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Air Source Heat Pump for Heating Hot Water

asked Feb 20

jmoody's avatar

updated Feb 20

I've been reading through any available posts on the use of air source heat pump water heaters for heating hot water to coils. This is being pushed in the industry, and we are seeing more projects considering this as an option in lieu of non-condensing or condensing boilers.

From what I can tell there is no current way to do this in OpenStudio. Is this correct or does someone have an approach to approximate the performance?

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answered Feb 21

mattkoch's avatar

Not sure if you are familiar with OpenStudioApp, but in it, you can go the Thermal Zones tab, then create a thermal zone (or use an existing one, if your model already has such) and then from Library on the right-hand side drag a Heat Pump Water Heater from the Water Heater - Heat Pump drop-down into the Zone Equipment field of the thermal zone.

Then you can click on that and in Edit on the right-hand side you can adjust its parameters.

Further, in Edit on the right-hand side, there is a small tab near the top that looks like chain links, next to the tab that looks like a gear. In that "links" tab, you can checkbox a preexisting service hot water loop to link your new heat pump water heater to. That way you can make it available to a Water Use Connection. However your water heater will not show up in the service hot water loop as that heat pump water heater, but rather as the tank that was created automatically when you dragged your heat pump water heater to Zone Equipment.

From there onward it should all be standard water heating stuff to complete your model. Good luck.

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Sorry, I might have misread your post. I think you are after "heating hot water" rather than "domestic hot water". You might be able to use a Heat Pump - Water To Water - Heating from the Library and drag that onto the supply side of a plant loop. On the demand side of that plant loop, you you could place your heating hot water coils. Then you need another plant loop, where your heat pump then is on the demand side, and on the supply side of that loop you could place a cooling tower. You will need a pump in each plant loop, but in the cooling tower plant loop, it would have 0 kW or 0 ft.

mattkoch's avatar mattkoch  ( Feb 21 )

To get that heat pump to be on the demand side of the cooling tower loop, you will need to drag it from Model - not Library - on the right-hand side.

mattkoch's avatar mattkoch  ( Feb 21 )

I've seen this approach before but could not find it again so thank you. Anyone ever implement the CentralAirSourceHeatPump approach discussed here I have looked at it but not sure if the intent is to place the Plant Component User Defined on the loop and somehow use the ruby code to connect it via a measure.

jmoody's avatar jmoody  ( Feb 21 )

I found a HeatPumpAirToWaterFuelFiredHeating object in Opensudio SDK. It seems to mirror the HeatPump:AirToWater:FuelFired:Heating object in EnergyPlus. I suspect it can use fossil fuel as a backup. However, I think you'd have to inject it via the SDK - I doubt OpenStudioApp has it (yet).

mattkoch's avatar mattkoch  ( Feb 22 )

Could not make HeatPumpAirToWaterFuelFiredHeating work - uses fossil fuel only, not heat pump - looking at output variables, this is referred to as an absorption heat pump so I think the word "Absorption" should be in the class name to avoid confusion. However, HeatPumpPlantLoopEIRHeating appears to work as advertised - tested it on a one-space model just to see if the results may be plausible.

mattkoch's avatar mattkoch  ( Feb 23 )

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Asked: Feb 20

Seen: 57 times

Last updated: Feb 20