06-14-10, 11:30 AM | #1 |
Supreme EcoRenovator
Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Portland, OR
Posts: 4,004
Thanks: 303
Thanked 723 Times in 534 Posts
|
Lessons learned form Winter 2009-2010...
Seems to me that it would be a good idea to have a centralized place on Ecorenovator to post what we have learned from our actual efforts.
I'm a believer that we can learn from our successes and also from our failures. In fact our failures might be able to teach us more than our successes, because there will probably be more of them. As for myself, my efforts have been proceeding in two overall directions:
Energy Efficiency:
Energy Use Reduction:
Last edited by AC_Hacker; 06-14-10 at 12:57 PM.. Reason: including more info |
06-14-10, 09:45 PM | #2 |
Lex Parsimoniae
Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Woburn, MA
Posts: 4,918
Thanks: 114
Thanked 250 Times in 230 Posts
|
Good post.. I noticed you wrote mini-split about 10 times.
"I do wonder that if I had gotten a mini-split that was sized to heat the whole house, would it have been as comfortable when heating just one room? I don't know the answer..." I think your comfort level in rooms that are farther away from a centrally located mini-split, is going to depend on how tight those rooms are and the amount of air flow into those rooms. (from the main room). In our house, warm air flows into other rooms, mostly on the ceiling. Cold air comes from the cooler rooms, traveling along the floor. It's pretty easy to assist the cold air out of a room using a small fan, placed on the floor of the cold room, just inside the doorway. Cold air coming out on the floor, means the room is going to slowly warm up, from the ceiling down. I made sure that my attic installation was as good as I could make it, within reason. Low (8 foot) ceilings helps too.. Not so much over-head to heat.. Notice the old wood stove in the fireplace. Back in the old days, when that stove was used for heat a few times, it put out a LOT of heat and warmed right down the hall into the bed rooms. It has a wrap-around steel jacket with a blower in the back, and it really kicks out the BTUs.. So, I knew that a single source of warm air would work, about 30 years before I decided to try a mini-split.. The Sanyo is perfectly aligned. It can shoot right down the hall. We just adjust the Sanyo output a little high and point the vent down the hall, and those rooms warm up nicely. If it's 68 down the hall and we want it up to 70, we just turn the heat in the living room up to 72.(or 74 for a faster change). My guess is, if you had purchased enough BTUs in that mini-split, you would have a lot less motivation to complete the GSHP! I can't imagine a GSHP installed in my house that could draw much less wattage than the energy used by my Sanyo even by 30%.. (Unless it was a deluxe GSHP that has the same technology as my Sanyo). These things so effective and efficient, there is no way I would ever even think about digging up my backyard to install a GSHP.. And then of course there's all the big rocks buried in the back yard!! Cheers, Rich |
06-15-10, 03:20 AM | #3 | |
Supreme EcoRenovator
Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: Portland, OR
Posts: 4,004
Thanks: 303
Thanked 723 Times in 534 Posts
|
Quote:
Here's a chart from a study of 200 homes done at Fort Polk, when they switched from ASHP to GSHP. Full study can be found here. -AC_Hacker Last edited by AC_Hacker; 06-15-10 at 11:28 AM.. |
|
|
|