We're in really in hot water now!

Well, not quite "in" hot water.  We just have hot water again.  Today was a great day for the project. Yesterday we ripped out the old oil furnaces and disabled the oil-fired hot water heater. We had 50 gallons of warm water in the tank which was enough to get us through to the morning.  Today the plumber and electrician visited.

Here's James from Kirkland and Shaw posing with his plumbing handiwork.  On the left is James.  In the middle is the GE Geospring air-source heat pump (ASHP) 50-gallon water heater. On the right is a 40-gallon electric water heater.  The 40-gallon water heater is not connected electrically. It is just a holding tank for hot water from the desuperheater  in the ground-source heat pump (not shown, not delivered yet).  Between the two tanks is a mixing valve to make sure we don't put water that is too hot into the Geospring.



Our electrician,  Gallant Electric, also was on-site today to install the subpanel that will provide power to the water heater, GSHP and auxiliary heat (and the condensation pump).  They pulled a big armored cable from the main service panel to the new subpanel.  They also installed the TED devices!   (I'll get a picture of Andy when he returns next week).

The TED devices measure the power used by the main electrical panel and the subpanel. The subpanel is dedicated to the water heater and the HVAC system.  The TEDs transmit their measurement data on the power lines. A device called a gateway plugs in to a normal electrical outlet and also gets connects to my Ethernet wires. The gateway is *really* cool. It basically has a little web browser inside. It can also transmit data to the google power meter so now I'm able to read my power measurements from my igoogle web page (see picture on the right).

The TED's have a really cool web interface as well (picture, right). It shows the power (kW) that my system is currently using, the cost of electricity or the pounds of carbon dioxide emitted to produce that electricity. It also has a cool graphing feature and can export the data.

The big dial in the center of the picture shows that at the moment we are using 2.7kW of electrical power. The bar in the middle of the left hand side shows that we've used 1.6kWh of electrical energy since we turned the TEDs on. That includes heating 50 gallons of water and cooking dinner this evening. If I click on the "$" it shows that we spent $0.28 on electricity today. The box in the upper right (if you could read it) says that the peak usage today was 5.7kW at 6:19PM (when corresponds to when we were cooking dinner).

The TEDs will allow me to measure the electricity use for the whole house and specifically for the GSHP and water heater. This will help us more deeply understand how much energy the new system is using. The graph at the right shows 3 bars per hour. The leftmost 2 bars (purple and green) in each group are the total power used by the house. The light blue bar (rightmost in each group) shows the power used by the Geospring. When we turned it on we were heating the 50 gallons up to 120 degrees for the first time using a combination of electrical resistance heat and the air-source heat pump. Once the water reached 120, I put the Geospring in "eheat" mode where it tries to avoid using the electrical resistance heat and relies more on the ASHP.  The GSHP will be included in the light blue bar when it is installed.



Tomorrow we get the glycol circulation tubes and thermal grout installed in the two 290-foot holes we bored last week.