The Importance of Heat Pump Design

To achieve the best economical benefits from the installation of Heat Pump water heaters, the design is critical.   For domestic installations there is a little more flexibility because daily hot water volume requirements are considerably lower than those required in commercial or industrial applications, and therefore a more general approach can be made to selecting the most suitable domestic system.  However for the larger and more continuous daily volume requirements for commercial or industrial applications, a suitably designed Heat Pump water heater is critical in order to achieve the most economically suitable outcome.  The most important issue with the larger volume installations is firstly that the designed system must be able to – do the job that is expected of it and that is, to provide hot water at the fixture point at any time of the day and on any day of the year.  

To design and select the most suitable Heat Pump for each application, it is important to determine the overall daily hot water requirement as well as allowing for any peak load periods throughout each day.  There are a few of ways of determining the daily hot water requirements, and one is to use industry proven volumes for various fixtures or by monitoring water flows into any existing water heater with a suitable meter.  These methods, whilst generally being an acceptable way of determining daily hot water volumes they still require some assumptions to be made, which can introduce a certain level of inaccuracy.   However, the most accurate method of determining all of the criteria that would be needed to custom design the most economically suitable heat pump model(s) is to use a specifically designed computerized sensor driven monitoring system.  This type of device can automatically collect data as frequently as every sixty seconds which can then be translated into a graph showing actual water flow rates, overall daily hot water requirements, and any peak load requirements throughout each 24 hour day.   This indisputable "actual" data can then be used to design or select the most suitable Heat Pump for each project.   By doing this capital costs can be kept to a minimum without and fear of compromising the performance of the system and with minimum capital costs, comes very attractive Return on Investment (ROI) outcomes.   With all forms of energy prices continuing to increase Worldwide it is not unusual to see ROI's of 100% and higher for the capital equipment in the first year after the installation of a custom designed commercial or industrial Metran Heat Pump hot water system. 

Metran International Pty. Ltd. has the tools, equipment and capability of designing large volume hot water requirements using energy efficient Heat Pump technology.   We specialise in this type of service, and can also recommend and supply the Heat Pump products as well.     

By Mel Peatey.