The only problem with using this in the winter is that the closer you get to -10f the less efficient it becomes. So it gets harder and harder to heat as it gets colder outside. until eventually It cant do it any longer no matter how much refrigerant you pump it can't effectively move heat. So this is only a complete solution in warm climates. In cold climates gas/wood heat is far better.
This reminds me of the time I went with my dad to a pawn shop where he was trying to hawk a window a/c unit. It was December or January. The pawn shop employee asked, "It's the middle of winter, what do you want me to do with that thing?" My dad, without missing a beat, replied, "Just turn that thing around in the window and you got yourself a heater!"
If you know how to welt/solder then you could replace some of the connections with electric valves and convert any air conditioner into one that also behaves as a heat pump. Just connect it so that the inside and outside coils are swapped connections.
@@DeltaSierra181 A heat pump unit is basically just an air conditioner with valves to allow the inside and outside coils to be swapped. The compressor and expansion valve are basically the same, though in most off the shelf units the valves are integrated into the compressor.
It is a scam that only works in a trashy empire of gross polluters who can afford to throw away AC compressors. Scientist, or quack scientist? Science seems like a religion for suckers.
I have been on the road full time in my camper van for over a year now. I have installed a very efficient window ac unit in one of my rear doors that runs off my power station which is charged by 720 watts of solar. It has worked great so far cooling my van. I always thought about turning the unit around backward for the winter but learned that the unit will not turn on if temperature is below like 55 degrees. If there was a work around for that, I would do it. My diesel heater does a very good job heating and it is cheap to run but even on the lowest setting the van gets too hot very quickly unless the temperature is below 35 degrees outside. I would use the reversed window unit until it got really cold out. I hope you do a video on how to run an ac unit backwards or to spoof mine into thinking it is warmer than it is so it will run turned around. I have enjoyed your channel for years and have learned a lot from you . Thank you.
If you take the front panel off most window AC units there's wire similar to the one in the video that is the temp sensor. You might be able to bend it around so it isn't on the cold side anymore it should keep running. That may lead to other issues though, so try at your own risk.
@@gunslinger2566 Good idea, but I do not have room for that near any of my opening windows. Plus my windows are the type that pop out from the bottom and only open about 4". Thanks.
*Been living off grid over 15 years, you can see so much on my channel.* HOWEVER - We have used the output of our multiple small window units ( solar powered ) to make almost all our hot water for 7+ months a year for free. Outbound temps on the AC units exceeds 140 degrees, exchanger recovery is 85% so we get 125 degree water put in storage all day, from it we get 115 to 120 degree water to the showers. My own design, not hard to do.
If you want to get really efficient, take apart some window air conditioners and convert them so that the exterior coil is submerged in water, then pump the water to a pond outside somewhere and have the water circulate. --oh, I see thats what you said you did, LOL
huh never thought of that. Places that are really hot year round really should have ac systems that are also the water heater. It would literally be free water heating from waste heat from something you need to have running all the time (like arizona or some parts of texas). Combine it with those instahot things and you would be set even if you didnt need to run ac at night.
I bought a heat pump a few years ago and I have no regrets. I went from using 3.5 full 285 gallon tanks of oil per year to 1.5. One thing to note is that the effectiveness and efficiency of the heating will be reduced the colder it gets outside, and you'll start having to deal with things like ice accumulation. You can pay a bit extra for a heat pump designed to work in colder climates, but I'm guessing window units will not work well in this scenario - maybe something worth testing. I always thought it was strange that window units don't come with a reverse feature built in. It seems like it would be relatively cheap while adding a significant amount of value.
So yes - couple of things you need for the ac unit to heat pump conversion - reversing valve as he mentioned, accumulator as the cycles heat/ac need differing amounts of refrigerant, extra metering device and check valves defrost sensor, defrost timer, you would need to separate the indoor and outdoor fans so you could de-energize the outdoor fan without de-energizing the indoor fan also means you’d need a relay with your timer, you’d need to put some supplemental heaters in during defrost nobody likes to feel cold air coming out of the vent, the indoor fan also would be bringing heat into the system, and the thermostat would need to be swapped - new controls, wiring would need to be modified quite a bit probably best handled by a control board.. but yeah
@devbella5223 There's no need to deenergize either fan since 1) most window ACs use one motor to drive a common shaft carrying both fans and 2) you still need a flow of air over both sides of the loop to move any heat for heating or cooling the interior.
With your intro, it reminds me why I watch your channel. Although I do understand heat pumps as used in residential settings, I generally pick up at least a few tidbits from you on ANY subject, no matter how familiar I am with said subject. Keep up the great work!
In reality: 99.9% already have heat pumps that heat dwellings in the developed world - they are called refrigerators. :) (heating effect is minimal of course).
Thank you for taking the time for that demonstration, I've been an A/C & Refrigeration technician for sometime now and first time I've seen anyone demonstrate this.
Most units of measure have better resolution in metric. I think it's interesting that temperature measurement has higher resolution in Fahrenheit. But it makes sense. Celsius goes from freezing water to boiling water in 100 units, but Fahrenheit takes 180 units to measure the same change.
The units (C or F) used to prove this experiment, is of no (or at least very little) importance. The change is what is important. Although I live in a metric country, I understand the decision to use F's. I must admit, I've seen many C-thermometers going into one decimal digit, but never (IIRC) into 2 decimal digits. LOVE this video.
Given a delta degree F is 1.8 a delta degree C, a Celsius probe with 0.5C resolution is effectively equivalent to F Most probe systems barely give you that level of accuracy anyway though.
Excellent video demonstrating how heat pumps work. Just for clarification to anyone confused by the AC unit in the door, hes installed it back to front, on purpose, so that the 'cool' side is dumping its 'coolness' into the hallway, and putting the hot side (that normally would go on the outside of your window) into the room, to heat the room. As you can see; the resistive heater and fan used 669 watt hours (aka 0.66Kwh) to heat the room by 10.4 degrees F The heatpump aka the AC unit, used 197.5 watt hours (aka 0.19Kwh) to heat the room by 16.2 degrees F
@@lassikinnunen At least in the Western/PNW US, they're rare outside of 208-250VAC In-Wall units. I see the 'use' for re-using a Window A/C. They often can be had 'off-season' used for very cheap (if you're willing to fully disassemble and clean.) or, can be had on sale at the edge of the hot season.
@@lassikinnunen Unfortunately, not so in North America. A couple of units have just come on the market this year, but are at a premium price, and of limited quantity. Low cost "mini-split" heat pumps have become fairly popular, but they are not simple window units.
@@TechIngredientsu know whst i'd reslly live to see guys... agrovoltaics (I'm prettt sure i've mentioned this before Maybe on that solar panels video u made/...) It just feels like there's so much untapped potential out there And u can spread awarness as to just how incredible it is The efficiency gains in both power from the cooling effect and the impact on certain crops is incredible (Yes yes that's not to say there aren't any issues... Like the cost of specialized inferstractures/mechinery is absolutly massive etc) Seriously It'd be nice to see some more awarness of the matter Everyone on the internet heard of such things as thorium Or the over 100% efficiency of heat pumps But no one's talking about such incredible simple things (with so much potential)
@@TechIngredients Where is the video that shows you how to get the most out of your AC unit? Also how do you use a AC a say in a 350 sq ft room to heat it not cool it? AC is in the window of the room.
Startling differences! Your description and explanation of "entropy" is probably the best I have ever seen. Appreciate you, your videos and projects are the most interesting and the most professionally done and I like the way you are able to bring it down to the level where laymen like myself can understand and grasp the concepts.
Some 30 years ago now, I had the bright idea of turning a window AC machine around to blow the cold air outside and the hot air inside. I was amazed how well that worked! Almost cut my electric bill by 1/4 if memory serves. And that was only using one small unit, I could have done more with multiple units. There are down sides of coarse, one of them being cold starts. If the room is already cold, you wont get the compressor to start unless you heat the thermal couple. Another is the fan noise, what used to be outside is now inside, so the whole machine is just noisier like this. Water, you have to do something with the condensation buildup. And there is nothing pretty looking about the setup, if that matters to any of you. But it definitely works well otherwise once you get it running. Cheers 🍻
@@ambulocetusnatans use a portable AC unit, you can set the unit on say a porch and just put the round duct in the window to blow the heat inside. All you'll have is noise from the heat blowing in and the AC is outside. Also they dehumidify themselves, so no drain lines.
Another problem is some of the window ac’s are toxic and can’t be vented into the house … I only know cuz I got in trouble as a teen doing the same thing as u 😂. Not sure which tech it is.. or if they still make them that way or not. Kinda reminds me of the people that use (I wanna say natural gas) ovens to heat their house and end up dying from the fumes.
"we could pretty much exchange the word entropy at any point with equilibrium" thank you for that explanation and application of entropy. It definitely helps me to understand entropy. Looking forward to the next video about improving AC efficiency.
Growing in a family of chemist dad, physicist mom, entomologist grandma and chemistry equipment glassblower granddad. Watching your videos feels being at home )
@@mrmadmaxalot Yeah, I remember frantically washing kitchen walls with my dad and sister after some experiments with metal sodium. Before mom comes home )
The problem here is he claimed an air conditioner made today is twice as energy efficient as an older one, say from the year 2k. I want to see experimental data proving they are twice as efficient. I don't believe this claim AT ALL.
I love the heat pump videos that you guys do, and also technology connections videos on them as well, alec and yourself always do an amazing job explaining things in very simple terms for everyone to understand how things work. Also. Im watching this in my car at the moment and that music is just GOLDEN for my sound system over at the intro, your audio is always fantastic. Thanks for the quality entertainment and knowledge. Its giving me ideas to make a custom cooling system for a server rack i plan on installing in my own home.
Man, I love these videos. A layman's approach to hard science. It's a mind blowing concept and I'm going to try it - but it's going to be a real drag in the winter, when I have to go outside and climb the ladder to turn it on and off :)
Of all the nonsense and educational videos I am recommended to watch, no channel excites me more than yours. Quite a few of your videos have given me ideas for clever solutions in a completely unrelated fields. I was a thermal engineer and now a battery process engineer, but the learnings I've acquired through your videos still heavily influence my decision making. I'm glad to be alive at this time in history where knowledge is so abundant and easily accessible. Thank you! I think you might be the most thorough and widely scientifically educated tinkerer I've ever come across. Your experiments are well thought out and the effort you put into materializing them is impressive for a RUclips channel.
Just bought one 3 days ago it's an inverter type. It's over 120° here. It works so much better than my old a.c. and it uses half the power, and now I don't need a separate heater for the winter. Grate video👍 its so hot down here. i can't wait for the next video 🫠
About ten years ago, I got a new Amana window unit, in a humid climate. The condenser (outdoor) coil dripped condensation into a tray, which came with a drain plug. My installer explained trapping some water in the pan would increase efficiency, as the fan would sling water onto the coil. In practice, the standing water became a mold farm. I've seen the same problem with "sonic / cool steam" humidifiers. In winter, if I didn't clean my filter religiously, the evaporator (indoor) coil would accumulate frost until it became a giant ice cube.
@blipblap614 This one had a double vent pipe. The exuast pipe is inside of the intake pipe, which I thought was weird. It is a portable unit. Normally, the exuast hose would get hot when using the a.c. on my old unit and required insulation to keep it from spreading unessery heat. The dual design eliminates that prolbem. I have checked the drain plugs, and both have no water, and I am running a swamp cooler aswell so it's super humid, and I am surprised that their has ben no condensation. I will keep a look out for it. I have only had my unit for 3 days. Thank you for the advice 🙂
Won’t work under 40 F degrees. Condensation is going on your floor? Heaters have defrost to keep them working under 40F. Your sensitive electronics will be on the outside getting rained on. Not great for it probably 🤨
@@BeefNEggs057 I rarely see below freezing here. Maybe one night a year will be 20F. The unit performed fine until the defrost cycle couldn't pull enough air over the coil due to a clogged filter. The outside portion of a window unit is just a fan and a coil, housed in a sheet metal box, insulated with styrofoam.
This is really cool. I've always had the impression that A/C units were super inefficient but that seems to have more to do with their application than the work actually being done.
These descriptions of physical phenomena are so good I listen to them all the way through, even though I have the background and already understand them.
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Good job! Here in Europe, we use heat pump (AC) heating quite extensively. Regarding the next video - I hope it won't be just applicable to integral "window" type AC units you have in the US but to "split" type units too - commonly found across the world, indoor and outdoor units are mounted separately and are connected by lines carrying refrigerants and electric power/signals. Of course, you have split systems in the US too but the window units are much more common in households, as far as I understand. I'd also like it if you touch upon the efficiency figures used for heating and cooling, as those are different and often misunderstood or completely ignored by consumers. Cheers!
