Quote:
Originally Posted by jeff5may
I'm interested! I have been watching on the forum for someone to attempt one of these, and up to now the only one who seems to have completed a project is ac hacker. He converted his unit to water on both sides, to run off his ground source loop. Xringer threw in the towel when he found a premade unit. Both have posted awesome efficiency numbers and general satisfaction with their results. So I am eager to see a hacked unit brought to a new life.
Now, a few questions.
What model or capacity is your dehumidifier? It seems that for DHW production, 6000 btu is all that is necessary.
What's your plan on frost control? These units are designed so that the evaporator will freeze up under room temperature PDQ. They then defrost, sucking more water out of the air while the ice melts. Good for drying the air, not so good for max heat output.
Good luck and godspeed!
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Thanks for the encouragement,
You have some good questions that I'm not sure of the answers at this point. As far as frost control goes, I'm just going to initially just wait and see what happens. The dehumidifier has the cooling HX and the heating HX. I'm going to loop the cold to the hot essentially doubling the area on the cold side hoping it won't get quiet as cold. I disconnected the fan last night to see if the hot side would reach a usable temp to heat water. During normal operation with the fan on it was only reaching about 90 deg. And the cold side was below freezing. After disconnecting the fan I saw temps in the 140's on the hot side and climbing and the cold side was in the 34-38 range. So between the doubling of the HX space and the temp range increasing I'm hoping that freezing wont be as big an issue. I currently have a GE Heat Pump water heater that works great. Ive never noticed it going into a defost cycle. It may do it, I'll pay more attention in the future. I probably should pull the cover off and see what it looks like under there. I didn't have a chance to play with anything today, I had a rifle match to lose. I'll start replumbing tubing tommorrow.
Hv23t