I had an interesting discussion about the cooling potential of our heat pump system – in a climate warmer than ours.

Recently I’ve shown data for the past heating season, including also passive cooling performance:

After the heating season, tank temperature is limited to 10°C as long as possible – the collector is bypassed in the brine circuit (‘switched off’). But with the beginning of May, the tank temperature starts to rise though as the tank is heated by the surrounding ground.

Daily cooling energy hardly exceeds 20kWh, so the average cooling power is always well below 1kW. This is much lower than the design peak cooling load – the power you would need to cool the rooms to 20°C at noon on a hot in summer day (rather ~10kW for our house.)

The blue spikes are single dots for a few days, and they make the curve look more impressive than it really is: We could use about 600kWh of cooling energy – compared to about 15.000kWh for space heating. (Note that I am from Europe – I use decimal commas and thousands dots :-))

There are three ways of ‘harvesting cold’ with this system:

(1) When water in the hygienic storage tank (for domestic hot water) is heated up in summer, the heat pump extracts heat from the underground tank.

Per summer month the heat pump needs about 170kWh of input ambient energy from the cold tank – for producing an output heating energy of about 7kWh per day – 0,3kW on average for two persons, just in line with ‘standards’. This means that nearly all the passive cooling energy we used was ‘produced’ by heating hot water.

You can see the effect on the cooling power available during a hot day here (from this article on passive cooling in the hot summer of 2015)

Blue arrows indicate hot water heating time slots – for half an hour a cooling power of about 4kW was available. But for keeping the room temperature at somewhat bearable levels, it was crucial to cool ‘low-tech style’ – by opening the windows during the night (Vent)

(2) If nights in late spring and early summer are still cool, the underground tank can be cooled via the collector during the night.

In the last season we gained about ~170kWh in total in that way – only as much as by one month of hot water heating. The effect also depends on control details: If you start cooling early in the season when you ‘actually do not really need it’ you can harvest more cold because of the higher temperature difference between tank and cold air.

(3) You keep the cold or ice you ‘create’ during the heating season.

The set point tank temperature for summer  is a trade-off between saving as much cooling energy as possible and keeping the Coefficient of Performance (COP) reasonably high also in summer – when the heat sink temperature is 50°C because the heat pump only heats hot tap water.

20°C is the maximum heat source temperature allowed by the heat pump vendor. The temperature difference between 20°C and the set point of 10°C translates to about 300kWh (only) for 25m³ of water. But cold is also transferred to ground and thus the effective store of cold is larger than the tank itself.

What are the options to increase this seasonal storage of cold?

• Turning the collector off earlier. To store as much ice as possible, the collector could even be turned off while still in space heating mode – as we did during the Ice Storage Challenge 2015.
  
• Active cooling: The store of passive cooling energy is limited – our large tank only contains about 2.000kWh even if frozen completely; If more cooling energy is required, there has to be a cooling backup. Some brine/water heat pumps[#] have a 4-way-valve built into the refrigeration cycle, and the roles of evaporator and condenser can be reversed: The room is cooled and the tank is heated up. In contrast to passive cooling the luke-warm tank and the surrounding ground are useful. The cooling COP would be fantastic because of the low temperature difference between source and sink – it might actually be so high that you need special hydraulic precautions to limit it.

The earlier / the more often the collector is turned off to create ice for passive cooling, the worse the heating COP will be. On the other hand, the more cold you save, the more economic is cooling later:

1. Because the active cooling COP (or EER[*]) will be higher and
2. Because the total cooling COP summed over both cooling phases will be higher as no electrical input energy is needed for passive cooling – only circulation pumps.
   

([*] The COP is the ratio of output heating energy and electrical energy, and the EER – energy efficiency ratio – is the ratio of output cooling energy and electrical energy. Using kWh as the unit for all energies and assuming condenser and evaporator are completely ‘symmetrical’, the EER or a heat pump used ‘in reverse’ is its heating COP minus 1.)

So there would be four distinct ways / phases of running the system in a season:

1. Standard heating using collector and tank. In a warmer climate, the tank might not even be frozen yet.
2. Making ice: At end of the heating season the collector might be turned off to build up ice for passive cooling. In case of an ’emergency’ / unexpected cold spell of weather, the collector could be turned on intermittently.
3. Passive cooling: After the end of the heating season, the underground tank cools the buffer tank (via its internal heat exchanger spirals that containing cool brine) which in turn cools the heating floor loops turned ‘cooling loops’.
4. When passive cooling power is not sufficient anymore, active cooling could be turned on. The bulk volume of the buffer tank is cooled now directly with the heat pump, and waste heat is deposited in the underground tank and ground. This will also boost the underground heat sink just right to serve as the heat source again in the upcoming heating season.

In both cooling phases the collector could be turned on in colder nights to cool the tank. This will work much better in the active cooling phase – when the tank is likely to be warmer than the air in the night. Actually, night-time cooling might be the main function the collector would have in a warmer climate.

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[#] That seems to be valid mainly/only for domestic brine-water heat pumps from North American or Chinese vendors; they offer the reversing valve as a common option. European vendors rather offer a so called Active Cooling box, which is a cabinet that can be nearly as big as the heat pump itself. It contains a bunch of valves and heat exchangers that allow for ‘externally’ swapping the connections of condenser and evaporator to heat sink and source respectively.