Split-system central air conditioning very common in US homes built in the past few decades. 95% of the time this is a split system. The compressor and condenser coil sits outside and the evaporator coil sits on top of the furnace (or in a dedicated air-handler) which distributes cold air via ducts. I believe what you are used to is what we call "mini-splits" which is much less common but has become more popular in the past 15 years.
Outstanding. I am an HVAC specialist. Lovin this video series, But then again I have loved all the videos coming from this channel. Now I will say if you dont understand I know its hard for a guy as smart as this to transfer the meanings in to lamens terms, I have various ways to explain this talking to customers that know NOTHING. I think it was a great job of breaking it down and excited to see the next video,Always Outstanding work !!
Agreed - the entropy explanation was perhaps a bit overdone and hard to understand for many - easier to tell people that one doesn't make cold, one removes heat or moves it from one place to another and flow can be reversed similarly to a bath manual faucet / shower head valve AND that even while there the air seems cold, there is still some heat present. The efficiency point is reasonably demoed though the information could be improved in other ways.
Awesome demonstration. Keep in mind this is close to an ideal condition for a heat pump. They lose efficiency as the temperature difference between the hot and cold side increases. To impress skeptics, would be cool to do a demonstration in worst possible conditions.
@@tullgutten pretty impressive. I guess main consideration is if you have poor insulation in a very cold climate you need a hell of a lot of electricity to heat a large volume. Heat pumps are more constrained in where they can be placed. You can stay warm with a small radiant heater by your bedside. For a modern build, no doubt a heat pump is the way to go.
@@tullguttenhow and where are you running a heat pump that cold?!? Northern Canada? Assuming a 410A system and a 16C indoor temp you're looking at a lift ratio of over 7! That's an extreme compressor unless you're running a cascade system!!!!
Someone protect this guy. When you start talking about saving that much money you are also talking about stopping someone or people from making that money and they aren't going to be happy!
Good explanation. I have been upgrading air conditioners into heat pumps for years. Window units are too small but central systems can be upgraded by a skilled technician. They don't tell you that because they want to throw away the air conditioner and sell you a heat pump.
This is incredible, I live in an older house, circa 1905, with no duct work and 5 units I put in the windows every summer. With this, I can use them year around and cut my heating bill while doing it. I've had issues with tripping circuit breakers because the wiring was set for minimum usage in bedrooms. I can power 5 ac units to heat with the power of 2 resistive units with energy to spare, this is crazy!
Efficiency drops for heating when the outside temperature gets lower. Still makes sense in some climates, but not sure you will get far with window units vs. a ductless heat pump. If you are rural, consider ground sourced for good efficiency year round.
@REPEAT63 Are you going outside several times per day to adjust each window unit? The controls are now outside... ....in the weather. I don't think you have thought your plan thru.
Simple fixes, you can put it on high and attach the plug to a thermostatic control unit, plug into a thermostat that turns on and off based on the temp in the room. It works automatically.
as others have stated - they make Mini-splits that have the heat pump built in to reverse the expansion valves. This was a proof of concept for how heat pumps work, not a 'do this at home'. When your AC reads the thermal temperature outside as being cold, it will stop running When it gets colder outside, the unit becomes far less efficient The controls are on the outside The fans are WAY louder on that side Water will be dripping on your floor
Talking about fridge. For the best result the hot side coils should be out side wall (like most commercial system have) - I am thinking to cut the pipes and go thru external wall (presumably fridge is on the same wall to minimised the distance). In winer time you will have fridge cool almost for free. In summer it will not matter it you heating you house or need expel the heat from fridge out side, you always go up heel, but you will reduce heat load in your house.
@@miroslawkaras7710 just remember to shade coils fom direct sunlight, cause that can increase temperature enough to pop out high pressure presostat in a compressor
Dehumidifier has coils on same side, you need to have the cold side outside and hot inside. A fridge similiarly has to have the back coil inside with the rest outside, which is hard to do. a window A/C unit is optimal if you don't have a mini split.
@@miroslawkaras7710 It might not work too well. From what i read about freezers the refrigerant has a temperature span, below that it might not be able to transport heat from the inside properly. You need to look up climate classes before doing something like this, some freezers are designed for an ambient temp of 18°C, and the lowest i've seen is 10°C. Plus you need to figure out how to keep, or at least replace the refrigerant if you cut the pipes.
I dont know what they're gonna say in the next one but misters can be used to cool the hot coils of an AC unit to greatly increase it's efficiency when it becomes heat soaked.
@@MindCrime550 I'm thinking that, too. I've got a circa 1980s portable A/C unit (Toshiba Cool Mini) that uses a water spray kicked up by a fan in order to help cool the condenser. It does a pretty good job for such a small machine. Initially I did think it was just a swamp cooler type, what with needing water and everything, but nope, it's definitely got a little compressor, evaporator and condenser in there which look to have been repurposed from their line of dehumidifiers.
@@GLZEPHEAD69 in mobile devices you have to account for weight and energy density (specific energy). Gas has a much higher energy density (specific energy) than any battery. You will be able to heat ~50 times longer with 10kg of gas, than a 10kg battery.
@faustinpippin9208 in the winter they're cold af. In the summer they're hot af. There's no insulation and it's 30yrs old. I'm using window air conditioners because the roof one doesn't work any more and in the winter the furnace uses a 20lb tank of propane every 3-4 days costing me a fortune
Great video! This will help to convince the accountants in charge that replacing air conditioners with electric heaters by installing new heat pumps is not a waste of money, but actually going to save them a lot on the electric bill! Thanks for the easy demonstration. However maybe they will want me to install the air conditioner backwards instead to use the old AC as a heat pump. When I worked at a retirement center built in 2000, they had old PTAC units in many of the rooms (about 105 of them) and I wanted to buy new R-410 units, they worked better in the heat pump mode down to 35F, not the 40F cut off that the older units had. For those who do not know, a window or PTAC heat pump changes over to it's electric heater at about 35F, so no ice can build up on the outdoor coil, they do not have a defrost system, and the outdoor fan blade can get blocked and not spin if there is to much ice on it. I live near Portland Oregon, and there are many 40F days that actually don't reach 35F, so the heat pumps might run 30% more in the heat pump mode with the newer units. Also the R-410 collects heat much better than a R-22 unit. I like the clever way you show this happening. It makes it easy for even a accountant to understand.
One thing to be mindful of: If you wish to use this A/C-setup in order to heat a room during winter, you need to make sure that the heat battery (the radiator you see on the back) doesn't drop below 12-13 degrees C. If it freezes, it will break. So forget about putting it outside in freezing temperatures, and make sure the room that has cold air being blown into it never drops below that temperature limit.
commercial units have already defrosting built in for this, but it sucks because if it is really cold outside, the defrosting can take up to 30 minutes, the time where no hot air will blow inside.
@@D4no00 That is not the reason for defrosting - it is to remove external ice buildup, not to stop the refrigerant from freezing. The refrigerant is obviously not water ...
I watched this and immediately thought this would work great to some energy efficient heating into a small 10x10 grow house during the winter. I'm curious how you would determine at which temperatures it makes sense to do this. From my understanding a heat pump is still good down to nearly 0 degrees Celsius. Is it dependent on the refrigerant type? What would be the issue here and how could one get around it?
@@marshallgoatIT will still be more efficient than a resistive heater well below 0°C. But I suppose a kilo watt meter would easily show when the efficiency craps out. Here in Denmark we have single split units that guarantee efficiency to. -20°C and will still generate heat down past that.
I have also experienced that many people find it difficult to fathom that a certain amount of energy for a heat pump can make a room much warmer than with the same amount of conventional heating. It seems like a violation of the law of conservation of energy. Then I like to use the following simple analogy: A room is cold, but instead of heating that room with a heater, I drive a tank of hot water in from outside, and that heats up the room. Takes little energy, because I don't generate it, I move/pump it to the room. And if I want to cool the room, I wheel the hot tank outside. That's what an air conditioner / heat pump does: Move heat from one place to another. btw: Most modern "airco's" are bidirectional nowadays, so in fact air-to-air heatpumps.
I wish there were a requirement that all air conditioning systems sold be bidirectional heat pumps. The actual cost of turning an air conditioner into a heat pump is quite small. In North America where the normal climate extremes are in the sweet spot for heat pump efficiency, the annual energy savings would be significant. And the efficiencies of mass production would bring the cost down even further. There would be a slight reliability hit.. but well worth it overall. In the 1970's Honeywell did a demonstration project of a solar powered heat pump system, where the energy necessary to run the "machine" was gathered using glycol filled solar panels, and storing the heat in an insulated glycol tank for nighttime use. The two different heat pumps were tested. One was a piston type refrigeration machine powered by a turbine. The working fluid powering the turbine was Freon. Not only did the unit provide cooling, but an AC generator driven by the same Freon turbine provided power for lights, pumps, controls, and fans! The second machine demonstrated the use of an Arkla type chemical heat pump, where the heat source driving the chemical reaction was the glycol heat storage system. In Florida, in the summer time, we often had to leave the doors open "wasting" cool air, because we generated so much surplus heat that the glycol solution would BOIL inside the solar panels. The panels were about 40' x 20', and the system load was a pair of tractor trailers, parked side by side. The panels were mounted on the top and side of the "southern most" trailer, and were hydraulically tilted to match the average solar angle.. (no active tracking was used .) The first trailer held all the equipment and heat storage facility, and a small monitoring/control area. The second trailer held lighted poster board displays describing the system and seating for meetings/classes... And was the "system load".
Company near me sells well connect heat pumps. They extract what you need from the water you use. The energy density of the water and the volume make it viable.
Been running heat pump since 1991. Good video.I would recommend you talk to an electrician about powering a space heater with a 15 foot 16 gauge cord. You even noticed it was warm when you unplugged it. Best wishes.
Heat pumps are the ONLY way to go these days. My current home has a multi-zone ductless mini-split heatpump system. Each room has its own head unit with two main heatpumps outside (mitsubishi hyperheat). The system works down to -12F and keeps up pretty well even at those temps. It's SO efficient you wouldn't believe it. Plus being able to independently control the temperature of each individual room is simply amazing. Of course forced air heat pumps are still great, but the efficiency of these ductless systems are even better. Also have a heat-pump water heater which is great.
They do math shenanigans Lets do more than one hundred percent efficiency. You can always make things less ifficient, and if thats you definition of efficiency
@@bobsterclause342 No it's PHYSICS not math shenanigans. When you're moving energy instead of making it, it isn't hard to be more then one hundred percent efficient.
No they are not. Once it gets too cold a heat pump will fail. My house has one on it. Once the temperature outside gets too low it can no longer heat the house and I have to rely on resistance heating to bring the house to comfortable temperatures. Heat pumps work on the principle of "exchange". The "coolant" being use has limits and depending on it's performance along with the design of the system operating with it. This experiment is working between two environments with similar temperatures. This will greatly show the efficiency differences... but when two very different environments are experimented with... the limitations quickly being to show. If the cold side cannot get "colder" than the environment it is in... it will cease to perform at all. This is the same as the hot side when it cannot get "hotter" than the environment it is in. This is why your house AC works harder when the temps are in triple digits. Yes... it is very efficient... at first.... but the greater the disparity in environments... the less efficient it becomes. NONE of this is recent news.
@@CD-vb9fi There are winter heat pump setups but you have to bury long pipes throughout your yard and run coolant through them, extracting heat from the ground below the freezing depth.
I just got into solar and have a 3kw Setup, I keep reading comments in DIY solar forum.. about Heat pumps. This explains a ton. My interest is definitely peaked now. Thanks so much for your videos I thoroughly enjoy your classes in hands on education.
Have to say something about increasing A/Cs effectiveness. I have an aggregate from a mobile A/C. As an A/C it was very ineffective because it throws air out of the room and some new air goes from outside. I disassembled it, took out the refrigeration unit and bent the condenser radiator down to a horizontal position. Then I put it all in the bath and filled it with cool water so that it just covered the condenser, and the evaporator was above and blown by a fan. This is how I cooled my apartment. The heat went into the water, the cold air into the room. I noticed that the compressor itself heats up quite significantly. Although its lower part was also in the water, it was tall, and there was no good heat transfer. I started pouring water directly onto the side of the compressor, and that’s when I noticed that the efficiency of cold production had increased greatly, because before my eyes, the evaporator became covered with frost, and then with ice. I can't say why is that so. It seems at first glance that the condenser must be the main point that you should cool down.
Cool! There are mobile ACs now that do that, it works but has a limited capacity. You could also have used a second pipe to suck in air from outside by covering the compressor air inlets of the AC with a box and connecting the second pipe to it. This way there is no underpressure in the room and works way better. Thats how i did it. There are some videos on youtube about it. (I guess in english too)
@@sompka1 It may surprise you to learn that some industrial processes use municipal potable water as their cooling supply since the few dollars per cubic meter of water (250 gallons) at 15c coming from underground could sink way more energy from their process than the equivalent energy to run a chiller.
