Quote:
Originally Posted by jeff5may
AC...I think I'm beginning to get the bug you speak of... I'm getting ideas on how to improve upon this creation already.
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Yep, you got the bug alright. And as far as I can tell, it's incurable.
So, I sure do agree that bigger heat gathering area is better, but there is a sweet spot, after which incremental increases only give marginal improvements.
The commodity air conditioner (that's pretty much every one you have ever seen) is designed primarily for the profit of the company that makes them. They want the customers to be satisfied enough that they would be willing to buy another unit. You can improve on the design, but more knowledge and experimenting is ahead.
I probably said it before, but if you can use earth or water as your source for the heat pump to extract from, you'll see sizable improvements.
So, if you live near a lake, you have it made. If a creek is running next to your house, that cold water contains a lot of heat. If the earth where you live is drillable or trenchable, you have a wonderful source there.
The principle is that your evaporator coil is either direct with a liquid, or through a water/HX arrangement, is in indirect contact with the earth, down where the temperatures are warm while the cold winter winds are howling past your door.
Otherwise, as you are finding out, through most of the winter, an ASHP will work just fine, but somewhat less efficiently.
So, I don't know if there are any sizable towns near where you live, but you might check out mini-split heat pumps, just to see how they're built. I actually bought a small one to tide me over while I worked on my ground source unit. The small unit works very, very well. But I have noticed that the HX where the fan draws in air is really quite large, especially compared to a typical A/C unit. I would guess that that HX is easily 2x to 3x the size of an A/C evaporator. The mini-split uses rather thin HXs with either single rows of coils or double rows of coils at the most, but the height and width are quite large. The fan is quite large too, compared to an A/C.
There were mini-split A/Cs before there were mini-split heat pumps, so you might look into something like that. Acuario did a great write-up on converting those kind of units. He used them to heat his swimming pool, and later applied the same kind of hacked units to heat his house.
If you can lay your hands on a working R-22 mini-split A/C, grab it fast, for it will be prime hacking material.
The ones with 'inverter technology' are better, more efficient units, but the inverter bit and the complex electronics can be paralyzingly complex.
However, if you already have a multi-trace oscilloscope and a signal analyzer in your home and you already know how to use them, please ignore the previous paragraph.
If I can be of further help, please let me know.
Best,
-AC