MASTERING Residential HVAC

[00:00:00]Hey Build Show, Steve Basic Architect. I am out here in our offsite build. Yes, we have some excitement brewing here because as you know, we're doing a whole series on mechanical systems, but I've jumped outside. We are looking at SpacePak's air-to-water systems. Yeah, that's what we're looking at here. These are air-to-water heat pumps. The only thing that goes in and out of the house is chilled water and warm water.

[00:00:31]Everything is done inside of this unit.

[00:00:35]All the refrigerants are inside this external unit. So, we have a lot to unpack. We got Jason from Meridian Plumbing and Heating and he is a wealth of knowledge. So, let's catch up with Jason and let's talk air-to-water.

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[00:01:06]>> All right, so we made our way over to what I like to call the dirty side of the house. Now, get your mind out of the gutter because the dirty side of the house really means where do we put these behemoths, right? I mean, they need a home to go um because of their size, but they also have some clearance dimensions that are associated with it. Heights off of the ground, heights away from the wall, fans, etc. etc. We're going to get unpack all of that with uh Jason here.

[00:01:39]But, uh Jason, I'm going to s- literally start with you and let you take over. So, tell us like on the most fundamental level, like what are we looking at here? What's its purpose? What is this thing doing?

[00:01:53]>> So, this is the SpacePak CC3260. This is a 5-ton air-to-water heat pump. This is a fantastic heat pump. This is the exact same heat pump that I have at my personal house. What we're doing here is unlike uh mini split or an air-to-air heat pump system, right? We're piping a water glycol mix from the inside from our buffer tanks and our batteries out here to this heat pump and we're doing all of the work heating and chilling that water out here. Refrigerant never enters the building at all and that's important for a couple of reasons. The largest of which is that we're currently going through a refrigerant changeover where the EPA is changing the chemicals that we're allowed to use as refrigerants and the new refrigerants are mildly flammable. Well, that doesn't matter to us cuz all of our mildly our mildly flammable refrigerant is contained out here. It never enters the building. In the future, what they use in in uh Europe is R290, which is essentially propane as a refrigerant.

[00:02:52]They're not burning it. They're using it as a refrigerant. Obviously, propane is highly flammable, but it's also a terrific refrigerant. It hits higher temperatures at higher efficiencies and when that technology comes here, it's a pretty quick and easy swapout to change this to an R290 heat pump. In fact, SpacePak will have them available.

[00:03:12]They're probably going to have the same piping connections or very similar, so you could swip switch this out really easily and get an increase in efficiency and higher output temperatures if you need them and none of that is going to matter to you as a consumer because that refrigerant is never going to enter your house. It's only water and glycol. So, they're also very, very safe and very, very future proof, which are two of the big reasons that I advocate so heavily for air-to-water heat pumps beyond the fact that we also get superior dehumidification when we're working with water. Houses that are well built such as this one here, dehumidification is a really important consideration. And you said, you know, air-to-water. So, to be crystal clear on that concept, we're basically, regardless of what the temperature is outside, it's we're here climate zone 5, it can be 0° below 0, this machine is still extracting heat energy out of the air and putting it into the water.

[00:04:11]>> That's correct, Steve. These are rated down to -22.

[00:04:14]>> Now, in the summertime, which we're here now, they kind of work in reverse. It's bringing heated water to this unit, and the unit is expelling the heat energy into the air and sending back cooler water.

[00:04:29]>> That's correct, Steve. So, these during the summer, if you were to stand out here, there's going to be hot air coming out of these fans, and that's because all the heat from this house behind us is being removed and it's being spit out through these fans into the air out here where it doesn't matter to anybody.

[00:04:47]Except the service guy standing in front of it melting.

[00:04:49]>> Now, that being said, I can see that it's on the stand, and I do know, I mean, there's specific clearances. We have to get this out of the snow cuz we can't just set it on the ground. It has to be, because this is a fan, it needs air on the backside here so that as it pulls that air, it has an adequate supply. You can't put this up against the house, for instance.