The comparison being made between resistive heating and a heat pump is reasonable from a tech stand point, but for a lot of people the real comparison is gas (ng/lpg) or wood vs heat pump and the economics heat per dollar.
Yes, also they say "resistive heat is 100% efficient" but they don't consider the losses in generation and transport. Burning the resource on-site would be much more efficient.
@@jeremiahbullfrog9288 Electrical infrastructure is mostly made of aluminum to save costs and because aluminum has a higher tensile strength than copper while also resisting corrosion better. So there is actual substantial line loss up to 25% on average. Most high voltage transmission line isn't insulated too. So you could use a coil or any conductor to receive the induced electric field. The first thing to reduce is energy consumption not efficiency. Solid state thermal mass is the best energy regulator. It's all about receiving and directing solar radiation where you want it. Then utilize natural convection and effects like the plenum effect to circulate air. So there is no net energy input or output to gauge efficiency. This would reduce the energy consumption by up to 60% for heating and cooling. Passive solar design and thermal mass. If our houses were cars they would be blocks with aerodynamic surfaces facing in the wrong direction, really bad radiator design where the radiator is in a dead air space, wheels that barely spin, and they would be too heavy for the engines we are trying to use. So people are focusing on the engine to make it more efficient when they should be focused on redesigning the whole car or in this case the house. Also taking into account the energy used in the material for construction and the material life cycle. Hint, stone is still the best building material.
The comparison is made between resistive and heat pumps because this is the best case scenario. If you consider resistive heaters as 100% percent "efficient" then heat pumps are easily 300% efficient. Lastly using propane or other hydrocarbon based fuels you should expect less than 50% "efficiency" this is because a lot of heat is lost to the outside from having to exhaust the carbon monoxide and such. You also loose energy in the unburned smoke and tar escape with the exhaust. A lot of the energy lost in the exhaust can be recovered via more elaborate burners such as "rocket stoves" but you still wont reach the efficiency of the power plant burning the fuel for you and transporting the energy to you. Which is incidentally why resistive heating is used as the standard. Of course, the cost of electricity vs raw fuels varies drastically around the world. That is a economical and politically charged issue and not with in the scope of this video. Ultimately, the most efficient way to heat or cool oneself is to heat and cool oneself. There are lots of jackets and pants with resistive heaters built in to only warm up your self and not your house but that is not as comfortable as walking around in shorts and a t shirt in your home no matter the season.
@@jeremiahbullfrog9288 i mean the 400ish watts can much more easily fit into solar system , i'd be more concerned when the outdoor air is too cold to really pull useful heat from it . Theoretically possible by just turning the window air conditioner around each season. What sort of heat would you use , the resistive heater or potentially gas/wood/oil/electric furnace as supplemental?
@@jeremiahbullfrog9288 There is plenty of loss in collection and transport of gas as well, it would be difficult to compare the two losses since gas companies aren't going to be keen on publishing these figures.
I never understood the appeal of moving closer to the flaming ball of gas in the sky particular when we are wrapped up in a decimal point of temperature increase over a century here, further away from the flaming ball of gas.
First time I ever came across you. But you're smart and trying to save me money, so I love you. I'm subscribed. I will comment, and I will like, thank you.
I’ve been using my small 7cf chest freezer filled with about 16g of water along with a 12v small transfer pump to flow the cold water from the freezer to a PC heat exchanger in another room that’s 120sf. I have a cutoff switch to keep the freezer water no colder than 35f. I can run it for a week straight in near 100f ambient and keep the room about 5 degrees F colder than the rest of the house with a 100mm heat exchanger using about 140 watts. The water in the freeze equalizes at about 44f when running constantly. I use 2 noctura pc fans in series to blow the air through the exchanger. Doing the math though, compared to a traditional window ac it used the same power over time since one runs intermittently and the other is constant. The upside is one is near silent and still works if the power is out for a few hours if the pump runs on a small pocket sized battery bank. I have had questioned asked as to why I don’t use an antifreeze and run it colder. The reason is because the heat exchanger would frost over and eventually the circulating water would equalize back to the same 44f anyway. I feel the room environment is much better regulated than an intermittent ac system. The principle is the same as a mini split which is what many heat pumps are used in these days. I think another benefit of the low wattage use is it can be more easily ran off a wider range of generators and battery units with lower starting/total amps.
I do something very similar. A small fan+radiator from a PC,some vinyl tubing,wire,and a small 12Volt pump. I use the bathtub (or kitchen sink) filled with cold water from the tap (maybe 40-50 degrees F). It's not much extra cooling,but it does help,and only uses about 15W of electricity (It could easily be solar/battery powered). Once the reservoir of water is warmed,I just drain it and refill it with more cold water. It's enough to get a nice cool breeze in the room on warm days,but when it's really hot out,I need the big A/C. (It also works as some extra heat in winter,if you have a source of warm/hot water.)
“The fan itself generates some heat” thank you for considering that. I get so frustrated with people that think fans cool a room, when the reality is the opposite.
fans dont cool a room they cool you. they do this be creating air current that increases evaporation. the outcome is a cooler room from the perspective of the human experience.
@@jjg1501 absolutely. And that’s a huge difference, for example when people leave fans on while they’re out so that the room is cool when they get home. It’ll be warmer, although probably imperceptibly, but definitely not cooler.
@@thedave1771 ive never heard of anyone doing that. i leave my ceiling fan on when i leave simply because im to lazy to turn it off. it does not make my house hotter considering i dont have air conditioning at all. 1 degree means little when your house is 88 degrees, lol
Thank you both so much for explaining this principles !!! Have a 820% warmth in my house compared with resistance heat!! Amazing good working system, If the airco’s are able to “ run “ both ways, the home can be heated for about 1/5 of the watthours used by resistor based heating. The efficiency of heatpumps drops when the difference in ambient temperature versus outside. Sometimes it is only 300% But with prices for fuel / gas etc. You can spare a lot of money. Certainly when solar energy is used, and heat is produced when a cold sunny day warms your house for free!!!
You do get a small gain, but the amount of engineering you have to do to insulate the input and output sides, while ensuring enough heat flow through the active faces isn't really worth it.
Yeah, relatively marginal gains because their COP *rapidly* deteriorates with increasing DeltaT. As an academically interesting point, their COP is outrageously good when the DeltaT is miniscule, but there's practically no real world applications for such a scenario.
tecs are really inefficient compared to compressor based cooling, especially at higher temperature differentials. I couldn't find any hard numbers on a quick search but the rule of thumb seems to be a phase change system is about 3x more efficient than a tec. So compared to resistive heating it should fall somewhere in the middle. A resistive heater moves no heat and "creates" a lot, a tec moves a little heat and creates a medium amount (net still more than resistive), and a phase change system moves a huge amount of heat and creates a little (net massively more than resistive).
In Germany we have some laws now that keep us from heating our houses, using cheap gas from Russia or cheap nuclear electricity but obligues us to use heat pumps. In Bavaria we get down to minus 16 celsius or zero Fahrenheit so the external unit is covered up in ice while the hot air concentrates under the ceiling making the people sick. I installed some vertical tubes with fans but that is very noisy.
I tried the vertical pipes with fans and didn't get a good result. But what worked is a regular ceiling fan running very slowly. The modern fans that have stepper motors aren't good for such application, so use the old-style AC motor fan which can be controlled with a step-down transformer.
Wait what, North America, one of the biggest western markets for residential ACs does not use reversible ACs (yet)? We've been installing reversible air-air heat pumps for ages in continental europe and asia. Central Europe now modernizes and moves to ground to water and air to water heat pumps. Well guess that's what happens when cheap, polluting, war subsidized coal, gas and oil is available.
@Jameson1776 US most definitely does use heat pumps almost everywhere. However, furnaces are still common in very cold areas (northeast and great lakes region) where the outside temperatures are too cold for the cold side refrigerant to expel heat to the environment. I was hoping he'd address that. I believe from watching his previous videos that he's in New Hampshire (at least New England), which is an area where furnaces are still common. Also, this is pretty hilarious considering the US is paying the majority of the cost for a war to keep natural gas flowing to central europe.
@@clayton97330 I live in the midwest of the USA and it gets below 0F° and above 100F° most years so it doesn’t quite apply to me. As far as paying for a foreign conflict the U.S. will do as it always has and look out for its own interests.
@@Jameson1776 For harsh winters and all the time your power grid goes down in mild winds... sure keep your furnace. But can't fathom not using a HeatpumpAC the rest of the year, ie spring, fall, and mild winters. Good heatpumps achieve a COP of ~2.5ish down to 10F
The only thing that matters to a consumer is heat per dollar and natural gas heating if avalable is the most economical. At current prices of natural gas and electricity in my area in Ontario, Canada, the CoP of a heat pump needs to be at 7 to be economically viable to substitute natural gas heating with electric heat pump heating. It means that natural gas heating is two times more economical compared to a 3.5 CoP heat pump.
On the flip side, that means in your area, a CHP generator only needs to be about 14% efficient to net "free" heat. Which is not hard at all to exceed.
I totally agree with going with whatever is cheaper, but if you can have solar panels with a heat pump it's probably cheaper, and price heating wood that can be really cheap depending on where you live.
It's not shocking that a heat pump can go both ways and both cool or warm up the air. For all the people in rest of the world: we were all shocked the first time we learned that the USA air conditioners only work to cool off rooms and people there don't know that they can do it reverse as well. For all of us an AC means a heat pump. We didn't know your ACs don't heat up. Somebody screwed you big time and for a long time. You got scammed.
The big HVAC mfrs didn't want to damage their furnace and boiler businesses when they started selling air conditioning. Even when they did start selling heat pumps, they didn't work well below 40F for that same reason. Although heat pump efficiency drops to near that of electric heat from 40-20F in areas with humidity due to the need to defrost the outdoor coils. This usually only means reversing into indoor cooling mode for a short period but to avoid discomfort, electric heat strips run to warm the cold air being discharged inside during the defrost cycle.
You have to keep in mind the US is a big place that spans a lot of climates. Most areas of the US have been using heat pumps for decades to both heat and cool. However, some climates on the extremes had some other form of heating and comparatively small cooling needs or vice versa. The cooling only heat pumps were for those areas, not the majority of the US. In very hot US climates only cooling is needed. The coldest temps in those areas just don't justify a heating system at all. A reversing valve/control systems for heating are not very expensive, but it does add some cost and complexity. When they malfunction, the system is usually stuck in heating mode by default. I live in Florida and this has happened to me twice. It sucks to have your AC stuck blasting out heated air in the middle of summer. I also never use my system in heat mode even during record cold weather because inside the house it never gets below 65F. So while most heat pumps installed in my area can heat and cool, we could get by just as well with cooling only systems. In very cold US climates, older heat pump technology could not produce enough heat in low ambient temps to be feasible. So, they need a lot of heating and their heating/cooling needs are not balanced. That is a problem for heat pumps because an appropriately sized system for heating would be way oversized for cooling in those climates. More modern heat pump technology works well even in very cold weather and variable speed systems solve the heat/cool load balance as well. So, now even these few remaining regions are moving to heat pumps rather than separate heating and cooling systems. So, comparing this to the rest of the world, it probably only seems odd to countries that have both heating and cooling needs in the same region and don't understand that only certain parts of the US have dedicated cooling-only systems. To someone in Egypt or Iceland, I'm sure they can understand why cooling-only systems exists or why old heat pump technology was not always feasible for heating. Having said all of that, the US does still lag way behind in HVAC tech, but not for the reasons you suggested.
@@allinclusive5762 you can just get a couple ordinary air conditioners, for my house 3 or 4 300$ air conditioners should be enough , and all the ones I've seen also support heating with reversible valves the only thing is they don't also heat your water, unlike the very expensive central ac you mentioned
Fahrenheit became the international standard before centigrade specifically because of the resolution of the units. He made instruments for meteorologists and his scale put almost every temperature that mattered to them from 0 to 100. Shortly after he died it was discovered that they could bump the temperature up by 6.67% and water went from melt to boil in 180 degrees and the area between the reference standards could all be marked out as powers of two. Celsius was easier to standardize across the whole world but Fehrenheit is a much more useful scale for almost all people, anyone who would be better off using centigrade should probably be using kelvin anyways.
here is the problem with heat pumps in general. it takes much more energy to extract heat out of something that has alot less heat in it to begin with. ie its easy to move heat from a 70F degree room to a hallway but its alot more difficult to move heat from a 0F room to the hallway. (heat and energy are the same thing in this context)
Inverter compressors rock. I've been impressed with their performance over standard on-off compressors common in older systems. High efficiency heat pumps give me the ability to run A/C or Heat long than conventional systems using less power a plus when maximizing a solar system to run my equipment.
