Heat your showers for FREE

Earlier in this series of articles, I discussed using the waste heat in available on-site water-based sources to heat water. Essentially, you just add a water-to-water heat pump system that allows you to move a lot of heat to a useful function with the expenditure of just a little energy.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could do this sort of transfer of heat from a waste source to a useful function without requiring the addition of a compressorized system?

Well, in existing refrigeration systems, there already exists a source of heat that is usually of a temperature that can provide useful heating for a domestic hot water application without need for additional compressors: The compressor superheat.



In a refrigeration process, where cooling is the desired function of the compressorized system, this compressor superheat is essentially waste heat, and serves no useful purpose. It is simply thrown away to the environment through whatever heat rejection process the system employs. But this compressor superheat was put into the system by the energy used to run the compressor, and therefore was paid for once by the operator of the equipment. Instead of paying for it again in the operation of the heat rejection fan or cooling tower, why not instead use it for something, saving the heat rejection costs and reaping a real benefit?

It was this sort of thinking that prompted Florida Heat Pump to develop their HRP Heat Recovery Package (pdf). This is an add-on heat exchanger that transfers the compressor superheat directly into a domestic hot-water source--using double-walled heat exchangers to protect the potable system.



The heat from the desuperheater system provides supplemental heat to the domestic hot water system any time the compressor operates--in heating or in cooling. This can greatly reduce the amount of electric or gas heat required for water heating--even completely displacing this direct heating during many times of the year, depending on the building loads and use of the space.

(Note, however, that the compressor superheat is lost to the heat pump space heating process and therefore the space heating capacity of the heat pump will be reduced by the capacity of the desuperheater. As long as this is taken into account in the sizing of the heat pump, this presents no problem to operation.)

But water-source heat pumps represent only a small part of the compressorized systems that are exisiting or installed every year. It seems there is an opportunity for taking advantage of this same heat source on many other systems and on existing equipment, too.

That is where the Heat Harvester Heat Recovery System can be used to great effect. This heat recovery system is a stand-alone desuperheating device that is pre-designed for various compressor system capacities and is available for retrofit on existing or new systems.

How much heating potential is there? Well, Heat Harvester has provided an interesting analysis of the desuperheat capacities of compressorized systems:

Size of Air Conditioning System tons	Gallons of Hot Water per Hour	Gallons of Hot Water per Day
3	15-to-25	180-to-300
5	25-to-40	300-to-480
10	50-to-80	600-to-960
20	100-to-160	1200-to-1800
30	150-to-240	1800-to-2880

These systems can be economically installed into just about any compressorized systems using positive displacement compressors: Scroll and Screw air-cooled chillers, Rooftop packaged units, Condensing units, CRAC units, you name it. Since the Heat Harvester heat recovery system consists of a package with a heat exchanger and a pump, the installation basically involves a little refrigerant and water piping. And in a cooling-only application, all of the heat recovered would have otherwise been lost to the environment.

Greening Small Rooftop Packaged Units: Heat Recovery

This article on 'greening' rooftop packaged units is the third of the ‘Greening Small Packaged Units’ series and addresses the use of exhaust air heat recovery in these types of systems.

Heat recovery is a well-understood and accepted method of energy conservation. However, the energy saved comes at a cost. Generally, an air conditioning system that has heat recovery capabilities operates with higher pressure drops than a system without heat recovery, and there may be other parasitic loads that are required to run the heat recovery equipment.

Energy codes generally require heat recovery on systems that use a significant amount of outdoor air, since it is a reasonable assumption that on such systems, which have very large ventilation loads, the amount of energy saved will greatly outweigh the additional energy required to operate the heat recovery equipment. However, depending on the operating conditions, there usually are energy benefits for systems that operate with even very minimal outdoor air requirements.

For an owner or designer trying to decide whether heat recovery is right for a particular application, it is important to know what these benefits are in terms of energy cost reductions, payback or return on investment, and, more and more frequently, carbon emission reductions.

For rooftop packaged units, the heat recovery product of choice is the heat wheel. The industry has settled on this product for many reasons, including first cost, footprint, efficiency and layout considerations. Aaon uses the Airxchange wheel, which is an ARI 1060 certified heat recovery device.


As with their rooftop economizers, Aaon provides this efficiency option as an integrated, factory installed option. This greatly reduces on site labor, eases commissioning, and ensures the owner of the energy benefits of their investment.


(If field-installed RTU economizers have a high rate of failure, imagine how often field installed heat recovery wheels are a commissioning problem!)

