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Old 01-11-14, 06:17 PM   #1
BeerGrylls
Lurking Renovator
 
Join Date: Dec 2013
Location: Austria
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Default Inverter ASHP to WSHP conversion (on a boat), design&discussion

I will start by saying I got inspired by the home made heat pump manifesto, many thanks AC Hacker for the thread and for everyone posting very useful knowledge there. I will try to keep the information here pretty focused, the purpose of the thread is to find help/knowledge and ideas in regard to my necessary conversion.

Mission: convert a high! COP inverter driven ASHP (normal household, not marine) to a WSHP, on a boat, possibly providing water heating for showers or thermal storage too.

Why: I live on a boat, I have to heat it efficiently, I don't like open flames, noise, I don't have money for a MARINE high COP unit, I got the unit with a stupid high discount and lastly and most importantly the conversion itself needs to be done in order to remove the outside unit from my cockpit and put it in the engine compartment using water as a heat source.

Challenges: design (dimensioning HX, pumps, shower water heating circuit, electronics), sourcing parts (hard to find some parts in Europe) and manual labour (soldering).

Unit details: the heart of the unit is a DA110S1C-30FZ (R410A) compressor, it has an Electronic Expansion Valve (probably SanHua model). Unit was rated for 8000btu in heating, but on the inside and outside labels it says it goes up to 12500btu, compressor rating 160-1100w(2600-12500btuh). The COP is 5.56 in papers. The remote it came with seems pretty stupid, and the indoor unit does not have a digital display, just a bunch of leds. The unit was sold under the brand Midea, but there is absolutely no brand name anywhere on the physical unit, remote, indoor or outdoor.

The plan: swap the outdoor HX with a water to refrigerant HX, leave all (most) the electronics, sensors and controls intact. I also want to add a secondary HX for heating a water tank (but this is an optional goal=would be nice).

Immediate tasks: size the outdoor HX and source it (or the other way around), figure out the piping (adding pressure gauges&where&if), figure out the hot water tank size and location (suction vs discharge), figure out potential problems in the system. So here I would be grateful to get ideas, help dimensioning etc.

Statistics: unit pulls an average of 8kw or less/day, while heating the inside (28ft sailboat) to around 17-22 deg, outside temps around 0-8 deg Celsius. For 4 days I left the unit on 17deg, outside ran an average of 4-5 deg, pulled 22.79kw. Also, I suspect a small leak of refrigerant, not sure of it, suspicion is based on different outside unit behaviour sometimes, maybe just paranoid.

So far: I assume a 1ton HX will do fine outside, but read some papers saying enlarging the HX and running refrigerant at slower speeds inside it is better. I presume I should not go lower than 1 ton, but higher is ok ? I'm trying to source HX's but without luck here, a shell-tube HX would be nice, or making my own (blindly dimensioning it).



So, opinions, ideas, do's, don'ts, part sourcing ?
Cheers,
F

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ashp, heat pump, inverter, minisplit, wshp

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