The problem is icing. If you use air conditioner to heat a room when temp outside is 5-10 celsius - its ok. But when temperature outside drops bellow zero - air conditioner's outside unit will freeze and ice. And that ice will prevent thermoregulation with outside world and drastically drop efficency until air conditioner will just stop pumping heat from outside. Well, if only it was that easy to heat up buildings we wouldnt have problems with central heating or heating vats))
That is where the little electronics change comes in with the system, and when it notices the buildup/temperature, it reverses for a few minutes and goes back to heating, in that time the inside unit doesn't run the fan spreading the colder air until it warms back up again.
I have 2 words, Wisconsin winters. In order for a heat pump to work in winter here, it needs to be an underground piping one. Very expensive to install.
That’s what I want to know. I guess it’s going to drip all over the floor. Or perhaps he’s in an area of the country with little to no humid, so it evaporates out of the tray as soon as it condenses out of the air…which is impossible in half the country with high humidity. It’s a nice little expirament but not practical where I live. I have a heat pump and we want to get rid of it…it sucks.
@@jamesengland7461 Maybe. But I'm sure that he will either have a solution that is way over engineered, or stupid simple. If I do this, I'll need to have my plan down to a T. Otherwise, the wife issue takes effect....😶
Since the day I first stumbled upon your channel I fell in love with your unwavering dedication to the scientific method and your precise and accurate articulation of physics. This video is a perfect example of why I value this channel so highly. Looking forward to the next one!
As a European it is honestly hard to believe that most of the USA does not use heat pumps and heat with direct electricity or gas which is even more insane to us.
If it's -15c outside, natural gas cost is $1/ccf and electricity cost is $0.2/kwh (both approximately correct costs for the American midwest), a 96% efficient condensing gas furnace is far cheaper to run than even the best heat pump. Because of this, you'll be running the gas furnace for most of the winter, and you'd only use a heat pump during the fall and spring ... and the heat pump would wear out before you ever get enough savings out of it to pay for the added cost (vs. AC only). Keep in mind that gas-fired generating stations are only 20-35% efficient, meaning that in an area where electricity is primarily generated using gas turbines, a heat pump would have to achieve a COP of between 3 and 5 to match the overall efficiency of a condensing gas furnace ... and no heat pump can do that in truly cold climates.
@@TheSwissChalet In Finland our electricity is only about 5 % fossile. And we have much cheaper electricity than most of Europe. We don't use gas for households, but typically a house has 3*35A 240V electric connection. Good enough for 9kW sauna stove, cooking and heating same time. We have 5 nuclear reactors, thousand if wind turbines, hydropower, bioenergy. We buy also Norwegian and Swedish hydropower, if there is too little wind. We use very little gas, we don't have pipeline from Norway and Russian pipelines are proven unreliable, and we don't want to do business with Russia anymore. Russia is a mafia that has a state. Better stay away. They already stole our power plants and factories invested in Russia. We just opened our own uranium mine also. We are also going to mine all minerals needed for electric cars, better not to be dependent on some authoritarian countries. Electrifying our road traffic would increase electricity needs only 10%. We used to have higher consumption 10 years ago, efficiency has improved and paperfactories closed.
@@jounisaari9471 Electric cars can be centrally controlled, and stopped anytime the controllers want to stop you. All types of mining are environmentally damaging...so I don't know how you could consider that "green"...only because the brainwashers convinced people of that. Your houses in Finland are extremely small compared to US houses, and you have little need for air conditioning. Not really comparable.
Yea like I'm going to turn my air conditioner around in the winter and expose all the controls that are designed to be in an inside environment to the harsh outside winter environment. I don't think so. I'll just keep using my AC to cool the inside in the summer and my heater to warm the inside in the winter. A better test would be to have the outside of the bedroom at 30 degrees and see how much heat the other side of the AC puts into the room.
Love this idea in theory. I work for a ministry and we serve many poor and elderly people who don't have central air and often have to use space heaters in the summer and window AC units in the summer. I love the idea of making these units more effective for people, since they are all pinching pennies as it is. My only question is how would you suggest weather proofing an AC unit having the electronics face outside? Thank you
Yep. Heat comes out one side and cold out the other. It’s why it has to be 1/2 inside and out. If u stick an a/c in the middle of a room it would work. It would actually heat the air a bit. Especially a dehumidifier works that way
I don't want to interfere with your, we're European and we're so Superior analogy, but we have been using heat pumps for years and years and years in the United States as well.
@@yachtsteve I am european and I'd like to say that... europe is not even uniform between countries to make these comparisons and these "as an enlightened EU citizen" comments are dumb.
I’m in the US and have had a heat pump for over 20 years. What about this video makes you think any of this is “new”? Our heat pump sucks, by the way. It is inefficient and we want to get rid of it. We still have to use heating oil as a backup because when the temperature goes below freezing outside (which it does every year for weeks on end), the heat pump doesn’t come anywhere near heating the house comfortably enough, and it’s a HUGE unit.
If you are not in the financial market space right now, you are making a huge mistake. I understand that it could be due to ignorance, but if you want to make your money work for you... prevent inflation
Thanks for continuing updates I'd rather trade the crypto market as it's more profitable. I make a good amount of money per week even though I barely trade myself.
A lot of people still make massive profit from the crypto market, all you really need is a relevant information and some ‹professional advice. ‹it's totally inappropriate for investors to hang on while suffering from dip during significant
I currently have a GE geospring water heater , been using heat pump only for the last 5 years. Shaved almost 30 percent off electric bill while gaining cooling ac and drier basement air. That is a win/ win. Now lets build a solar reflected condenser for a freezer/ cooler unit.
This is an excellent demonstration for those unfamiliar with the benefits of heat pumps and the lack of affordable small window units. As others have noted, it’s possible to modify a window AC into a heat pump, a concept that dates back to the 1960s. However, modern units require more than just adding a reversing valve-features like defrost modes and proper drainage are crucial but often overlooked. Until these issues are solved, manufacturers seem hesitant to revive this idea. Some inverter mini-splits are exploring the concept, but at over $3,000 and with no units as small as 5,000 BTU, there’s still a gap for small homes needing simple heating and cooling solutions.
One additional thought: Magtor linear motor based compressor tech, seems they are looking to recover the 33% loss from rotating motor compressor due to cost to change rotating to linear motion for compressor...looks interesting, is this a part of what you plan for your next video?! Love your channel!
Many times in the past I have walked by my AC unit in the window while it was running. Many times I thought to myself, I should flip that thing around in the winter". The high amount of heat being blown off the back is just being wasted. I'm actually going to do it this time. The next trick would be to cover the controls outside. Great Video!
I did a similar experiment to convert a window A/C into a heat pump. The main practical problem is that the outdoor coil will freeze up and you won't get anymore heat after that happens. I created a defrosting circuit using an Arduino. Look for my video entitled "Convert air conditioner to heat pump using Arduino controller relay box". By using this, I was able to create a practical heat pump that saved me money on heating.
My home is Energy Star rated. I had one of these for 5 years and was not very impressed with it. By the time the air made it through the ducts to the registers, it was only 'very warm' and not at all the heat levels I was used to. Secondly, as soon as it dropped below 30f outside, the internal heat strips would kick on. No big deal, but if we had long periods of days where the temps were right around that 30f mark, it would constantly switch back and forth between heat pump and resistance strips. Lastly, would be that after 5 years, it quit in the middle of summer. The tech that replaced it said that the compressors are the same whether its a heat pump or not, but heat pumps run all year instead of getting the winter break. More hours of use means faster detonation. Made perfect sense to me. THE MATH: I paid $2,700 for the heat pump upgrade when I bought this house, which included the proper thermostat and running the 7-wire for it. My savings were an average of $32 per month; meaning it takes me 7 years to EQUAL the initial cost to upgrade. I know mine only lasted 5 years, but even if it had lasted 7 or 10 or even 15 years, the few thousand dollars saved is not worth losing out on being able to cook my feet on a hot register, or to let that hot blast of air up under my robe on a cold morning.
A) Use a little energy to _move_ heat.
B) Use a lot of energy to _make_ heat.
Hmmm, gimmie a minute...
Yes...that sums it up very nicely.
I think this comment deserves to be pinned.
Because we no longer teach "science" in schools such concepts are lost on many - sadly.
The only problem with using this in the winter is that the closer you get to -10f the less efficient it becomes. So it gets harder and harder to heat as it gets colder outside. until eventually It cant do it any longer no matter how much refrigerant you pump it can't effectively move heat. So this is only a complete solution in warm climates. In cold climates gas/wood heat is far better.
Move heat from hallway to bedroom. Do we heat up our houses like this? 🤔
This reminds me of the time I went with my dad to a pawn shop where he was trying to hawk a window a/c unit. It was December or January. The pawn shop employee asked, "It's the middle of winter, what do you want me to do with that thing?"
My dad, without missing a beat, replied, "Just turn that thing around in the window and you got yourself a heater!"
If you know how to welt/solder then you could replace some of the connections with electric valves and convert any air conditioner into one that also behaves as a heat pump. Just connect it so that the inside and outside coils are swapped connections.
@@tripplefives1402 Are you talking the copper/aluminum pipes or the wires?
@@DeltaSierra181 3 way valves are used to change the flow so that the outside and inside coils are swapped. Everything else remains the same.
@@tripplefives1402 Well shit that should be easy.
@@DeltaSierra181 A heat pump unit is basically just an air conditioner with valves to allow the inside and outside coils to be swapped. The compressor and expansion valve are basically the same, though in most off the shelf units the valves are integrated into the compressor.
I love how MP is genuinely excited over even the smallest discovery or corrected oversight.
A real scientist. Please never change.
That's the grandfather of the son of the main presenter's son.
@@misterhat5823 you weren't supposed to figure that out, agents will be at your door in the coming days
It is a scam that only works in a trashy empire of gross polluters who can afford to throw away AC compressors. Scientist, or quack scientist? Science seems like a religion for suckers.
Eh... he could afford to change a little.
he released a video on saving heating costs in august during heatwave. he's aiming for the aussie ad dollars?
I have been on the road full time in my camper van for over a year now. I have installed a very efficient window ac unit in one of my rear doors that runs off my power station which is charged by 720 watts of solar. It has worked great so far cooling my van. I always thought about turning the unit around backward for the winter but learned that the unit will not turn on if temperature is below like 55 degrees. If there was a work around for that, I would do it. My diesel heater does a very good job heating and it is cheap to run but even on the lowest setting the van gets too hot very quickly unless the temperature is below 35 degrees outside. I would use the reversed window unit until it got really cold out. I hope you do a video on how to run an ac unit backwards or to spoof mine into thinking it is warmer than it is so it will run turned around. I have enjoyed your channel for years and have learned a lot from you . Thank you.
If you take the front panel off most window AC units there's wire similar to the one in the video that is the temp sensor. You might be able to bend it around so it isn't on the cold side anymore it should keep running. That may lead to other issues though, so try at your own risk.
What if you brought the unit inside and ducted the cold air out through a window?
@@gunslinger2566 Good idea, but I do not have room for that near any of my opening windows. Plus my windows are the type that pop out from the bottom and only open about 4". Thanks.
*Been living off grid over 15 years, you can see so much on my channel.* HOWEVER - We have used the output of our multiple small window units ( solar powered ) to make almost all our hot water for 7+ months a year for free. Outbound temps on the AC units exceeds 140 degrees, exchanger recovery is 85% so we get 125 degree water put in storage all day, from it we get 115 to 120 degree water to the showers. My own design, not hard to do.
I just subscribed, Good content but can't find the water heater video
Me neither
If you want to get really efficient, take apart some window air conditioners and convert them so that the exterior coil is submerged in water, then pump the water to a pond outside somewhere and have the water circulate. --oh, I see thats what you said you did, LOL
huh never thought of that. Places that are really hot year round really should have ac systems that are also the water heater. It would literally be free water heating from waste heat from something you need to have running all the time (like arizona or some parts of texas). Combine it with those instahot things and you would be set even if you didnt need to run ac at night.
Been subscribed to your channel for a few years now , great channel
I bought a heat pump a few years ago and I have no regrets. I went from using 3.5 full 285 gallon tanks of oil per year to 1.5. One thing to note is that the effectiveness and efficiency of the heating will be reduced the colder it gets outside, and you'll start having to deal with things like ice accumulation. You can pay a bit extra for a heat pump designed to work in colder climates, but I'm guessing window units will not work well in this scenario - maybe something worth testing.
I always thought it was strange that window units don't come with a reverse feature built in. It seems like it would be relatively cheap while adding a significant amount of value.
You can buy any type of AC unit with reversing functionality nowadays - costs only marginal more than pure AC models.
For a bit more money, you can also bury a ground sync to mitigate seasonal fluctuations.