[00:05:12]Um and then, obviously, we have all of our chilled lines. Can you speak a little to the dimensions and the requirements of placing one of these?

[00:05:20]>> So, where you place it and how you place it is going to depend on where you are in the country. If you're some place where you don't get snow, these don't have to be stood up like this off the ground as high. You're still going to want to place it off the ground cuz these going to defrost or uh if you're using this in an application where you're making domestic hot water, the amount of water that's going to drain out of the bottom of this thing in defrost or just [clears throat] as a byproduct of chill of cooking hot water during the the is going to be quite impressive. Uh there's a lot of water that comes out of these things. So, you always want to stand it up a little bit, but blocks are fine if you're not in a snow climate.

[00:05:54]Here in Massachusetts, the any the National Electrical Code that we've adopted here requires a 3-ft service area for this panel here. This is where we service it on this side. So, we need a 3 by 3 open space in front of this to be able to safely conduct service on this. The units we like to see them The minimum is 16 in from the the building to the back of the unit, but we try to space them out a little bit further when we can cuz you can never have too much air air space moving across these. Other considerations are weight. This thing weighs 480 lb roughly. You know, you want to put it on sure footing so that it's not going to move around. There's very little vibration, almost none. In fact, my personal heat pump is on the other side of the wall about 6 ft over from my headboard, and you never even know it's running no matter what it's doing outside. So, they're very quiet. They don't have any vibration that's going to transfer through the pipes to the walls or anything like that.

[00:06:51]>> And it's sitting on isolation pads, right? I mean we have these little neoprene isolation pads, so the unit isn't directly connected to the stand.

[00:07:00]So, there is some absorptive quality of any vibration in the in those isolation pads.

[00:07:07]>> There sure is. Uh but to be honest with you, Steve, I wanted to run an experiment at my house, so I didn't put them in.

[00:07:13]>> Okay.

[00:07:13]>> Uh mine is direct direct to strut, and uh couldn't tell you it's running. Wouldn't even know.

[00:07:19]>> Now, one of the things I learned about these on a previous project where we used it, these are in close proximity to the house.

[00:07:25]>> Mhm.

[00:07:26]>> But if I had, say, a barn 300 ft away, I could put this out next to the barn and just run that chilled and water hot water line in the ground in a really good insulated pipe, but I could run it from my house out to the unit out there and then come back. We've done it before where we've run them we'll dig a trench, so we'd typically we'll put it below the frost line. We lay down rigid board insulation. We lay down our piping. We spray foam that. We put rigid board back on top of it. Bury it in sand with caution tape and uh and then backfill it.

[00:07:58]>> And it's still only water though. It's the glycol water.

[00:08:00]>> glycol water mix, yep.

[00:08:02]>> But but that displacement is possible.

[00:08:04]So if it's like if you wanted to use the system and you said, "Oh, I don't want that near my pool or I don't really have a dirty side on my house." These lines could have easily come out of the house into the ground and these units could have been down the driveway 100 ft if we >> These could be 300. You just need to You can go as far as you can as far as you can size piping to you can go.

[00:08:24]>> So all of this obviously we have four connections it looks like going in. If you want to speak to what are those four things that are happening there?

[00:08:34]>> Absolutely. So we have our water supply and return.

[00:08:37]>> Okay.

[00:08:37]>> Then we have our wiring connections. In this application, the heat pumps themselves control our circulation pumps that are pushing the water to and from them.

[00:08:47]So we're controlling those through one and then we have low voltage communication that's going through the other electrical term- terminal. And then we have our supply and return piping. As part of that, even though we just got done saying that these don't have any noise or vibration, because this is a new build and this ground was excavated. This was 15 ft deep 2 months ago.

[00:09:08]There's some There's some opportunity for the ground to shift and things to move here. And as part of that, we installed some isolator some vibration isolators here to give us some flexibility so that if the ground does move, we don't break a line, rupture something like that.

[00:09:24]Beyond that, we have isolation valves at the unit. That is for that time when, you know, these units come to the end of their service life, they need to be replaced. This is what goes into This is part of why the overall cost of ownership with an air-to-water heat pump is significantly less.

