UPDATE: Water Heater Woes Continued...

Temperature in the Crawl Space from last night: next to the Geospring and the crawl space door (Bottom Value=56.1F)

Continuing on from my current discussion, so I'm been watching the Geospring to see if Friday's fix of the control board has worked.  Well, my skepticism has been right.  This AM, I checked the TED5000 and it appears the Geospring is still not operating correctly.  And I know its got nothing to do with the temperature in the crawl space because that's fine...and this AM it was  a nice 47F outside while the crawl space was at least 56F.  The graphs below show the AM routine with showers and such.  You can easily see the electric elements on the water heater turning on (a healthy ~5kW) 3 times over this morning for showers.  The 3rd time is when my wife cleaned the dishes in the sink.

Morning Energy Consumption.  The first big jump and 10-min plateau is the water heater running for my wife's shower.  The second is my my shower (with the 'thorn' on top for my wife's  hair dryer).  The third...well, I'm not sure.  Laundry?

Below is a closeup of the 3rd jump.  What I find a little odd is the "noise" on the graph (the jumping up/down).  That's kind of unusual.  Just look at the data before and notice that the data is very smooth.  And after is a little "rough" also.  Thinking about this...that's got to be the clothes washer.  I'm guessing it must be that little bit of "juice" to keep the drum moving.  Neat, huh?

Closeup of the 3rd turn on of the water heater electric elements.  

Since I can't zoom or change the scale on these graphs, I downloaded the raw data from TED and opened it up in Excel to graph.  The results are below so you can easily see the "noise" from the clothes washer.

Excel Plot of the clothes washer "Noise"  Lots of ups and downs.  

Anyhow, regardless of what the clothes washer is doing, I'm still a little peeved about my water heater still not operating correctly.  It should be running the heat pump exclusively.

Reminder of the weather station next to the water heater with the water heater set to "Heat Pump Only"

Well, I guess I'll get the *joy* of calling GE again and hopefully this time I won't get the rude person who's trying to tell me I'm wrong and I don't understand how the water heater works...along with the threat that I'll have to pay for the service "when they find there's nothing wrong".   If I'm wrong, I'll gladly blog about it and apologize.  Until that happens...which it hasn't to date...

Water Heater Woes Continues...

OK...so recall a little while ago (cue the Scooby-Doo music and squiggly lines), I was having some issues with my GE Geospring Heat Pump Water Heater.  Well on Friday last week, the back-ordered control board finally arrive and week later (yesterday), the GE repair guys showed up and installed it.  As a fun note, the water heater was showing the dreaded "FC/F14" (failed compressor) error when I opened up the crawl space before the guys arrived.

Well, go figure, today I'm getting ready to feed the dog while my wife was showering and I noticed on the energy monitor that the energy usage was sky-high.  Well, what the heck!  I checked and the downstairs heat was on...OK...that's about 2.5 kW (Stage 2).  The upstairs heat was not on.  And then while looking around I heard her hair dryer come on...that's about 1.5kW.  So I checked TED and this is what I saw the following:

Morning Power Usage.  The ~2.5kW is the heat.  The final blip is a hair dryer.  The big jump is the water heater.

 Huh...there' a huge roughly 5kW jump...so the electric element is on the water heater again!  WTH?!?  Didn't those guys fix that yesterday?!?

Well, at this point I can't do any more investigation because I needed to cook breakfast for the family. In case you're wondering, it was waffles.  And yes, they were awesome.

So after cooking and cleaning up I checked on the water heater.  While doing dishes, I did run over to the corner of the house and listen and I could hear the heat pump working.  Well that's good!

After I had finished cleaning, everything I checked the power monitor and *$%&$%, the electric heating element was on again!  Well, now I was free to check on everything.  Below is my series of pictures where I made sure everything was off.  There was no heat on, upstairs or downstairs.  The dryer wasn't running.  We weren't cooking or baking.  And nothing else was running (fridge, freezer, kegerator).  I also checked the temperature in the crawl space...and it was a healthy 59F.

TED5000 showing my energy usage

Temperatures.  Upper is Indoor.  Lower is Crawl Space.  Ignore the time, I've never set it.

Downstairs heat is not running.

Upstairs heat is not running either

Geospring showing it in Heat Pump Only Mode.

While down in the crawl space checking the water heater and taking the above picture you could hear the a click which I'm guessing was the electric elements turning off.  I verified it with the below pictures...

Yup, all heating (air and water) is off. 

Below is the TED screenshot.  You can see the event described earlier (~6:30am) with the hair dryer peak.  And then there's cooking breakfast followed by doing the dishes.  Then everything turns off while we eat followed by the final water heater peak when I was doing this investigation.

TED5000 energy monitor

So I'm going to try an experiment.  I relocated my weather monitor right next to the Geospring.  Not to say it was much further away...maybe 10-15-ft, but now it's only about 1-ft away.  And it is also right next to the crawl space door.  This should be the coldest it should ever read, if for some reason, air is getting through the insulated and weatherstripped door.  It happens, so I'm trying to give it the benefit of the doubt although one would think that if it were significant enough, I'd see huge fluctuation in the temperature in my entire crawl space...which I do not see.

Geospring with the weather (temp/humidity) monitor now located beside the water heater.  The door is about 3-ft away.

Looking at the monitor now, it is showing a lower temperature...53F instead of 59F.  Then again, I did just have the crawl space door open while I went inside to grab the weather station, then move it over and position it (it didn't want to stand up so I had to put it on its side), and then take the picture.  And even with that, it's still nearly 8F higher than the minimum temp.  So I'm overly surprised that the temperature it lower. 

Either way, I'm going leave this here for a while to see if the temperature drops to below the 45F threshold where it overrides the heat pump and goes to electric.  I *highly* doubt this is the case, but I can at least rule it out.  I'll keep y'all posted.  Otherwise, I guess I'll have to call GE repair again to get them over to figure out why this thing keeps running the electric heat.