@@binaryblade2 Sure but unless you can do it yourself and have the equipment, "a bit more" could be quite a bit more. :)
So yes - couple of things you need for the ac unit to heat pump conversion - reversing valve as he mentioned, accumulator as the cycles heat/ac need differing amounts of refrigerant, extra metering device and check valves defrost sensor, defrost timer, you would need to separate the indoor and outdoor fans so you could de-energize the outdoor fan without de-energizing the indoor fan also means you’d need a relay with your timer, you’d need to put some supplemental heaters in during defrost nobody likes to feel cold air coming out of the vent, the indoor fan also would be bringing heat into the system, and the thermostat would need to be swapped - new controls, wiring would need to be modified quite a bit probably best handled by a control board.. but yeah
@devbella5223 There's no need to deenergize either fan since 1) most window ACs use one motor to drive a common shaft carrying both fans and 2) you still need a flow of air over both sides of the loop to move any heat for heating or cooling the interior.
With your intro, it reminds me why I watch your channel. Although I do understand heat pumps as used in residential settings, I generally pick up at least a few tidbits from you on ANY subject, no matter how familiar I am with said subject. Keep up the great work!
In reality: 99.9% already have heat pumps that heat dwellings in the developed world - they are called refrigerators. :) (heating effect is minimal of course).
Thank you for taking the time for that demonstration, I've been an A/C & Refrigeration technician for sometime now and first time I've seen anyone demonstrate this.
It is cool but also common sense for us techs. I was expecting a commercial split system or package unit.
No one talks about the principles , right ?
Love that you commented about the smaller units in degrees F vs degrees C and phrased it as more "resolution". Nice way to think about it.
Most units of measure have better resolution in metric. I think it's interesting that temperature measurement has higher resolution in Fahrenheit. But it makes sense. Celsius goes from freezing water to boiling water in 100 units, but Fahrenheit takes 180 units to measure the same change.
@@SuperDavidEFAssuming one is at sea level. But the same theory applies with altitude change
Better for resolution for me too as a novice American scientist I am Fahrenheit sighted.
The units (C or F) used to prove this experiment, is of no (or at least very little) importance. The change is what is important. Although I live in a metric country, I understand the decision to use F's. I must admit, I've seen many C-thermometers going into one decimal digit, but never (IIRC) into 2 decimal digits.
LOVE this video.
Given a delta degree F is 1.8 a delta degree C, a Celsius probe with 0.5C resolution is effectively equivalent to F
Most probe systems barely give you that level of accuracy anyway though.
Excellent video demonstrating how heat pumps work.
Just for clarification to anyone confused by the AC unit in the door, hes installed it back to front, on purpose, so that the 'cool' side is dumping its 'coolness' into the hallway, and putting the hot side (that normally would go on the outside of your window) into the room, to heat the room.
As you can see;
the resistive heater and fan used 669 watt hours (aka 0.66Kwh) to heat the room by 10.4 degrees F
The heatpump aka the AC unit, used 197.5 watt hours (aka 0.19Kwh) to heat the room by 16.2 degrees F
1338 watts for half an hour is 669 wh
395 watts average (started around 350 watts and went up to 440 watts) for half an hour is about 197.5 wh
@@ivanjakanov Good catch thanks, I'll edit my comment, I went the wrong way doubled instead of halved.
2 way heatpumps are quite common now though. Its the way they sold ac to nordics, used to be that nobody had it.
@@lassikinnunen At least in the Western/PNW US, they're rare outside of 208-250VAC In-Wall units.
I see the 'use' for re-using a Window A/C. They often can be had 'off-season' used for very cheap (if you're willing to fully disassemble and clean.) or, can be had on sale at the edge of the hot season.
@@lassikinnunen Unfortunately, not so in North America. A couple of units have just come on the market this year, but are at a premium price, and of limited quantity. Low cost "mini-split" heat pumps have become fairly popular, but they are not simple window units.
I wish the whole of RUclips was like this - clearly explained, useful and entertaining.
Me too!
@@TechIngredientsu know whst i'd reslly live to see guys...
agrovoltaics
(I'm prettt sure i've mentioned this before
Maybe on that solar panels video u made/...)
It just feels like there's so much untapped potential out there
And u can spread awarness as to just how incredible it is
The efficiency gains in both power from the cooling effect and the impact on certain crops is incredible
(Yes yes that's not to say there aren't any issues...
Like the cost of specialized inferstractures/mechinery is absolutly massive
etc)
Seriously
It'd be nice to see some more awarness of the matter
Everyone on the internet heard of such things as thorium
Or the over 100% efficiency of heat pumps
But no one's talking about such incredible simple things (with so much potential)
@@TechIngredients Where is the video that shows you how to get the most out of your AC unit? Also how do you use a AC a say in a 350 sq ft room to heat it not cool it? AC is in the window of the room.
Too long of video.
Startling differences! Your description and explanation of "entropy" is probably the best I have ever seen. Appreciate you, your videos and projects are the most interesting and the most professionally done and I like the way you are able to bring it down to the level where laymen like myself can understand and grasp the concepts.
Some 30 years ago now, I had the bright idea of turning a window AC machine around to blow the cold air outside and the hot air inside. I was amazed how well that worked! Almost cut my electric bill by 1/4 if memory serves. And that was only using one small unit, I could have done more with multiple units. There are down sides of coarse, one of them being cold starts. If the room is already cold, you wont get the compressor to start unless you heat the thermal couple. Another is the fan noise, what used to be outside is now inside, so the whole machine is just noisier like this. Water, you have to do something with the condensation buildup. And there is nothing pretty looking about the setup, if that matters to any of you. But it definitely works well otherwise once you get it running.
Cheers 🍻
Cool! My heating bill was outrageous last winter. I think I will try this.
of *course
@@ambulocetusnatans use a portable AC unit, you can set the unit on say a porch and just put the round duct in the window to blow the heat inside. All you'll have is noise from the heat blowing in and the AC is outside. Also they dehumidify themselves, so no drain lines.
Another problem is some of the window ac’s are toxic and can’t be vented into the house … I only know cuz I got in trouble as a teen doing the same thing as u 😂. Not sure which tech it is.. or if they still make them that way or not.
Kinda reminds me of the people that use (I wanna say natural gas) ovens to heat their house and end up dying from the fumes.
Its freon gas. @DRJoe100
"we could pretty much exchange the word entropy at any point with equilibrium" thank you for that explanation and application of entropy. It definitely helps me to understand entropy. Looking forward to the next video about improving AC efficiency.
I got it! I'll mount my window A/C unit on a "Lazy Susan". Spinning it around depending on my needs. Yeah baby! Cheers.
Awesome! Looking forward to the next video on how to increase the efficiency of my window units! You guys make it so much fun! Don't ever change!
Growing in a family of chemist dad, physicist mom, entomologist grandma and chemistry equipment glassblower granddad.
Watching your videos feels being at home )
That sounds like a fun childhood! 😀
@@mrmadmaxalot Yeah, I remember frantically washing kitchen walls with my dad and sister after some experiments with metal sodium.
Before mom comes home )
Sounds like a fascinating upbringing
The problem here is he claimed an air conditioner made today is twice as energy efficient as an older one, say from the year 2k.
I want to see experimental data proving they are twice as efficient. I don't believe this claim AT ALL.
Dude had a great spawn point.
I love the heat pump videos that you guys do, and also technology connections videos on them as well, alec and yourself always do an amazing job explaining things in very simple terms for everyone to understand how things work.
Also. Im watching this in my car at the moment and that music is just GOLDEN for my sound system over at the intro, your audio is always fantastic. Thanks for the quality entertainment and knowledge. Its giving me ideas to make a custom cooling system for a server rack i plan on installing in my own home.
This is a really long cliffhanger - I'm still waiting for the next episode :-)
This is seriously the most underrated channel on all of RUclips. The things this channel is teaching could literally change the world.
Man, I love these videos. A layman's approach to hard science. It's a mind blowing concept and I'm going to try it - but it's going to be a real drag in the winter, when I have to go outside and climb the ladder to turn it on and off :)
I really enjoy your channel. Your project or testing is unique. You show things that normally no one ever think about.
I'm amazed at the varied subjects this channel puts out! Love it.
Of all the nonsense and educational videos I am recommended to watch, no channel excites me more than yours. Quite a few of your videos have given me ideas for clever solutions in a completely unrelated fields. I was a thermal engineer and now a battery process engineer, but the learnings I've acquired through your videos still heavily influence my decision making. I'm glad to be alive at this time in history where knowledge is so abundant and easily accessible. Thank you!
I think you might be the most thorough and widely scientifically educated tinkerer I've ever come across. Your experiments are well thought out and the effort you put into materializing them is impressive for a RUclips channel.
Just bought one 3 days ago it's an inverter type. It's over 120° here. It works so much better than my old a.c. and it uses half the power, and now I don't need a separate heater for the winter. Grate video👍 its so hot down here. i can't wait for the next video 🫠
About ten years ago, I got a new Amana window unit, in a humid climate. The condenser (outdoor) coil dripped condensation into a tray, which came with a drain plug. My installer explained trapping some water in the pan would increase efficiency, as the fan would sling water onto the coil.
In practice, the standing water became a mold farm. I've seen the same problem with "sonic / cool steam" humidifiers.
In winter, if I didn't clean my filter religiously, the evaporator (indoor) coil would accumulate frost until it became a giant ice cube.
@blipblap614 This one had a double vent pipe. The exuast pipe is inside of the intake pipe, which I thought was weird. It is a portable unit. Normally, the exuast hose would get hot when using the a.c. on my old unit and required insulation to keep it from spreading unessery heat. The dual design eliminates that prolbem. I have checked the drain plugs, and both have no water, and I am running a swamp cooler aswell so it's super humid, and I am surprised that their has ben no condensation. I will keep a look out for it. I have only had my unit for 3 days. Thank you for the advice 🙂
Won’t work under 40 F degrees. Condensation is going on your floor? Heaters have defrost to keep them working under 40F.
Your sensitive electronics will be on the outside getting rained on. Not great for it probably 🤨
@@BeefNEggs057 I rarely see below freezing here. Maybe one night a year will be 20F. The unit performed fine until the defrost cycle couldn't pull enough air over the coil due to a clogged filter.
The outside portion of a window unit is just a fan and a coil, housed in a sheet metal box, insulated with styrofoam.
@@blipblap614 could you post the model you purchased I'm very interested
That's extremely interesting. You continue to answer questions that I've never even asked. Thank you for making the norm, absolutely amazing.
this is what I needed, you always deliver...
This is really cool. I've always had the impression that A/C units were super inefficient but that seems to have more to do with their application than the work actually being done.
These descriptions of physical phenomena are so good I listen to them all the way through, even though I have the background and already understand them.
Good job! Here in Europe, we use heat pump (AC) heating quite extensively. Regarding the next video - I hope it won't be just applicable to integral "window" type AC units you have in the US but to "split" type units too - commonly found across the world, indoor and outdoor units are mounted separately and are connected by lines carrying refrigerants and electric power/signals. Of course, you have split systems in the US too but the window units are much more common in households, as far as I understand.
I'd also like it if you touch upon the efficiency figures used for heating and cooling, as those are different and often misunderstood or completely ignored by consumers.
Cheers!
Split-system central air conditioning very common in US homes built in the past few decades. 95% of the time this is a split system. The compressor and condenser coil sits outside and the evaporator coil sits on top of the furnace (or in a dedicated air-handler) which distributes cold air via ducts.
I believe what you are used to is what we call "mini-splits" which is much less common but has become more popular in the past 15 years.
Brilliant! Can’t wait for the next one for the saving!
I'm waiting for the follow-up video. Thank you
Why hasn't RUclips given this channel a tick yet? It deserved one years ago.
Outstanding. I am an HVAC specialist. Lovin this video series, But then again I have loved all the videos coming from this channel. Now I will say if you dont understand I know its hard for a guy as smart as this to transfer the meanings in to lamens terms, I have various ways to explain this talking to customers that know NOTHING. I think it was a great job of breaking it down and excited to see the next video,Always Outstanding work !!
Agreed - the entropy explanation was perhaps a bit overdone and hard to understand for many - easier to tell people that one doesn't make cold, one removes heat or moves it from one place to another and flow can be reversed similarly to a bath manual faucet / shower head valve AND that even while there the air seems cold, there is still some heat present. The efficiency point is reasonably demoed though the information could be improved in other ways.
Awesome demonstration. Keep in mind this is close to an ideal condition for a heat pump. They lose efficiency as the temperature difference between the hot and cold side increases. To impress skeptics, would be cool to do a demonstration in worst possible conditions.
YES love to see a efficiency- power curve graph for us in colder climates .
Mine gives about or over 5 KW heat for just under 2 KW power at -30°C
@@tullgutten pretty impressive. I guess main consideration is if you have poor insulation in a very cold climate you need a hell of a lot of electricity to heat a large volume. Heat pumps are more constrained in where they can be placed. You can stay warm with a small radiant heater by your bedside. For a modern build, no doubt a heat pump is the way to go.