[00:09:41]Kind of like the old boiler days, when you change out a boiler, or in this case, if you change out a heat pump, all of your interior stuff can stay. The heat pump gets taken apart, pulled away, and replaced. So, simply said, this is just a source of either hot or cold water.

[00:09:56]>> Absolutely.

[00:09:57]>> And those pipes, it's either hot or cold water going in or out.

[00:10:01]>> That's correct.

[00:10:02]>> And so, that system in there really doesn't know what's out here. Really doesn't care. All the systems that we're going to go talk about inside, they don't [snorts] care what's out here. All they care is that when there's hot water required, hot water comes in. When there's cold water required, cold water comes in.

[00:10:20]>> Absolutely. So, that control that we're going to be talking about in the basement, that's the brains of this whole operation. As long as when that says, "I need hot water," it gets hot water. And when it says, "I need cold water," it gets cold water. That's the only thing that matters to it. So, these heat pumps can be taken out, changed, removed, put new ones in, and it has no bearing on anything inside the house.

[00:10:42]And that's That's a big deal if you're designing a house that you're going to live in for quite a long time. You're going to go through a couple iterations of systems, and it's really convenient to not have to tear your whole house apart every time you want to do that, have to change out all your interior stuff. Whereas, like with mini splits, if you have to If you decide to change brands, or uh if you have to change refrigerants or something like that, not only do you have to remove and replace the outdoor unit, but all of the indoor stuff that's connected to it also needs to be changed. Here, we don't worry about that.

[00:11:13]>> question I had was, there's two fans here. Does that mean this is like a multiple unit, or like tw- a double unit? Is it because there's two fans, or is this just standard with their systems?

[00:11:25]>> So, this one being the bigger one needs to move It needs to be able to extract more heat from the air. That's the 60,000 BTU capacity just requires us to be able to extract 60,000 BTUs of energy from the air at the temperatures where this is going to operate. And so, as part of that, uh SpacePak had to engineer larger coils and larger fans.

[00:11:46]And that's why this one has the double stack fan and a larger coil.

[00:11:51]>> But, they have single fan uh smaller units for smaller type systems.

[00:11:56]>> The other project that we're looking at that you're doing, uh we're looking at doing two 40,000 BTU heat pumps as opposed to two 60,000 BTU heat pumps.

[00:12:05]The 40,000 BTU heat pumps are a single stack or single fan.

[00:12:09]>> Yeah. I'll ask of you, any parting words?

[00:12:12]>> If you're building a house like this, I would highly recommend looking into air to water or using hydronics to do it.

[00:12:18]Geothermal water to water is another option that's really good as well.

[00:12:22]>> Wow.

[00:12:23]There you have it, folks.

[00:12:24]Uh we're outside or inside. We jumped outside. We're going back inside. We have a whole bunch of videos, so um you know, look in the near future, look for more videos with uh Jason as we go through this whole kind of mechanical series. But, thank you, Jason, for coming on out, sharing your experience, talking a little bit about these units because, honestly, to a lot of people, it's a big brown box with a couple fans that we have no idea what the heck it's doing, so.

[00:12:54]>> The magic box.

[00:12:55]>> The magic box is it's it's inside there, yeah.

[00:12:58]>> It's a big heavy box that comes >> There you go.

[00:13:01]There you go. So, if this is your first time you've ever seen a Build Show video or one of my videos, then thank you for joining in. Now, go watch all the rest.

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[00:13:33]Um Build Show Live. October 16th, 17th, 18th. Are you going, going, going? Are you going to be there? Yes, I hope so because I would love to meet up with you. And I actually have a special treat. I'm bringing my daughter Alexandra from the office and her and I are going to do a presentation together.

[00:13:51]Little does she know, she's going to do most of the presentation. I'm going to sit there like a bump on a log and uh cheer her on. So, why don't you come out and uh cheer her on with me. Other than that, this is the Build Show. I'm Steve Bazegian, architect. Until next time, long live our buildings.