I guess I'm the "someone in the comments". I used to have a pool and whirlpool in the central area of Arizona. Had a large Propane gas heater and could be directed to heat the whirlpool only or the pool or both. One November, I invited some friends over for Thanksgiving Holiday. Plan was to have a nice comfortable, warm whirlpool after the big afternoon meal and watch the sunset. Turned on the heater at 9:00 AM. A 5:30 PM the whirlpool was still quite cold, so we changed plans. I used up two large tanks of propane in the process and called a service to have them refilled. The guy came and asked me "why refill them now at the end of November?"; since any fool knows that even the large, powerful heater I had was going to be useless until mid March or later. Again, since you're a nerd like me, it would be interesting to see the record of heating and pool use for the next >6 months. As you state, pool heaters are only useful for adding a couple of extra months during the changing of the seasons.

You can build the scheduling with Home Assistant :)

@villehietala9677

7 ай бұрын

Schedules are hard in ha compared to actually measuring currents and driving stuff accordingly with it.

I am able to keep a 18.000L above ground pool to 29C with a 5kW heat pump from mai to september in Belgium. Your pool is underground and you live a much warmer region than me which most probably/certainly makes that 11kW more than enough. Just make sure to get that cover in asap because it really makes a huge difference (you'll also save money not needing to refill the pool).

We have a Madinack pool heat pump in Brisbane. Works well but yet to get our first power bill. The heat pump tends to make the water a bit too warm, so will lower the set temperature. We run it on auto now so it can heat and cool. Brisbane pools can get a bit hot.

Your heat pump heats the pool and cools the air. Wouldn't it be cool (haha, pun) if you could use the cool air to cool your house and/or the solar panels?

About the automation of switching it on when you have excess solar. You could DIY this with smart plugs and some sensors. It's not gonna be as reliable probably, but you can fix it yourself and implement it however you want. I bought a random bunch of smart plugs for cheap, they have ESP8266 inside typically, flashed the ESP8266 with community made open source firmware like Tasmota or ESPhome to liberate the devices from the clouds and have them available on my network and then I set up Home Assistant on a RaspberryPi to log the data. Home Assistant has a few web widgets, one of them is a thermostat. So I made a few temp sensors using ESP8266 devkit boards and made myself a thermostat. Once you have the data on the RaspberryPi, you can code whatever you want but I am sure there are premade solutions for some things. I like it because I can do whatever and it's all ran locally.

@EEVblog2

7 ай бұрын

Sure, anything is possible given enough effort.

Yes - Eddie is the controller for dumping energy into hot water tank, Harvie is the comms hub.

@Electronics-Rocks

7 ай бұрын

Yes this is correct all you need is the expansion board in Eddie plus RFsolution LowRa to pool or buy another Eddie with expansion board to run the heat pump. The expansion board is needed as the Eddie output is inverter driven so can vary the output power giving more efficiency & without causing any switching noise a normal triac would give. So to give a normal on off with protecting those FET a relay expansion board is needed!

@EEVblog2

7 ай бұрын

@@Electronics-Rocks Why they don't just make a cheap relay output module is beyond me. Or even have that built into the Zappi. Such a huge oversight.

My folk's house in Florida runs air con much of the year. Also running ~5kW pool heat pump much of the year. I'm looking into a retrofit heat exchanger that bypasses the air source AC condenser and routes instead through a special heat exchanger that dumps the heat into the pool water.

COP of 16? What were the testing conditions? My pool heater, R6450ti (US market) gets only a COP of 6.

@EEVblog2

7 ай бұрын

See previous video, I show the sticker with the conditions on it.

@eliotmansfield

7 ай бұрын

cop of 16 when the ambient is 40’c and you don’t need to heat the pool at all

Sea water where I live peaks at 19 C at end of summer, no problem for the kids when the sun is shining! Around 12 C in mid winter - only the brave and well clad in neoprene can manage that - but there are a hard core who do it every day!!