@@tullguttenhow and where are you running a heat pump that cold?!? Northern Canada?
Assuming a 410A system and a 16C indoor temp you're looking at a lift ratio of over 7! That's an extreme compressor unless you're running a cascade system!!!!
Someone protect this guy. When you start talking about saving that much money you are also talking about stopping someone or people from making that money and they aren't going to be happy!
>Use your A/C
*cries in moderately old apartment in Germany*
same 🥲 the ac worked crazy fast too
oh yes. I am happy when we have such summers like now, when there are only few hot days.
The a/c he showed in the video can typically be purchased for about $15 in a pawn shop, LOL. Treat yourself.
@hxhdfjifzirstc894 here in the US, sure. Things are a little different in Europe, if I'm to assume correctly
Take solace in your superior construction.
You guys are one of my favorite channels. Always excited to see what new mad science you are going to show next!
I always look forward to your videos. Your depth and breadth of knowledge, and the quality of your research, always amazes me.
Good explanation. I have been upgrading air conditioners into heat pumps for years. Window units are too small but central systems can be upgraded by a skilled technician. They don't tell you that because they want to throw away the air conditioner and sell you a heat pump.
Interesting
This is incredible, I live in an older house, circa 1905, with no duct work and 5 units I put in the windows every summer. With this, I can use them year around and cut my heating bill while doing it. I've had issues with tripping circuit breakers because the wiring was set for minimum usage in bedrooms. I can power 5 ac units to heat with the power of 2 resistive units with energy to spare, this is crazy!
Efficiency drops for heating when the outside temperature gets lower. Still makes sense in some climates, but not sure you will get far with window units vs. a ductless heat pump. If you are rural, consider ground sourced for good efficiency year round.
@REPEAT63
Are you going outside several times per day to adjust each window unit?
The controls are now outside... ....in the weather. I don't think you have thought your plan thru.
@@mrbmp09 get a ac with remote control
Simple fixes, you can put it on high and attach the plug to a thermostatic control unit, plug into a thermostat that turns on and off based on the temp in the room. It works automatically.
as others have stated - they make Mini-splits that have the heat pump built in to reverse the expansion valves. This was a proof of concept for how heat pumps work, not a 'do this at home'.
When your AC reads the thermal temperature outside as being cold, it will stop running
When it gets colder outside, the unit becomes far less efficient
The controls are on the outside
The fans are WAY louder on that side
Water will be dripping on your floor
0:54 you don't need an air conditioner to own a heat pump, just a fridge or a dehumidifier.
Talking about fridge. For the best result the hot side coils should be out side wall (like most commercial system have) - I am thinking to cut the pipes and go thru external wall (presumably fridge is on the same wall to minimised the distance). In winer time you will have fridge cool almost for free. In summer it will not matter it you heating you house or need expel the heat from fridge out side, you always go up heel, but you will reduce heat load in your house.
@@miroslawkaras7710 just remember to shade coils fom direct sunlight, cause that can increase temperature enough to pop out high pressure presostat in a compressor
Dehumidifier has coils on same side, you need to have the cold side outside and hot inside. A fridge similiarly has to have the back coil inside with the rest outside, which is hard to do. a window A/C unit is optimal if you don't have a mini split.
@@miroslawkaras7710 It might not work too well. From what i read about freezers the refrigerant has a temperature span, below that it might not be able to transport heat from the inside properly. You need to look up climate classes before doing something like this, some freezers are designed for an ambient temp of 18°C, and the lowest i've seen is 10°C. Plus you need to figure out how to keep, or at least replace the refrigerant if you cut the pipes.
or a car. vehicle a/c works off the same principle
As I hear my A/C running right now, I'm excited for the follow up video.
😂 I wish we had the next video a month ago
I dont know what they're gonna say in the next one but misters can be used to cool the hot coils of an AC unit to greatly increase it's efficiency when it becomes heat soaked.
@@MindCrime550 I'm thinking that, too. I've got a circa 1980s portable A/C unit (Toshiba Cool Mini) that uses a water spray kicked up by a fan in order to help cool the condenser. It does a pretty good job for such a small machine. Initially I did think it was just a swamp cooler type, what with needing water and everything, but nope, it's definitely got a little compressor, evaporator and condenser in there which look to have been repurposed from their line of dehumidifiers.
Great video! Heat pumps rock. I built a backyard ice rink chiller based on a 28000 BTU AC unit.
I'm currently living in a camper so the heat-pump and ac efficiency video are very interesting to me.
Campers are so small you can Heat them up with your farts when you have good isolation
Wood stove in camper is more efficient
@@GLZEPHEAD69 in mobile devices you have to account for weight and energy density (specific energy). Gas has a much higher energy density (specific energy) than any battery. You will be able to heat ~50 times longer with 10kg of gas, than a 10kg battery.
@faustinpippin9208 in the winter they're cold af. In the summer they're hot af. There's no insulation and it's 30yrs old. I'm using window air conditioners because the roof one doesn't work any more and in the winter the furnace uses a 20lb tank of propane every 3-4 days costing me a fortune
For small campers, the Ecoflow Wave 2 is excellent if you can get it on sale.
Awesome demo! Patiently waiting for more content like this.
Thank You so MUCH, I Have Been Wanting to do This experiment for the last TWO Years ...And NOW, I Do NOT have Too.... You Rock !
Great video! This will help to convince the accountants in charge that replacing air conditioners with electric heaters by installing new heat pumps is not a waste of money, but actually going to save them a lot on the electric bill!
Thanks for the easy demonstration. However maybe they will want me to install the air conditioner backwards instead to use the old AC as a heat pump.
When I worked at a retirement center built in 2000, they had old PTAC units in many of the rooms (about 105 of them) and I wanted to buy new R-410 units, they worked better in the heat pump mode down to 35F, not the 40F cut off that the older units had. For those who do not know, a window or PTAC heat pump changes over to it's electric heater at about 35F, so no ice can build up on the outdoor coil, they do not have a defrost system, and the outdoor fan blade can get blocked and not spin if there is to much ice on it.
I live near Portland Oregon, and there are many 40F days that actually don't reach 35F, so the heat pumps might run 30% more in the heat pump mode with the newer units. Also the R-410 collects heat much better than a R-22 unit.
I like the clever way you show this happening. It makes it easy for even a accountant to understand.
One thing to be mindful of: If you wish to use this A/C-setup in order to heat a room during winter, you need to make sure that the heat battery (the radiator you see on the back) doesn't drop below 12-13 degrees C. If it freezes, it will break. So forget about putting it outside in freezing temperatures, and make sure the room that has cold air being blown into it never drops below that temperature limit.
commercial units have already defrosting built in for this, but it sucks because if it is really cold outside, the defrosting can take up to 30 minutes, the time where no hot air will blow inside.
Under the assumption that the refrigerant would be water - which is it not.
@@D4no00 That is not the reason for defrosting - it is to remove external ice buildup, not to stop the refrigerant from freezing. The refrigerant is obviously not water ...
I watched this and immediately thought this would work great to some energy efficient heating into a small 10x10 grow house during the winter.
I'm curious how you would determine at which temperatures it makes sense to do this. From my understanding a heat pump is still good down to nearly 0 degrees Celsius. Is it dependent on the refrigerant type?
What would be the issue here and how could one get around it?
@@marshallgoatIT will still be more efficient than a resistive heater well below 0°C. But I suppose a kilo watt meter would easily show when the efficiency craps out. Here in Denmark we have single split units that guarantee efficiency to. -20°C and will still generate heat down past that.
Clear and simple explanations with accessible demonstrations. Aces.
I have also experienced that many people find it difficult to fathom that a certain amount of energy for a heat pump can make a room much warmer than with the same amount of conventional heating. It seems like a violation of the law of conservation of energy.
Then I like to use the following simple analogy:
A room is cold, but instead of heating that room with a heater, I drive a tank of hot water in from outside, and that heats up the room. Takes little energy, because I don't generate it, I move/pump it to the room. And if I want to cool the room, I wheel the hot tank outside. That's what an air conditioner / heat pump does: Move heat from one place to another.
btw: Most modern "airco's" are bidirectional nowadays, so in fact air-to-air heatpumps.
I just say the heat pump uses energy to run plus moving the heat from the outside in. The heat hat's moved brings you over the 100% simple as that.
I wish there were a requirement that all air conditioning systems sold be bidirectional heat pumps.
The actual cost of turning an air conditioner into a heat pump is quite small.
In North America where the normal climate extremes are in the sweet spot for heat pump efficiency, the annual energy savings would be significant.
And the efficiencies of mass production would bring the cost down even further.
There would be a slight reliability hit.. but well worth it overall.
In the 1970's Honeywell did a demonstration project of a solar powered heat pump system, where the energy necessary to run the "machine" was gathered using glycol filled solar panels, and storing the heat in an insulated glycol tank for nighttime use.
The two different heat pumps were tested. One was a piston type refrigeration machine powered by a turbine. The working fluid powering the turbine was Freon. Not only did the unit provide cooling, but an AC generator driven by the same Freon turbine provided power for lights, pumps, controls, and fans!
The second machine demonstrated the use of an Arkla type chemical heat pump, where the heat source driving the chemical reaction was the glycol heat storage system.
In Florida, in the summer time, we often had to leave the doors open "wasting" cool air, because we generated so much surplus heat that the glycol solution would BOIL inside the solar panels.
The panels were about 40' x 20', and the system load was a pair of tractor trailers, parked side by side.
The panels were mounted on the top and side of the "southern most" trailer, and were hydraulically tilted to match the average solar angle.. (no active tracking was used .)
The first trailer held all the equipment and heat storage facility, and a small monitoring/control area.
The second trailer held lighted poster board displays describing the system and seating for meetings/classes... And was the "system load".
Company near me sells well connect heat pumps. They extract what you need from the water you use. The energy density of the water and the volume make it viable.
But this is the thing I don't get, it's COLD outside.. so how does transporting cold air inside do anything..
@gordon1201 the outside is 30⁰ pull the heat out until it is 10⁰ that's 20⁰ of heat
Been running heat pump since 1991. Good video.I would recommend you talk to an electrician about powering a space heater with a 15 foot 16 gauge cord. You even noticed it was warm when you unplugged it. Best wishes.
Thanks.
That is the same guage as the cord from the appliance. Heavier guage is always good when it's available.
When are you going to show us how to make our air con more efficient.
never
Cool down the condenser.
Heat pumps are the ONLY way to go these days. My current home has a multi-zone ductless mini-split heatpump system. Each room has its own head unit with two main heatpumps outside (mitsubishi hyperheat). The system works down to -12F and keeps up pretty well even at those temps. It's SO efficient you wouldn't believe it. Plus being able to independently control the temperature of each individual room is simply amazing. Of course forced air heat pumps are still great, but the efficiency of these ductless systems are even better. Also have a heat-pump water heater which is great.
They do math shenanigans
Lets do more than one hundred percent efficiency.
You can always make things less ifficient, and if thats you definition of efficiency
@@bobsterclause342 No it's PHYSICS not math shenanigans. When you're moving energy instead of making it, it isn't hard to be more then one hundred percent efficient.
No they are not. Once it gets too cold a heat pump will fail. My house has one on it. Once the temperature outside gets too low it can no longer heat the house and I have to rely on resistance heating to bring the house to comfortable temperatures. Heat pumps work on the principle of "exchange". The "coolant" being use has limits and depending on it's performance along with the design of the system operating with it. This experiment is working between two environments with similar temperatures. This will greatly show the efficiency differences... but when two very different environments are experimented with... the limitations quickly being to show.
If the cold side cannot get "colder" than the environment it is in... it will cease to perform at all. This is the same as the hot side when it cannot get "hotter" than the environment it is in. This is why your house AC works harder when the temps are in triple digits.
Yes... it is very efficient... at first.... but the greater the disparity in environments... the less efficient it becomes. NONE of this is recent news.
@GeorgeWashingtonLaserMusket
What do you mean. Physics in general is absolutely math shenanigans.
@@CD-vb9fi There are winter heat pump setups but you have to bury long pipes throughout your yard and run coolant through them, extracting heat from the ground below the freezing depth.
If I have ever seen a better demonstration of explaining something truly relevant, this is it.
I just got into solar and have a 3kw Setup, I keep reading comments in DIY solar forum.. about Heat pumps. This explains a ton. My interest is definitely peaked now. Thanks so much for your videos I thoroughly enjoy your classes in hands on education.
