So in winter, when it is 32 degrees out, your heat pump can make heat from 55 degree water instead of 32 degree air, and in summer, when it is 90 degrees out, your heat pump can make coolness from 55 degree water instead of 90 degree air. Additionally if you get your water from underground, such as through a geothermal well loop, it is always 55 degrees. Ground or water source heat pumps work with water, and if you remember from school water is a much better conductor of heat than air, which is why an ice cube melts faster in cold running water than in a hot oven. This is hard to do and takes a lot of energy making air source heat pumps less efficient. So when its 90 degrees out and your air conditioning is on its trying to pull cold air out of that 90 degree heat, and in winter when it is 32 degrees out it is trying to pull heat out of that 32 degree air. Air source heat pumps work by pulling heat (or lack there of) from the surrounding air outside your home. There are two types of heat pumps we could use with this system, air source or ground (sometimes called water) source. This system could have many different zones throughout the home with independent thermostats and could even move hot air from one room to another without using much energy, making it very efficient. The heat pump (condenser would be a similar word) is what makes air (or refrigerant, or water) hot or cold, and the air handler is what blows it around. It was a ductless (meaning refrigerant was pumped around the house in little pipes, not big ducts), and split, which meant that the heat pump and the air handler were separated from each other. So I first really got into this Mitsuibishi system called City Multi. Also I intrinsically knew that if I had a HVAC system in the basement and it was trying to blow air up to the 4th floor we’d have a problem. For instance, I hated how you would have but one thermostat in a home and so some rooms would be hot and some cold (and usually it was my bedroom that was the wrong temperature). Many of the design choices I’ve made in his home come from my dissatisfaction with conditions in other homes where I have lived. I had done my own research on how to heat and cool this place and it seemed to me ductless minisplit systems would be the way to go. The finished plans weighed probably 30 or 40 pounds when printed. So, years ago, when we were designing this place it wasn’t simply a matter of drawing walls on paper, engineering must be done, structural, mechanical, electrical, it was all very complex. Also writing this post was a long process, I wrote it over a period of months. This has been a long process, when I say years ago, I really do mean years ago.
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