To aid in the heat recovery analysis, Airxchange has provided a free software program (registration required) to calculate the energy and cost benefits of applying their heat wheels on air-handling systems. This makes it very easy for an engineer to do a bin-data analysis of the benefits of this option. Given a particular heat wheel and some basic information about the RTU it is serving, it will calculate the gross heat recovery for cooling and heating hours, as well as calculate the additional fan energy required to operate the wheel. It will also perform a simple economic analysis calculating a net dollar savings when using the heat wheel.

An analysis of a 16 ton Aaon RM unit (pdf) shows the net energy savings available using a wheel on this type of unit. In the above analysis, a 5,200 CFM supply air system is compared looking at conditions of 100% OA and 30% OA. In both cases the analysis (using Seattle bin data, a 5 day week and typical office hours of operation) shows net energy cost savings, about $500/year on the 30% OA case, and about $1,700/year on the 100% OA case. Almost all of those savings come from the heat required to offset the ventilation load during the winter—the cooling savings are small by comparison.

However, the effect of the wheel on cooling is important in one respect--the use of the heat wheel may allow the designer to reduce the cooling (and, of course, heating) capacity of the RTU. In this example, the wheel adds 1.4 tons and 84 MBH to the cooling and heating capacity of the 30% OA system, and 3.7 tons and 230 MBH to the 100% OA system.

These ‘free’ tons of capacity that you gain by using the heat wheel effectively allows your cooling system to operate at a higher actual IPLV than is calculated in the ARI rating of the unit. ARI has acknowledged this in the publication of ARI Guideline V (Calculating the Efficiency of Energy Recovery Ventilation and Its Effect on Efficiency and Sizing of Building HVAC Systems). This guideline basically defines an efficiency rating for the heat recovery system (RER) and a ‘combined efficiency’ rating (CEF) for the entire system, accounting for the EER of the RTU and the RER of the heat wheel. This CEF is calculated in the Airxchange software linked above


If the goal of a design is not just energy savings, but carbon emission reduction, the wheel’s advantage is obvious. Every btuh that is recovered from the exhaust air is less natural gas that would need to be burned in a gas burner (the most common form of heat for these units in this region). But there is one other powerful way in which wheels can leverage energy savings or reduce carbon emissions: they can be used to greatly increase the applicability of a heat pump cycle for heating operation. In an Aaon unit, the entering air into the refrigerant coil needs to be 45º F or higher for the heat pump system to provide any heat. In the example reviewed above (RM16) the mixed air at a design heating day in Seattle is pre-heated to nearly 50 º F for the 100% OA case—well above the minimum needed for HP operation! And although capacity drops off, an air-source Aaon heat pump will still operate at conditions as low as 17 º F ambient. Converting the system to a water-source HP greatly improves the heat capacity at even the coldest days—and by reducing the amount of heat required from the ground, the use of the heat wheel can help keep ground loop costs down, too!

Converting a system from gas heat to heat pump operation has a large energy and carbon reduction benefit. First, it transfers the heating energy source from a high embodied-carbon fuel to electricity, which in the Pacific Northwest is considered a nearly carbon-free energy source. And it provides an advantage over electricity because, even with heating COP’s on the order of 1.5*, it greatly reduces the amount of utility electricity required to do the same amount of heating.

*at extreme conditions—moderate conditions greatly improve this performance

Reducing Ground-Loop First Costs

Ground-Loop heat pump systems perhaps have the greatest potential for reducing energy use in the built environment than any other space-conditioning technology now in use. This potential has been long recognized by the EPA and the DOE, and represents a great opportunity for owners and designers attempting to create systems that out-perform those that are commonly built in this region.

They also have a reputation for being expensive--very expensive.

And with drilling costs in this region historically being quoted as high as $15/lineal foot, this reputation is well deserved. These prices usually put this technology out of the range of economic justification for typical projects.

So what can a designer do to minimize costs, yet still provide the energy benefits of this technology?

Add a cooling tower.

Hybrid Systems

To understand how adding a cooling tower to a ground loop saves costs, first you have to understand a simple concept about closed ground-loop systems. While the ground loop is often referred to as a "heat exchanger", the ground-loop (and the ground it occupies) acts more as a leaky heat storage battery. Unless there is sufficient ground-water movement through the well-field, most of the heat that is rejected into the ground remains there throughout the year unless it is later removed by the ground loop itself.

That means that over time, if the heat added is not balanced by heat removed, the ground temperature will continually increase over the seasons, increasing loop temperatures and decreasing system efficiency.