Have to say something about increasing A/Cs effectiveness. I have an aggregate from a mobile A/C. As an A/C it was very ineffective because it throws air out of the room and some new air goes from outside. I disassembled it, took out the refrigeration unit and bent the condenser radiator down to a horizontal position. Then I put it all in the bath and filled it with cool water so that it just covered the condenser, and the evaporator was above and blown by a fan. This is how I cooled my apartment. The heat went into the water, the cold air into the room. I noticed that the compressor itself heats up quite significantly. Although its lower part was also in the water, it was tall, and there was no good heat transfer. I started pouring water directly onto the side of the compressor, and that’s when I noticed that the efficiency of cold production had increased greatly, because before my eyes, the evaporator became covered with frost, and then with ice. I can't say why is that so. It seems at first glance that the condenser must be the main point that you should cool down.
Cool! There are mobile ACs now that do that, it works but has a limited capacity. You could also have used a second pipe to suck in air from outside by covering the compressor air inlets of the AC with a box and connecting the second pipe to it.
This way there is no underpressure in the room and works way better. Thats how i did it.
There are some videos on youtube about it. (I guess in english too)
Wait, so you were just putting the heat into a bucket of water in your room?
@@sompka1 It may surprise you to learn that some industrial processes use municipal potable water as their cooling supply since the few dollars per cubic meter of water (250 gallons) at 15c coming from underground could sink way more energy from their process than the equivalent energy to run a chiller.
@@sompka1 a bath. Water drains heat very fast from metal objects. Much faster than air.
I don't understand this entire video or comments. Does your country not have reverse cycle air-conditioning?
The comparison being made between resistive heating and a heat pump is reasonable from a tech stand point, but for a lot of people the real comparison is gas (ng/lpg) or wood vs heat pump and the economics heat per dollar.
Yes, also they say "resistive heat is 100% efficient" but they don't consider the losses in generation and transport. Burning the resource on-site would be much more efficient.
@@jeremiahbullfrog9288 Electrical infrastructure is mostly made of aluminum to save costs and because aluminum has a higher tensile strength than copper while also resisting corrosion better. So there is actual substantial line loss up to 25% on average. Most high voltage transmission line isn't insulated too. So you could use a coil or any conductor to receive the induced electric field.
The first thing to reduce is energy consumption not efficiency. Solid state thermal mass is the best energy regulator. It's all about receiving and directing solar radiation where you want it. Then utilize natural convection and effects like the plenum effect to circulate air. So there is no net energy input or output to gauge efficiency. This would reduce the energy consumption by up to 60% for heating and cooling. Passive solar design and thermal mass.
If our houses were cars they would be blocks with aerodynamic surfaces facing in the wrong direction, really bad radiator design where the radiator is in a dead air space, wheels that barely spin, and they would be too heavy for the engines we are trying to use. So people are focusing on the engine to make it more efficient when they should be focused on redesigning the whole car or in this case the house. Also taking into account the energy used in the material for construction and the material life cycle. Hint, stone is still the best building material.
The comparison is made between resistive and heat pumps because this is the best case scenario.
If you consider resistive heaters as 100% percent "efficient" then heat pumps are easily 300% efficient.
Lastly using propane or other hydrocarbon based fuels you should expect less than 50% "efficiency" this is because a lot of heat is lost to the outside from having to exhaust the carbon monoxide and such. You also loose energy in the unburned smoke and tar escape with the exhaust.
A lot of the energy lost in the exhaust can be recovered via more elaborate burners such as "rocket stoves" but you still wont reach the efficiency of the power plant burning the fuel for you and transporting the energy to you. Which is incidentally why resistive heating is used as the standard.
Of course, the cost of electricity vs raw fuels varies drastically around the world. That is a economical and politically charged issue and not with in the scope of this video.
Ultimately, the most efficient way to heat or cool oneself is to heat and cool oneself. There are lots of jackets and pants with resistive heaters built in to only warm up your self and not your house but that is not as comfortable as walking around in shorts and a t shirt in your home no matter the season.
@@jeremiahbullfrog9288 i mean the 400ish watts can much more easily fit into solar system , i'd be more concerned when the outdoor air is too cold to really pull useful heat from it . Theoretically possible by just turning the window air conditioner around each season. What sort of heat would you use , the resistive heater or potentially gas/wood/oil/electric furnace as supplemental?
@@jeremiahbullfrog9288 There is plenty of loss in collection and transport of gas as well, it would be difficult to compare the two losses since gas companies aren't going to be keen on publishing these figures.
If our politicians approached things as intelligently and diligently as you, we'd have flying cars and a colony on Mars
no one has reached Moon until now ...
@@radurobert1 are you just saying they spent all that money just to Bankrupt the Soviet Union?
We already do...
@@MacMike71 so you have a colony on Mars ? when did you go to Mars ?
I never understood the appeal of moving closer to the flaming ball of gas in the sky particular when we are wrapped up in a decimal point of temperature increase over a century here, further away from the flaming ball of gas.
First time I ever came across you. But you're smart and trying to save me money, so I love you. I'm subscribed. I will comment, and I will like, thank you.
I’ve been using my small 7cf chest freezer filled with about 16g of water along with a 12v small transfer pump to flow the cold water from the freezer to a PC heat exchanger in another room that’s 120sf. I have a cutoff switch to keep the freezer water no colder than 35f. I can run it for a week straight in near 100f ambient and keep the room about 5 degrees F colder than the rest of the house with a 100mm heat exchanger using about 140 watts. The water in the freeze equalizes at about 44f when running constantly. I use 2 noctura pc fans in series to blow the air through the exchanger. Doing the math though, compared to a traditional window ac it used the same power over time since one runs intermittently and the other is constant. The upside is one is near silent and still works if the power is out for a few hours if the pump runs on a small pocket sized battery bank. I have had questioned asked as to why I don’t use an antifreeze and run it colder. The reason is because the heat exchanger would frost over and eventually the circulating water would equalize back to the same 44f anyway. I feel the room environment is much better regulated than an intermittent ac system. The principle is the same as a mini split which is what many heat pumps are used in these days. I think another benefit of the low wattage use is it can be more easily ran off a wider range of generators and battery units with lower starting/total amps.
I do something very similar. A small fan+radiator from a PC,some vinyl tubing,wire,and a small 12Volt pump. I use the bathtub (or kitchen sink) filled with cold water from the tap (maybe 40-50 degrees F). It's not much extra cooling,but it does help,and only uses about 15W of electricity (It could easily be solar/battery powered). Once the reservoir of water is warmed,I just drain it and refill it with more cold water. It's enough to get a nice cool breeze in the room on warm days,but when it's really hot out,I need the big A/C.
(It also works as some extra heat in winter,if you have a source of warm/hot water.)
@@PhattyMo Your PC is a great source of warm water if you liquid cool, though probably RIDICULOUSLY inefficient :D
“The fan itself generates some heat” thank you for considering that.
I get so frustrated with people that think fans cool a room, when the reality is the opposite.
fans dont cool a room they cool you. they do this be creating air current that increases evaporation. the outcome is a cooler room from the perspective of the human experience.
@@jjg1501 absolutely. And that’s a huge difference, for example when people leave fans on while they’re out so that the room is cool when they get home.
It’ll be warmer, although probably imperceptibly, but definitely not cooler.
@@thedave1771 ive never heard of anyone doing that. i leave my ceiling fan on when i leave simply because im to lazy to turn it off. it does not make my house hotter considering i dont have air conditioning at all. 1 degree means little when your house is 88 degrees, lol
@@jjg1501 sadly, I have.
@@thedave1771 are you saying you left a fan on while not home or not in the room because you actually believed it made a room cooler?
I suppose you could wall mount your fridge freezer to the outside, though you might spend more money if people steal your food 😆.
you coan install locks i guess lol my freezer had them
Or Bears!
Thank you both so much for explaining this principles !!! Have a 820% warmth in my house compared with resistance heat!!
Amazing good working system,
If the airco’s are able to “ run “ both ways, the home can be heated for about 1/5 of the watthours used by resistor based heating.
The efficiency of heatpumps drops when the difference in ambient temperature versus outside.
Sometimes it is only 300%
But with prices for fuel / gas etc.
You can spare a lot of money.
Certainly when solar energy is used, and heat is produced when a cold sunny day warms your house for free!!!
Technology connections is spreading😂
Say it with me... "The latent heat of vaporization!"
@@StretchyDeath the refrigeration cycle
And this phrase is a must have: all that by magic of buying two of them...
Wouldn't this be the OG channel?
he would be so proud XD
It's been over a month, where's the follow up video?
I really want you to do a similar test with a peltier device and compare the efficiency of heating with that vs resistive heating.
You do get a small gain, but the amount of engineering you have to do to insulate the input and output sides, while ensuring enough heat flow through the active faces isn't really worth it.
Yeah, relatively marginal gains because their COP *rapidly* deteriorates with increasing DeltaT. As an academically interesting point, their COP is outrageously good when the DeltaT is miniscule, but there's practically no real world applications for such a scenario.
tecs are really inefficient compared to compressor based cooling, especially at higher temperature differentials. I couldn't find any hard numbers on a quick search but the rule of thumb seems to be a phase change system is about 3x more efficient than a tec. So compared to resistive heating it should fall somewhere in the middle. A resistive heater moves no heat and "creates" a lot, a tec moves a little heat and creates a medium amount (net still more than resistive), and a phase change system moves a huge amount of heat and creates a little (net massively more than resistive).
mind blown!! this is the best real-world illustration i've seen thank you
patiently awaiting how to increase my ac efficiency
Water mist on the intake condenser.
In Germany we have some laws now that keep us from heating our houses, using cheap gas from Russia or cheap nuclear electricity but obligues us to use heat pumps. In Bavaria we get down to minus 16 celsius or zero Fahrenheit so the external unit is covered up in ice while the hot air concentrates under the ceiling making the people sick.
I installed some vertical tubes with fans but that is very noisy.
I tried the vertical pipes with fans and didn't get a good result. But what worked is a regular ceiling fan running very slowly. The modern fans that have stepper motors aren't good for such application, so use the old-style AC motor fan which can be controlled with a step-down transformer.
@@RandomNullpointer NEIN!
Let's see it perform from the view of warming a room or house with a very cold outside temp. Say 0 to 12 °F
The music slaps , should keep that shit playing the whole video
Wait what, North America, one of the biggest western markets for residential ACs does not use reversible ACs (yet)?
We've been installing reversible air-air heat pumps for ages in continental europe and asia.
Central Europe now modernizes and moves to ground to water and air to water heat pumps.
Well guess that's what happens when cheap, polluting, war subsidized coal, gas and oil is available.
I’ll keep my furnace and A/C.
@Jameson1776 US most definitely does use heat pumps almost everywhere. However, furnaces are still common in very cold areas (northeast and great lakes region) where the outside temperatures are too cold for the cold side refrigerant to expel heat to the environment. I was hoping he'd address that. I believe from watching his previous videos that he's in New Hampshire (at least New England), which is an area where furnaces are still common.
Also, this is pretty hilarious considering the US is paying the majority of the cost for a war to keep natural gas flowing to central europe.
@@clayton97330 I live in the midwest of the USA and it gets below 0F° and above 100F° most years so it doesn’t quite apply to me. As far as paying for a foreign conflict the U.S. will do as it always has and look out for its own interests.
@@Jameson1776 For harsh winters and all the time your power grid goes down in mild winds... sure keep your furnace. But can't fathom not using a HeatpumpAC the rest of the year, ie spring, fall, and mild winters. Good heatpumps achieve a COP of ~2.5ish down to 10F
The only thing that matters to a consumer is heat per dollar and natural gas heating if avalable is the most economical. At current prices of natural gas and electricity in my area in Ontario, Canada, the CoP of a heat pump needs to be at 7 to be economically viable to substitute natural gas heating with electric heat pump heating. It means that natural gas heating is two times more economical compared to a 3.5 CoP heat pump.
I also care very much about CO2 emissions.
On the flip side, that means in your area, a CHP generator only needs to be about 14% efficient to net "free" heat. Which is not hard at all to exceed.
I totally agree with going with whatever is cheaper, but if you can have solar panels with a heat pump it's probably cheaper, and price heating wood that can be really cheap depending on where you live.
It's not shocking that a heat pump can go both ways and both cool or warm up the air.
For all the people in rest of the world: we were all shocked the first time we learned that the USA air conditioners only work to cool off rooms and people there don't know that they can do it reverse as well. For all of us an AC means a heat pump. We didn't know your ACs don't heat up. Somebody screwed you big time and for a long time. You got scammed.
Americans also don’t know what a split system is
The big HVAC mfrs didn't want to damage their furnace and boiler businesses when they started selling air conditioning. Even when they did start selling heat pumps, they didn't work well below 40F for that same reason.
Although heat pump efficiency drops to near that of electric heat from 40-20F in areas with humidity due to the need to defrost the outdoor coils. This usually only means reversing into indoor cooling mode for a short period but to avoid discomfort, electric heat strips run to warm the cold air being discharged inside during the defrost cycle.
