Superlen, Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it!
I think double wall is going to hurt your heat transfer.
There is zero worry with the single walled pipe. 1/4" is some pretty tough stuff, and copper has been used to carry potable water for a very long time with no problems. It would be a pain to get anything bigger into the small size element hole.

Please let us know how your build goes!

Update!
No problems at all!
5299 hrs running = 221 days
475 kwh = 2.15 kwh per day = less than 25 cents a day!!!

I will be adding the txv soon I believe.

7632 hr = 318 days
Used 665 kwh of power. 2.1 kwh a day = 21 cents a day.
I haven't even check pressures since I built it.

Alrighty, finally found time to start work on the long awaited update to the already amazing water heater. First round of business, prove WHY this was "needed". :D:D:D
This update will do the following.
Dehumidify my indoor air.
Cool my indoor air.
Save energy because the ground at 30' deep right now is only 55F, while my indoor air is 76-78F.
And 4th produce water to "flush" my dogs homemade liter pan. Yes you read that right.

So onto the build. First step was finding the right size coil. I thought it a good idea to go BIG, as in HUGE. First reason because everyone who has built one of these monsters has their coil freeze up, and reason two being that I want to use as small a fan as possible to save energy.
I selected an amazing trane 2 ton coil. Yes 2 ton. :thumbup:

Then I needed a drip pan. I just used the bottom of the unit I stole the coil from.
http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1465872774
Next I used one of my large 110 cfm dc fans. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1
http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1465872826
Added a drain tube and cut the supports.
http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1465873013
http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1465873122
Then the brazing began! First was the half ton TXV.
http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1465873597
http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1465873183
Then everything gets bolted together (glued/mold free silicone)
http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1465873301
And lastly (for tonight) she get mounted to the wall.
http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1465873301

I will have ball valves on both loops in order to control which loop for which season. Hence the need for the TXV, cap tubes need extremely fine tuned charge, while a TXV is sightly more forgiving. I would rather a little wasted power vs flooding my compressor with liquid propane.

More to come soon!

Nice! What a radical change! You can't say the air-cooled evap is too small compared to the dx loop...

However, I suspect you will be running into the same situation other dude is with your super-sized evaporator. To get a low enough SST, the fan may need to go SSSLLLLOWWWW if you need it to dehumidify.

Thanks Jeff, yeah I thought about that. I can even cycle the fan on and off if I need to. But either way cold air will be made. I got the rest brazed this morning. And pulled a DWP vac, gonna fire her up when I get home.

Well I finished up today. I don't have much data to post yet. And since i can only take outside tank temp the data will not look the same. What i can say is with an outside bottom of tank temp of 95F I had 66psi suction and 230psi discharge with 13F superheat and 11F subcooling. Compressor pulling 3.32 amps. So I might be just a little overcharged, but I will see what happens as things get hotter. (I had to take a shower so everything cooled back down)
I'm getting TONS of water and now my laundry room is the coolest room in the house.
I'll post more data soon.

http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1465946865
http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1465946865
http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1465946865
http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1465946865

Info: This trane coil HOLDS water, so most of the water doesn't run off til AFTER the unit shuts off. I already have a timer to let it run doing the hottest time of the day (noon-7).
Question: Should I also have it run for 45 minutes and shut off for 15 minutes to aid in dehumification?

The water in the spines actually helps transfer heat better. Much research has been done on the subject of spiny pipe versus tubes and fins. Main ideas: spiny pipe costs the least to make, has slightly lower efficiency than tube and fin, and is harder to clean. Easy to flush, though. Dehumidification factor is the same. Parallel micro-channel and fin designs beat them both by a substantial margin, but cleaning and flushing them is much more difficult. Automakers have pretty much all switched to micro-channel condenser coils, so a contamination event pretty much necessitates a new condenser coil.

At 66PSIG, you are pretty close to freezing your coil. I try to keep mine above 60 during trials, as frozen things happen around 55. That's with propane. If you are running propylene, this happens around 70. Blend is somewhere in between.

Preliminary numbers look pretty darn good to me.

I can tell how much the water on the coils help. I only used 1.2kwh of power today heating my water 4F HOTTER than the dx coil that was using 2.1kwh.

Parallel micro-channel coils.............. hhhmmmm, you say these can handle the pressures of a phase changing monster? Because I have 4 nice size coils that are not be used YET. I guess I always though they were only for water/low pressure.

So I think leaving the fan going the entire time is the best way. I'll continue to let my dehumidifier do the most moisture sucking til the geothermal unit can run as less capacity for longer times to take care of it.

