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Ducted or Not...Heat pump install tips & tricks
Ready to unravel the fascinating world of heat pump water heaters and the influence of ducting on these devices? We promise, this episode will equip you with insights that can potentially save you a great deal of trouble. We kick off by exploring the common practice of ducting water heaters to the outside and why it might not be required in unfinished spaces. Also, discover how heat pump water heaters can be a game-changer in commercial places where there's an existing heat source.
Ever wonder how humidity levels affect the efficiency of heat pump water heaters? Well, we've got you covered! We take a deep-dive into the role of varying humidity levels, especially in humid regions like Minnesota, and how heat pump water heaters might still be beneficial without impacting your gas bill. We also discuss the relevance of the size of your furnace and the BTUs per hour of the heater. We wrap up with some invaluable tips on ducting and the importance of reading the installation instructions. So, gear up for this enlightening roller-coaster ride that will leave you with a wealth of knowledge on heat pump water heaters and ducting.
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Eric Aune @mechanicalhub
Andy Mickelson @mick_plumb
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Yo, yo, yo. How's it going, andy? What's up? Ha ha ha. Bonus episode Bonus episode.
Speaker 1:We recently talked about heat pump water heaters and we got some messages on them over on in the DMs on Instagram. So it just says reminder anybody. If you want to get in touch with us, you can look in your like, for instance in your Apple or Spotify podcast app. There's right in the description of the show. There's little links right directly to our DM over on Instagram, but you can hit us up over on Instagram. I'm at at Mechanical Hub. Andy is at mck m-i-c-k, underscore plumb p-l-u-m-b, and you can send us any kind of message or feedback or anything about the show. Start that out with um m-t-g-a, m-t-g-a. There you go. Thank you, boy.
Speaker 2:I tell you I'm here for you, I'm here for you.
Speaker 1:I appreciate it. You're here for me, so anyway, back to it. So we talked about heat pumps recently. We got some messages about it and it got brought up in conversations between you and I about ducting these things out, and so let's get into that. We don't usually talk about like install work or technical stuff on the job. It's not really been the theme of the podcast, but let's go that direction for this one a little bit. Yeah, I have. I'm just going to make a statement to start it out.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:So I live in a cold climate. The our water heaters are not sitting outside, they're. You know, we have basements for um on on kind of the normal year, we're six to seven months heating season. Right, consider that, I mean, that's, that's significant, right there, right, um, and we see a lot of gas, tons and tons of gas. Like the majority of appliances and homes in my area are gas and they have been up, will be for a long time. Right, Um, that the gas doesn't come into this venting but the the whole idea of a heat pump does. So you have to have a minimum cubic foot capacity of the space that they're in in order for these things to operate properly, right, right, I mean, I think most people listening are going to understand that, right, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:I think, I think the the place where people get into trouble is when they, you know, come in and they're like oh, we've got this 50 electric or 65 gallon electric and it's in this closet at the end of the hall. Yeah, you know, on the two story, you know, and you're you're like, oh, okay, yeah, that's great, you know. So you walk in there and right smack in the middle of the house is this closet that it's got a 65 gallon water heater in.
Speaker 1:Well, I see I don't see those a ton. I see I guess it's not. They're not unheard of, right? They're not in our like standard. You know like four, eight plex kind of town home buildings, you know what I mean. Even under those we see a lot of atmospheric gas water heaters. Yeah, believe it or not, in a closet of course, like you're saying. Yep, plenty of electric in those situations too. Smaller, going to probably be 50 gallon. Yeah, and I say smaller because we see a lot of very large electric storage water heaters when it comes to electric. We see them 80, 110, 105, stuff like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because we have, like those off peak programs with a heat at night at a discount. Yeah, okay. So my statement, I didn't make it, it's my opinion, and this is based off of where I work and a couple of different things, some experience. I think these things have to be ducted to the outside because they have these exhaust ducts so that the cold air that they're putting out. I personally believe that they should be ducted to the outside. That's my opinion. Right, I'm going to stick by, unless you can convince me otherwise.
Speaker 2:I would agree, in most common residential applications, you're going to want that, You're not going to want that thing in the, in the, or taking room air, cooling it and returning, basically, cooler room air it. In some cases that we, as we talked about in the in the last episode, where we talked about heat pump water heaters, you end up with areas that are just too cold, yeah, oh, especially in the winter. Uh, if you, if you don't have, you know, a good source of heat there, then then you're going to have that. The only place that I've, I have one heat pump water heater in a commercial application. Yeah, and it works phenomenally well on the basis that it's in an elevator room. There's a mechanical room with an elevator machine in it.
Speaker 2:That's and there's 80 degrees and that heat pump, water heaters just in there live in life, you know, and it cools the room a little bit. It doesn't even party put a dent in it. But if you had an application like that, if you had a big, big, um you know, hydronic heat manifold or man or mechanical, room or something like that. Yeah, I mean, it sure makes sense.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I get that. Well, I'm. I'm thinking, though, like you said, uh, the standard residential application, maybe I'm, maybe I'm not ducting it or even considering ducting it if it's a big unfinished basement and I don't see that thing getting finished anytime soon.