At least now the name air conditioning means more! It conditions the air to make it comfortable - by heating or cooling!
Perfect example of crooked Capitalism practiced in USA!USA!.
You have to keep in mind the US is a big place that spans a lot of climates. Most areas of the US have been using heat pumps for decades to both heat and cool. However, some climates on the extremes had some other form of heating and comparatively small cooling needs or vice versa. The cooling only heat pumps were for those areas, not the majority of the US.
In very hot US climates only cooling is needed. The coldest temps in those areas just don't justify a heating system at all. A reversing valve/control systems for heating are not very expensive, but it does add some cost and complexity. When they malfunction, the system is usually stuck in heating mode by default. I live in Florida and this has happened to me twice. It sucks to have your AC stuck blasting out heated air in the middle of summer. I also never use my system in heat mode even during record cold weather because inside the house it never gets below 65F. So while most heat pumps installed in my area can heat and cool, we could get by just as well with cooling only systems.
In very cold US climates, older heat pump technology could not produce enough heat in low ambient temps to be feasible. So, they need a lot of heating and their heating/cooling needs are not balanced. That is a problem for heat pumps because an appropriately sized system for heating would be way oversized for cooling in those climates. More modern heat pump technology works well even in very cold weather and variable speed systems solve the heat/cool load balance as well. So, now even these few remaining regions are moving to heat pumps rather than separate heating and cooling systems.
So, comparing this to the rest of the world, it probably only seems odd to countries that have both heating and cooling needs in the same region and don't understand that only certain parts of the US have dedicated cooling-only systems. To someone in Egypt or Iceland, I'm sure they can understand why cooling-only systems exists or why old heat pump technology was not always feasible for heating.
Having said all of that, the US does still lag way behind in HVAC tech, but not for the reasons you suggested.
You have done some pretty cool stuff, I think this is your best video since you built the speakers from the flat panels.
there is one problem here in good old germany: electricity is 5 times more expensive than gas, for example
but due to the efficiency of ac, per kw you're still getting almost the same amount of heat
@@voinea12 yes - but I already have the gas boiler and the heat pump would cost me €30,000 😞
@@allinclusive5762 you can just get a couple ordinary air conditioners, for my house 3 or 4 300$ air conditioners should be enough , and all the ones I've seen also support heating with reversible valves the only thing is they don't also heat your water, unlike the very expensive central ac you mentioned
That's an expensive heat pump.
Use a gas engine to pump heat.
Fahrenheit became the international standard before centigrade specifically because of the resolution of the units. He made instruments for meteorologists and his scale put almost every temperature that mattered to them from 0 to 100.
Shortly after he died it was discovered that they could bump the temperature up by 6.67% and water went from melt to boil in 180 degrees and the area between the reference standards could all be marked out as powers of two. Celsius was easier to standardize across the whole world but Fehrenheit is a much more useful scale for almost all people, anyone who would be better off using centigrade should probably be using kelvin anyways.
here is the problem with heat pumps in general. it takes much more energy to extract heat out of something that has alot less heat in it to begin with. ie its easy to move heat from a 70F degree room to a hallway but its alot more difficult to move heat from a 0F room to the hallway. (heat and energy are the same thing in this context)
You’re wrong.
Inverter compressors rock. I've been impressed with their performance over standard on-off compressors common in older systems.
High efficiency heat pumps give me the ability to run A/C or Heat long than conventional systems using less power a plus when maximizing a solar system to run my equipment.
The problem is icing.
If you use air conditioner to heat a room when temp outside is 5-10 celsius - its ok.
But when temperature outside drops bellow zero - air conditioner's outside unit will freeze and ice. And that ice will prevent thermoregulation with outside world and drastically drop efficency until air conditioner will just stop pumping heat from outside.
Well, if only it was that easy to heat up buildings we wouldnt have problems with central heating or heating vats))
That is where the little electronics change comes in with the system, and when it notices the buildup/temperature, it reverses for a few minutes and goes back to heating, in that time the inside unit doesn't run the fan spreading the colder air until it warms back up again.
There's also geothermal, costlier to install but eliminates this problem
@@wobblysauce Aaaaand there goes your efficiencies.
Modern heat pumps will run de-icing cycles by temporarily reversing the heat flow. Lowers the efficiency, of course.
@@fubarbazqux but with the headroom you have its still better than resistive heating.
I have 2 words, Wisconsin winters. In order for a heat pump to work in winter here, it needs to be an underground piping one. Very expensive to install.
Yup, Canadians learned heatpumps aren't up to the task either.
My Heat pump works down to -28C
What did you do to collect the water from the back of the window unit?
That’s what I want to know. I guess it’s going to drip all over the floor. Or perhaps he’s in an area of the country with little to no humid, so it evaporates out of the tray as soon as it condenses out of the air…which is impossible in half the country with high humidity. It’s a nice little expirament but not practical where I live. I have a heat pump and we want to get rid of it…it sucks.
This is not an insurmountable problem.
@@jamesengland7461 Maybe. But I'm sure that he will either have a solution that is way over engineered, or stupid simple. If I do this, I'll need to have my plan down to a T. Otherwise, the wife issue takes effect....😶
@@jamesengland7461 a hose going into a drain is the usual solution.
Since the day I first stumbled upon your channel I fell in love with your unwavering dedication to the scientific method and your precise and accurate articulation of physics. This video is a perfect example of why I value this channel so highly. Looking forward to the next one!
Wow, thank you!
As a European it is honestly hard to believe that most of the USA does not use heat pumps and heat with direct electricity or gas which is even more insane to us.
If it's -15c outside, natural gas cost is $1/ccf and electricity cost is $0.2/kwh (both approximately correct costs for the American midwest), a 96% efficient condensing gas furnace is far cheaper to run than even the best heat pump. Because of this, you'll be running the gas furnace for most of the winter, and you'd only use a heat pump during the fall and spring ... and the heat pump would wear out before you ever get enough savings out of it to pay for the added cost (vs. AC only). Keep in mind that gas-fired generating stations are only 20-35% efficient, meaning that in an area where electricity is primarily generated using gas turbines, a heat pump would have to achieve a COP of between 3 and 5 to match the overall efficiency of a condensing gas furnace ... and no heat pump can do that in truly cold climates.
Posting to see this later
Where I'm at the electricity is WAY more expensive than gas so while it's more efficient to use a heat pump, it's much cheaper to run a gas furnace.
Hopefully you'll be able to PV panels and turn that around and avoid burning fossil fuels.
@@BramMertens hopefully the people who believe the “fossil fuels are bad/electricity is good” nonsense will wake up to reality someday.
@@TheSwissChalet please enlighten me.
@@TheSwissChalet In Finland our electricity is only about 5 % fossile. And we have much cheaper electricity than most of Europe. We don't use gas for households, but typically a house has 3*35A 240V electric connection. Good enough for 9kW sauna stove, cooking and heating same time. We have 5 nuclear reactors, thousand if wind turbines, hydropower, bioenergy. We buy also Norwegian and Swedish hydropower, if there is too little wind.
We use very little gas, we don't have pipeline from Norway and Russian pipelines are proven unreliable, and we don't want to do business with Russia anymore. Russia is a mafia that has a state. Better stay away. They already stole our power plants and factories invested in Russia.
We just opened our own uranium mine also. We are also going to mine all minerals needed for electric cars, better not to be dependent on some authoritarian countries. Electrifying our road traffic would increase electricity needs only 10%. We used to have higher consumption 10 years ago, efficiency has improved and paperfactories closed.
@@jounisaari9471 Electric cars can be centrally controlled, and stopped anytime the controllers want to stop you. All types of mining are environmentally damaging...so I don't know how you could consider that "green"...only because the brainwashers convinced people of that. Your houses in Finland are extremely small compared to US houses, and you have little need for air conditioning. Not really comparable.
Yea like I'm going to turn my air conditioner around in the winter and expose all the controls that are designed to be in an inside environment to the harsh outside winter environment. I don't think so. I'll just keep using my AC to cool the inside in the summer and my heater to warm the inside in the winter. A better test would be to have the outside of the bedroom at 30 degrees and see how much heat the other side of the AC puts into the room.
Love this idea in theory. I work for a ministry and we serve many poor and elderly people who don't have central air and often have to use space heaters in the summer and window AC units in the summer. I love the idea of making these units more effective for people, since they are all pinching pennies as it is. My only question is how would you suggest weather proofing an AC unit having the electronics face outside? Thank you
So you just turn the ac around backwards?
I want to try this in my garage!
Yep. Heat comes out one side and cold out the other. It’s why it has to be 1/2 inside and out. If u stick an a/c in the middle of a room it would work. It would actually heat the air a bit. Especially a dehumidifier works that way
Iam amazed in Europe we use this for many years already.
I don't want to interfere with your, we're European and we're so Superior analogy, but we have been using heat pumps for years and years and years in the United States as well.
@@yachtsteve Yeah bloody Europeans, I'm from the UK and I'm with you on that one
@@yachtsteve I am european and I'd like to say that... europe is not even uniform between countries to make these comparisons and these "as an enlightened EU citizen" comments are dumb.
I’m in the US and have had a heat pump for over 20 years. What about this video makes you think any of this is “new”? Our heat pump sucks, by the way. It is inefficient and we want to get rid of it. We still have to use heating oil as a backup because when the temperature goes below freezing outside (which it does every year for weeks on end), the heat pump doesn’t come anywhere near heating the house comfortably enough, and it’s a HUGE unit.
@@TheSwissChalet :)
If you are not in the financial market space right now, you are making a huge mistake. I understand that it could be due to ignorance, but if you want to make your money work for you... prevent inflation
Thanks for continuing updates I'd rather trade the crypto market as it's more profitable. I make a good amount of money per week even though I barely trade myself.
A lot of people still make massive profit from the crypto market, all you really need is a relevant information and some ‹professional advice. ‹it's totally inappropriate for investors to hang on while suffering from dip during significant
You trade also?, I
No I don't trade on my own anymore, I always required help and assistance
From my personal financial advisor
..
I currently have a GE geospring water heater , been using heat pump only for the last 5 years. Shaved almost 30 percent off electric bill while gaining cooling ac and drier basement air. That is a win/ win. Now lets build a solar reflected condenser for a freezer/ cooler unit.
This is an excellent demonstration for those unfamiliar with the benefits of heat pumps and the lack of affordable small window units. As others have noted, it’s possible to modify a window AC into a heat pump, a concept that dates back to the 1960s. However, modern units require more than just adding a reversing valve-features like defrost modes and proper drainage are crucial but often overlooked. Until these issues are solved, manufacturers seem hesitant to revive this idea. Some inverter mini-splits are exploring the concept, but at over $3,000 and with no units as small as 5,000 BTU, there’s still a gap for small homes needing simple heating and cooling solutions.
Good points.
One additional thought: Magtor linear motor based compressor tech, seems they are looking to recover the 33% loss from rotating motor compressor due to cost to change rotating to linear motion for compressor...looks interesting, is this a part of what you plan for your next video?! Love your channel!
Very nice video. Perhaps a followup series on how to use these lesson's practically in home? Keep up the great work!
That's a really nice timer very clear and Visible.
Many times in the past I have walked by my AC unit in the window while it was running. Many times I thought to myself, I should flip that thing around in the winter". The high amount of heat being blown off the back is just being wasted. I'm actually going to do it this time. The next trick would be to cover the controls outside. Great Video!
Spent a lot of time trying to improve thermal efficiency of my home so looking forward to the next video
I did a similar experiment to convert a window A/C into a heat pump. The main practical problem is that the outdoor coil will freeze up and you won't get anymore heat after that happens. I created a defrosting circuit using an Arduino. Look for my video entitled "Convert air conditioner to heat pump using Arduino controller relay box". By using this, I was able to create a practical heat pump that saved me money on heating.
My home is Energy Star rated. I had one of these for 5 years and was not very impressed with it. By the time the air made it through the ducts to the registers, it was only 'very warm' and not at all the heat levels I was used to. Secondly, as soon as it dropped below 30f outside, the internal heat strips would kick on. No big deal, but if we had long periods of days where the temps were right around that 30f mark, it would constantly switch back and forth between heat pump and resistance strips. Lastly, would be that after 5 years, it quit in the middle of summer. The tech that replaced it said that the compressors are the same whether its a heat pump or not, but heat pumps run all year instead of getting the winter break. More hours of use means faster detonation. Made perfect sense to me.
THE MATH: I paid $2,700 for the heat pump upgrade when I bought this house, which included the proper thermostat and running the 7-wire for it. My savings were an average of $32 per month; meaning it takes me 7 years to EQUAL the initial cost to upgrade. I know mine only lasted 5 years, but even if it had lasted 7 or 10 or even 15 years, the few thousand dollars saved is not worth losing out on being able to cook my feet on a hot register, or to let that hot blast of air up under my robe on a cold morning.