close it's maybe a couple hundred dollars more expensive but I really think it's worth it and you have to consider if this unit operates better as a heat pump compared to other ones which are using the electric elements more it may save you money in the long run to have a more efficient unit like this so that's something else to keep in mind final thoughts on heat pump water heaters in cold climates so as you saw from the video I highly recommend the stable Ultron I think it's an outstanding unit and it should do really well for you if you have a small household with a 58 gallon or a larger household with 80 gallon I also would recommend the AO Smith particularly again the larger tank sizes I think those should work well for you I don't know anything about Rheem heat pump water heaters if you have one of those please leave a comment below let me know your experience because I have no experience with that and I'd like to learn more in terms of getting your house ready for one of these if you don't already have one you'll need a couple things number one you're going to need a 240 volt electrical connection if you have an existing electric water heater if you're in great shape you probably don't need to do anything if you have a gas water heater you will need to run that line which could add some cost and time to your installation so that's something to consider the other thing to know is because this is a giant dehumidifier which is great in the summer and that keeps the basement very comfortable I don't have to run a separate dehumidifier anymore but that does mean that this creates condensation that needs to be drained away so you'll need to have piping that goes to either your sump or your floor drain to deal with that so you don't have that building up if you enjoyed this video I'd really appreciate it if you could give it a like it'll help other people find this Channel and consider subscribing thanks for watching thank you

Channel: Ben's Eco Adventure

Views: 63,234

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Id: bbjHF7YkMNA

Length: 18min 35sec (1115 seconds)

Published: Wed May 10 2023