Quote:
Originally Posted by jeff5may
Unless you plan on heating with the unit also, a normal size heat pump unit would probably be too large in capacity. However, it would open up some heating options for you.
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It's only going to be used for dehumidification and possible cooling. As I wrote earlier, since it rarely becomes hotter than 80F, it's not a lot of cooling which is required. At the moment, these houses don't have any cooling at all, so removing the moisture and lowering the temperature just a few degrees could be sufficient.
As for heating ... with that system I am doing, there won't be need for any heating! However, since I have a seasonal heat storage, why not heat that up in the process of cooling the house down? To me, it makes a lot of sense if I can split the air into cold and dry into the house, and the hot "exhaust" into the seasonal heat storage, and get that heat back 6 months later (or as needed).
There will eventually be plenty of other heat available from a whole summer of about 300 square feet of Solarus hybrid PV-T solar panels (electric and thermal), with a peak thermal effect of around 15kW (yet to be confirmed). Maybe even more, as the power you can extract depends on how cold your buffer is, and stays, and I will have plenty of capacity, as I have written about before.
So a little hacked dehumidifier or freezer won't make too much of a difference in the big picture, yet it saves me from making an exhaust AND I get the heat later - so why not?