Quote:
Originally Posted by mechanic
My house has two geothermal systems, a 6 ton for the 1800sq ft house plus basement and a 2 ton for a 600 sq ft workshop. There is a 300' header trench branching into 4 300' x 4' wide trenches 8-9' deep. The house has a 1.5" line which someone on here had said was a little shy. The garage follows the same trenches with a 3/4" line. My question is would the smaller line have enough capacity to also run a water to water heat pump to handle my hot water needs? Thinking about modifying a 2 ton geo pump I have access to and just plumbing in to the same lines/pump. My hot water is all electric now.
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If I'm reading you correctly, you have a trench system that already has two separate closed water loops in the trench. Is this correct?
And it sounds like you want to plumb an additional 2 Ton heat pump off of the smaller of the two water loops.
On first blush, dedicating a 2-Ton heat pump to handle hot water needs could be a great idea if you were running something like a commercial car wash, or a village laundromat, or had an over-sized tribe of teen-age girls living in your house.
The heat pump hot water heating projects so far at EcoRenovator, have been successfully run with compressor capacities in the range of 1/4-Ton to 1/3-Ton. To be clear these were being used for small to modest sized families. One of them had the advantage of drawing heat directly from warm, moist Mississippi earth, and another was an ASHP, which took advantage of heated house air, to supply the needs of an elderly couple.
There is a technique called de-super heater, which other EcoRenovators will surely detail in subsequent posts.
My intuition is that 2-Ton would be seriously over-sized, and could rob a significant amount of heat from your earth heat reservoir.
The fact that you live in Saskatchewan will have a huge impact on your system. If you tell us what town we can pull up some weather data that will assist both you and us in making better decisions.
Best,
-AC_Hacker