@EEVblog2

7 ай бұрын

I've done 10degC canyons without a wetsuit.

Today my barometer and thermometer both read "FN hot". Pools are definitely summer thing, and heater just gives you the shoulder season, winter is a fools errand.

@EEVblog2

7 ай бұрын

Yeah, wasn't worth the expense to even try. Can always fill up the bath tub on a cold day with the heat pump hot water system.

👍 A like alone for the "Fahrenheit rubbish".🙂

@RoderikvanReekum

7 ай бұрын

Fahrenheit is SHIT

What I want to know, is how many bald eagles per gallon does that heater put out? (( Being a Yank.. familiar with BTU, Tons, and degrees Frankenstein.. )) none of that Science rubbish.

@samuraidriver4x4

7 ай бұрын

Its roughly 5 furlongs for a kilometer, should help you calculate it to freedom units😉

The huge capacity installations are twinned and tripled units, not a single bit one.

The Audio levels are down on this video...

@EEVblog2

7 ай бұрын

Yeah, no edit, straight upload of screen capture file.

Interesting. I have a solar heater for the pool on the garage roof, one of those arrays of black pipes. My electricity bills are high enough without an electric heater. I wonder how the efficiency and cost compares between my solar heating and solar panels + heat pump? Also, remember you need to take into account the energy use of the pump itself if you run the heater at times when the filter is normally off. What's the power requirement of your pool pump? Here's where you could have saved energy with a variable speed pump because it can likely run on low speed for only the heater, especially if you can bypass the filter.

@wobblysauce

7 ай бұрын

The pump is going to pump regardless

@EEVblog2

7 ай бұрын

Problem is havign the pump know when it's the heat pump switching it on. I can get a variable speed drive for my fixed pump.

@FrankGennari

7 ай бұрын

That's a good point. The pump I have is all fancy with a backlit digital display on the top that shows the current/power, speed/flow rate, and temperature. It also has some sort of data connection to the control panel, maybe a serial port of some sort. I assume it could be configured in this way - though I've only seen it running at a single speed. @@EEVblog2

your solar inverter might have a dry contact output for when it's making excess. Fronius ones do.

@EEVblog2

7 ай бұрын

Yes, but I have to separate solar systems.

This is strange, no bots.

@landspide

7 ай бұрын

The silence is deafening.

Dave should start a dairy... this pool sure is getting milked!! ...its a friendly bit of banter/joke people!.. :) do they not make them solar(hart) water heaters they used to put on roofs like solar panels?..the one with the tank and water pipes in the panel..... surely one of them would be perfect or atleast take load off heating the house water.. ..and theres another idea Dave, you could make a cover for the box and heat pump with some poles and a solar panel!

I wonder if we'll ever see water-cooled solar panels that you can connect to your pool plumbing. Cool the solar panels for optimal performance and put all that waste heat into the pool!

@EEVblog2

7 ай бұрын

You can get them.

MEasure, measure, measure!

28 degrees isn't a pool, it's a bathtub.

@WacKEDmaN

7 ай бұрын

i reckon 19c is perfect for aus winter or summer

@JustinAlexanderBell

7 ай бұрын

82.4f isn't that high tbh

Heat pump DO NOT have an efficiency greater than 1. They have a coefficient of performance greater than 1. AKA you can improve the system and use less power while still having the same COP. I'm sure Dave knows all that but as a mech eng I found the statement at 1:54 misleading.

120KW for the Max -> Just spews out boiling water 😂

@wobblysauce

7 ай бұрын

No crabs in this pot

A like for the flat earth comment

First !

@eimparas

7 ай бұрын

and no bots this time 😛

@EEVblog2

7 ай бұрын

@@eimparas Wow, yeah, no bots. Did KZread finally do something?

@checksum00

7 ай бұрын

@@EEVblog2 It's eerily quiet in here...