(graph showing increase in temperature over time for imbalanced loop of differing bore hole numbers. From here)

The best situation for a designer is when the heat added to the ground over the course of the year (by the process of cooling the building) is balanced by the amount of heat removed from the loop (by the process of heating the building). But a heat-pump does not just move heat from one source to another. Because a compressor is needed to perform this work, a heat pump always adds the heat of compression to the equation. This is a benefit in heating, since the heat of compression is added to the amount of heat moved from the loop to the building. This is a hindrance in cooling, since this compressor heat is added to the heat moved from the building to the loop. In practice, about 1.2 to 1.8 tons of heating are needed to balance out 1 ton of cooling. This means that many ground loops will see an imbalance where more heat is rejected to the loop than is removed from the loop over the course of a year. This effect can be significantly compounded (or mitigated) by the configuration and use of the building served--buildings with significant yearly cooling loads will be more affected than by buildings dominated by heating loads.

A ground-loop designer typically combats this effect by increasing the volume of the well field by increasing the number wells to a point where the relatively small amount of heat-leakage out of the well-field and added volume is enough to account for the imbalance of the system and minimize the heat gain. Thus ground loop well-fields are often sized due to the minimum requirements of either heating or cooling demand for the building. Cooling-dominated well-fields are more common throughout the US, especially in the southern portion of the country.

If the designer could correct for this imbalance and build the loop to the smaller size required by the heating load of the building, then fewer wells would be needed, and thus the overall cost of the loop would come down. One of the most cost-effective ways to provide extra cooling to balance out the loop on such a system is by way of a cooling tower or fluid cooler. When a cooling tower is used in conjunction with a ground loop, you have what is called a hybrid system.

Hybrid systems can be extremely effective at bringing down first costs of ground loop systems. A study by Kevin Rafferty of the Oregon Institute of Technology found that hybrid systems can reduce the cost of a ground loop by as much as half for some systems:


But can we expect similar reductions in first cost for the Puget Sound region, where we have a generally cool climate and a long heating season? For some systems, it appears the answer is yes. A presentation by Scott Hackel of the University of Wisconsin at the ASHRAE 2007 summer meeting investigated the cost savings possible using hybrid systems throughout the country. His study showed very significant reductions in ground heat exchanger (GHX) loop lengths for school, retail and office applications in the Seattle region:

(Click for larger image)

Hybrid loops may just make the next ground loop you consider pencil out.

Heating Your Showers with Your Cooling Tower

Most large buildings are throwing heat away for many hours of the year. In a large facility, this is most often accomplished by way of a cooling tower. Commonly, the cooling tower cools water from about 95º to around 85º. Many hundreds of thousands of btuh's from lighting, solar loads, equipment and any of the myriad heat load sources in these facilities are rejected to the atmosphere in this cooling process. Wouldn't it be nice if you could reclaim some of that heat and use it for a something that always requires heat input, like domestic water heating?

Sure, you could take the cooling tower water and run it through a heat exchanger to preheat the makeup water from the city utility before it enters your hot water heater, but that would only offset part of the heating load. The highest temperature you could reach would be on the order of 93º--any higher would require artificially allowing the condenser water to heat up, penalizing the efficiency of the chiller it serves.

It would be a lot more convenient if there were some way to use the heat in the condenser water loop to create higher temperature water--water that could be directly used to heat domestic water. And that is exactly why Colmac developed their HPW series of water-to-water heat pumps, specifically designed for domestic service.

These heat pumps include a circulating hot water pump and a double-wall heat exchanger as required for domestic service. They can directly heat the domestic water to temperatures of 140º or higher, using water as cold as 55º. This means that they can actually be used to pre-cool chilled water to reduce load on a chiller, as well as take waste heat out of a condenser line.

Florida Heat Pump also has a full line of water-to-water heat pumps for similar heat recovery jobs. These are a competitive alternative when domestic water service is not required, or where an external heat exchanger can be provided to meet domestic service requirements. These are also very flexible alternatives to traditional central plant chillers, with the ability to reverse cycle and provide hot water or cold, and come in convenient modular sizes for ease of installation and efficient capacity staging.

And there is no reason to stop at considering condenser water systems for sources of heat. Using water-to-water heat pumps, any source of flow that carries waste heat can be utilized to provide usable energy for your system. Why not pump heat out of your sewer lines? Luckily for the creative energy engineer, smells aren't transfered by the refrigeration cycle!