Some pics worth thousands of words:

http://hitchingsdesign.com/wp-conten...-Evap-Hero.jpg
Shiny new a-coil

http://www.quadratec.com/Assets/Imag.../147792-lg.jpg
Goes in a Jeep

http://www.docs.hvacpartners.com/idc...il_cross_2.jpg
Closeup

https://yorkcentraltechtalk.files.wo...struction2.jpg
Cutaway view

Don't forget to keep posting data on your rig. I'm certain that many subscribers are anxious to know how the thing operates with a TXV instead of a cap tube, both ways (DX loop and air coil) on the suction side. With the dinky fan and supersized air coil, how does this affect COP? What tangible effect does the air coil have on comfort level in the house? I could go on, but you get the idea.

Awesome pics. Thanks. So Now that I know what I have will work, I am going to build a dehumidifier for the house. I could use two of these bad boys for evap and condenser, OR I could go DX again and use it as a small geothermal unit and make it reversible. I'll start another thread. I got the HVAC bug again, after installing my first 3 ton 410a split unit at my grandparents in a record 5 hours. (Never installed one before).
http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1466273800

142 hours, 8.31kwh = 1.4kwh a day. about .7 kwh less than the DX loop. Plus the water is set 5 degrees warmer.

To kill Legionnaires or any other bacteria in water is very very simple .... just add some silver inside the tank, or if you want to go the extra mile make a small colloidal silver generator and put it on a timer ! IT WORKS and the water also gets a lot of therapeutic proprieties. You have to make a very small generator and put it on a timer because you need a small amount of this thing to kill any bacteria out there, This colloidal silver stuff is a thing you really have to research more about because you can use it for so much more than that. I make it at home for years by now even thou the purposes I m using it are a total waste...I just keep it in a old windows cleaning spray bottle and spray it all over the place to sterilize things :D also I m using it every summer to overcome sun burns... while my friends are buying expensive creams I just don t use anything but when I get at hotel after a shower I take the spray bottle I usually use for sterilizing the floor and spray it all over myself.... in like 3 seconds most of the tension in the skin its gone, the pain...which pain :cool: and I just repeat the process 2-3 times in 10 minutes interval....and none of my friends believe me even thou we go to seaside together for years by now and they never see me using sun cream :rolleyes:
Anyway, the main benefit of this substance is not to clean floors :D but to consume it daily and supercharge your body with a secondary immunity system, just do some research... the colloidal silver can be brought from the drug store, but its so expensive, you pay 20-30 USD for a 50-100ml bottle .... with that money you can buy pure silver wire and do enough colloidal silver out of it to last you a lifetime.

AQUAPONICS , wow I love that, can you show us some photos or videos with your aquaponics setup ,I researched for years about earthships and aquaponics and dream to build my own farm totally off grid and self sufficient. I m planning on using sun as main energy source but not using commercial solar panels instead more advanced stuff combined with vertical wind generator, anyway this is a very long topic on its own.

About heating greenhouses in the winter you might better consider building buried greenhouses were just the roof is exposed to the elements and you took advantage of the constant earth temperature.... this model was arrived here in Romania from China in small scale and works wonderfully for growing tomatoes at -20 C .... combined with a aquaponics system were you also heat the water with a solar heat exchanger if you want to raise tilapia and supplement the water heating with a heat pump :rolleyes:

In the race for efficiency we should first use the passive sources that cost just at the beginning when you do the design and construction of the greenhouse (example the buried greenhouses), after that use some extra solar power (adding solar water heater to add more heat exactly were we need it the most were are the fishes) and even thou we love them so much, we could use the heat pumps just for extreme needs so at the end our tomatoes don t have included in them some KW/h of electricity from the local coal powered electric plant :thumbup:
I mean it might fell strange in the plate for some .... joking

Here are the newest numbers. System been logging for 7198 hours, that is 2 hours shy of 300 days. In those 300 days the system has used 440 kwh of power.
So that is 1.5 kwh a day, at $.12 a kwh, that is $.18 a day for 120F water. We have not run out, system hasn't broken, and no signs of it breaking anytime soon.
300 days for hot water for $80.

Congratulations, guy - you deserve it!!

Just checked the meter, the hours had run out past 9999, so I looked back at the last date of when I finished the unit. The unit continued to measure kWh.
3 years or 1100 days. And 2000 kWh comes to $220 of power used. $220 ÷ 1100 days = .20 cents a day.

This is without me touching it in a couple years. I haven't even checked the pressures.

We will start building soon and I will no longer be logging info. Again I can't thank all of y'all enough for the help provided and wisdom shared over this project build.

Unit is still running! No issues as of yet.

Awesome to hear from you! So your rig has been running faithfully for 5 years now? At 20 cents a day instead of 50 or 60? With zero maintenance. Man, that's 700 bucks. WOW

Check it out..
Have you guys seen this website pertaining to DX
It contains videos showing how everything works in winter and summer.

I knew nothing about DX so I went searching around after reading your posts. Very interesting and thanks for sharing.