Speaker 1:I'm not talking about like a modern new house that just doesn't have a finished basement yet. I'm looking at it Like the one I was in just the last couple of weeks ago with that that big uh CU three a job, yeah, Um, you know, 120, 100 year old, 100 plus year old farmhouse, Right Basement is not getting finished. Promise you that.
Speaker 2:It's seven feet.
Speaker 1:I mean the ceilings are six and six foot eight or something like that, right, yeah, yeah, uh, we're not finishing that. It's a little leaky, it's probably it's a little cooler in the summertime down there already, because it's got like a stone and block foundation, that soft block stuff, yeah, and then it certainly isn't sealed up, you know. So there's some, some infiltration there, right? Maybe you don't duct it there. Maybe there's a benefit too. Maybe the people are like well, heck, I'm going to sleep down here when it's 95 degrees outside because it's so nice and cool. I just got to listen to it and try, and you know, right, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know we've. I think the majority of them that we're looking at, that we've looked at. In the last year I've absolutely said we're going to duck this out. Here's the duct kit. I'm including it in the price. Um, we're going to route the the duct work out. You know we can pull room air, but we still have to have your makeup air. I think you were talking about it before we started recording your snorkel kit, um, or your snorkel intake, um. You're going to have to have some sort of makeup air if you duck the thing out. Well, unless the house is leaking, Sorry go ahead.
Speaker 2:I was just saying, unless the house is leaky old windows, something like that. But Well, you can't rely on that.
Speaker 1:I mean we, we are required to an obligation to account for makeup air when we put in, like, a range hood. Yeah, um, when we put in exhaust fans, that has to be considered. You know we have to consider makeup air. Yeah, so, because you don't want to pull a negative on the house, you know. So, even in these old, leaky houses, um, we can't take into account, well, this house leaks, nobody's doing a manometer test on this old house and be like well, there's enough makeup air just through all the windows, no blower doors happening just to put in a fart fan. It's not theory at all, it's just by practice and by cold dictation. We do have to consider makeup air If we're exhausting on these water heaters. I would imagine that we have to consider that just the same, right? Yeah, I mean, it's literally just an exhaust fan, it's not, or I guess? Yeah, I mean at that point adding a fan, it's part of the water heater, but yeah, yeah, so it shouldn't be another permit item.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I mean, I think that if you haven't done a heat pump, water heater where it's ducted something that you got to keep in mind, you know, at least on the, the Aero Therm on the Bradford White, you've got to order the duct kit for it, right, so it's not a big deal and I don't even think it's that expensive, but it's like a hood that connects on the outlet and then there's also a hood to connect the inlet. And the last one that we did that, I feel like, works fairly well we pulled air out of a unfinished basement and we discharged air either back into the same unfinished basement or we discharged air into the kitchen area which was directly above it. So house has an AC or it doesn't. Didn't have AC at the time and we thought, well, let's just let it push that cool air up into the, into the kitchen area.
Speaker 1:So you just got like a floor register in and put a boot in there, or what?
Speaker 2:We actually had access to put in. I don't remember what we did, like a 10 inch oval, like a 10 by four oval that came up in the wall and then we had a wall boot made for it and it's all low velocity, I don't remember what it is 175 CFM or something like that. 150 CFM. It's pretty low, low volume, but it's you got. The thing to remember is you have to connect it with eight inch, so it's eight inch round duct, it's not not a small no, no, and they, they recommend not doing it in flex.
Speaker 2:No, you should be rigid, yeah, and you know, and ideally, that discharge line, if you're going to be using it and you're going to be running it with a really cool inlet temperature, you know, if you're, let's say, you're down in the fifties and you wouldn't be a bad idea if it's going to be somewhere where condensation is going to be an issue, as far as you know, property damage, it would be a good idea to insulate that too. The exhaust, exhaust duct or exhaust duct in it's going to it'll discharge that air, I think, I think, I think most likely, yeah, it'll discharge down to 38 degrees, I think is the low, low, the temp point where it cuts off there, shuts down the heat pump and says, hey, you know what we're not, we're not really doing a making a big impact here.
Speaker 1:Well, indoors, that I mean if you've got cooling happening, that indoor that dew point should be higher, should be at that or lower already I'm guessing. But if you got a relative humidity let's say like 45%, so yeah, so I mean that's kind of in the middle, yeah, but if I could see it condensing for sure, like you just said in your example and again I acknowledge what you said is, you know, if you didn't have air conditioning, this is something you're definitely going to want to consider. Yeah, yeah, I mean you're, you're dry mountain air there. You guys don't really have any, I mean reliably don't have humidity.
Speaker 1:No, that's a stupid way to say that. It's pretty typical your humid, your humidity levels are considerably lower than, let's say, ours here in the Midwest. Yeah, absolutely, I mean your homes is probably pretty darn low even without cooling, and that's a moving target here. I would caution anybody that's not doing any cooling to just leave that duct run wild in a situation where you're not you know, where you don't have a cooler environment that is running, put it that way, I mean it's probably going to sweat.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and I don't think you're going to have an issue If you're. If you're just not ducting it, let's say you're sticking it in that big unfinished basement in the old, you know old stone foundation home that's got water infiltration and moisture issues already. Yeah, it's not going to be a problem if you don't duct it. No, no, Because the unit has a condensate drain built into it. It's going to capture anything that it produces. But if you have a cold duct discharging off of it, then you're going to have an issue. You know, in our case here I mean our humidity fluctuates a lot from day to night and that's where a lot of our condensation issues if we're going to have them happen. In that twilight sunsets, humidity jumps up quite a bit as it's as the sun's setting, Because we'll get down in the low teens for outdoor humidity relative humidity, I mean in the summertime, which is kind of crazy.
Speaker 1:We're more humid than that in the winter.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then you know we'll be in the 60s or 60, 70% humidity throughout the evening and you'll get lots of dew, lots of condensation, you know, and then as soon as it's 100 degrees again, it's down in the teens or I don't know. It's been a long time since I've heard single digits of for humidity. When we get it stuff, that's when stuff is breaking, like you can hear trees drying up and things like that. It is kind of wild.
Speaker 1:It's crazy, it's so different here. Like it's so different we have. I'm looking at my phone right now, so take it for what it's worth. Here's your midwestern weather forecast. Yeah, here's your central Minnesota forecast. It's a little callback.
Speaker 1:Today the average humidity is 52%. The dew point is 61 to 65. So, and like it is just straight up, like that's normal. Yeah, that's just super normal. It's not high or anything. We get some pretty nasty levels of humidity and dew point. Like we see dew points up in the upper 60s and, yeah, you know, mid to upper 70s. That's when, like no thanks, yeah, yeah, it's pretty crazy. Actually, it's pretty gross and it gets worse the further south you go. Like it's not, I mean it's, it is pretty extreme here in Minnesota, believe it or not, for that humidity, but yeah, so like it's just my opinion Because of those heating months here in Minnesota.
Speaker 1:This is, like I said earlier, strictly based off of my experience, and I'm basing this off of feedback from customers. They don't love the idea of this thing, like really cooling down the space, and if we're in heating mode, I get a lot of calls, a lot of blowback Like why would I want my furnace running or my boiler running to heat my water heater and it's like well, I mean, you're not wasting energy. You know your boiler isn't necessarily running more because you have a heat pump water heater. That's not really how this works, but I can see why people would think immediately that you know one is a direct cause of the other. I don't think that we're adding to the load. I think you're definitely benefiting from whatever heat that you're creating, regardless of you know whether it's more than you need or not. I don't, I don't know, I just don't want to deal with it.
Speaker 2:Right, right, no, and I hear that too, and I guess the way I've kind of combated that is talking with a homeowner and saying, hey, listen, okay, so you know, yes, it's going to cool the room. No, you're probably not going to see it on your gas bill when your furnace is running, because it's not to that extent. You know, if you remember back from our last conversation, if we're talking about using room air to heat our water through mechanical advantage in our heat pump, we're talking about 4000 BTUs an hour. Yeah, that's right. I mean, your 96% efficient furnace is, or 80% efficient furnace is not going to notice 4000 BTUs an hour. That's, that's a. That's a an irrelevant number in terms of that. If we're talking 40,000, then okay, yeah, we got something to, we got something to consider. Do we need to up size your furnace, you know? At that point then I'm questioning well, you know, what do we really do in here? Why are we doing a heat pump, water heater? I think we got the wrong, wrong end goal in mind here, right.
Speaker 1:I agree, so I agree. Well, there you go, ducted or not ducted, totally up to you. I'm ducting them. If I can, I am too.
Speaker 2:I here's, here's. Here's one. Just a small tip. Look at the instructions. There's this piece of paper it's usually like folded in half, like maybe eight and a half by 11. It's like it's kind of like a knee pad. Yeah, it looks like a knee pad or a good shim, yep, it's. It's semi absorbent so you could use it to swap up some water if you got a little leaker. But open that thing up about midway through. They're going to talk about ducting and duct work, sizing and how many fittings you can use and the maximum length. You can't run this thing up through the attic and out through the roof. Probably not going to work out if you got to go clear across the basement with it either. Anyway, yeah, that's my tip of the day.
Speaker 1:They're just not made for that, not yet. All right, dude, that was a good one. Yeah, it was. We are awesome. I just love it when we're so good. Yeah, don't break your arm there. Pat yourself on the back. See you, dude, all right.
