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

Go figure, as soon as it gets cold, then issues arise.  Recall that i have one of those fancy GE Geospring water heaters that use a low energy heat pump to heat my hot water.  To date, it's worked nearly flawlessly with the only hiccup being a Thanksgiving when I had so much family in the house, that my water heater couldn't keep up with demand in the "heat pump only" mode that I have my unit set on.  So I just changed the mode to be "hybrid" to allow the electric elements to kick-on and produce the extra hot water necessary for ~6 showers in the morning.  

My GE Geospring water heater in my crawl space

Well, all was great until just after Thanksgiving when I noticed I had a lot of energy usage.  Trying to troubleshoot led me down to the crawl space where I found a "FC" error code on the GeoSpring.  Thanks to the "Google", I found this this meant "Failed Compressor" and (apparently) it's not an unusual occurance via comments and blogs.  I went ahead and called GE customer service and scheduled an appointment for after the Holidays (I was traveling).  They mailed the parts to me ahead of time which included a bunch of new parts.  

On Monday, the guys arrived and they plugged in their laptop (when can I get one of those appliance communication modules?!?) and ran a test to verify that "Yup, the compressor is broken".  So they ripped out the old one and put in the new one while leaving me to scramble for PVC parts to reattached the drain piping.

Old Evaporator.  There's a surprising amount of rust here for something that isn't even 2 years old!

Pic i used to go to Lowe's where I picked up a union and a nipple to reattached the drain piping

So after they put everything back together, it appeared that everything was working.  The fan was running which indicated that the compressor was running producing hot water. 

Well, funny thing, the next day I was getting ready to feed the dog when I glanced over at the energy monitor and saw it using 6 kW.  Wow...that's a lot!  So I searched around the house.  Drying not running; upstairs heat off; downstairs heat off; Oven off...huh.  My wife was making some stuff in the toaster oven, but that's rinky-dink...only 1.5kW.  So I set off to the crawl space to check on the water heater.  Suspicious, I flipped the breaker and guess what?  The electric demand instantly dropped...bullseye!   Below is a screenshot of the power usage via the TED5000 and my phone.

Real-Time Energy Usage showing the water heater on...then off at the sudden drop.  And the pick-up when I flipped the breaker back on.

Once I verified, I flipped the breaker again and you can see the water heater heat pump turn on as it goes through its start-up cycle.  Huh...so why was the electric running when I had the unit set to "heat pump only"?  No idea.  So I just assumed it was a minor blip...I made sure the temp was set right and it was still on "heat pump only", then closed up the crawl space and went on my merry way.

Well, the next morning, my wife wakes me up to say, "there's no hot water".  WTH?!?  So at 5:30am I trudged down to the crawl space again.  No error codes present.  So I changed the mode to "hybrid" to enable the electric heat.  As soon as I hit enter, you can immediately hear the electric units turn on and hum.  And the energy monitor verified that the electric heating was on with an instant 4.5 kW bump in usage.  This got me annoyed...why was the heat pump not turning on???  I closed up the crawl space and checked the temperature and even after the crawl space door was open when I was checking the water heater, the temperature still registered 63F..no where near the 45F limit.  

So I broke down and called GE again to get my unit serviced.  After the troubleshooting guy argued with me about the crawl space temperature (I monitor it...trust me, I know it stays between 60-65 all year round...coldest ever was 58F), I got an appointment with a stern warning that if they don't find anything wrong with the unit, they'll charge me.  Since then I got a call from one of the service guys who I talked through what I saw (very nice gentlemen) and they suspect it's the control board.  So that's been ordered...and actually its on back-order...with a tentative appointment to replace it on the 20th.  I'm really hoping that'll fix it. Luckily, this is all no-cost to me since it's well within its 10-year warranty.  

Today's energy usage on TED.  Maybe that step around 5-6am is for the water heater?  After 7am is the dryer.  At ~8pm (19:00) the previous day you can see the water heater come on for the kiddo bath-time usage

This AM, I did try to check to see if the electric water heating was on, but I can't see it on the graphing which is odd  (maybe it is hidden in there around that 4.5-5KW area before 7am?).  Granted I didn't get the opportunity to go to the crawl space and check.  There was plenty of hot water this AM which was nice given that it was a frosty 11F outside (20F colder than yesterday).  

Anyway, we'll see if and how this gets resolved. It's a little annoying that this is happening to a fairly new unit.   

New GE Geospring Hot Water Heater!

My new GE Geospring hot water heater in series with a preheat tank (not shown)

So I finally put in a new hot water heater.  As I had discussed in previous posts, I wanted a GE Geospring air source heat pump (ASHP) hot water heater.  Well, that's what I got.

Why am I so hyped about this?  Well for starters...

1)  The Geospring is rated at an energy factor of 2.5 which saves roughly 63% of the energy as compared to normal electric hot water heater (which I had).  On an annual average basis, my former HW tank was running 0.8 hrs/day @ 4.6 kW for 3.7 kWh/day.  Thus, this is expected to be reduce to 1.37 kWh/d.  

2) I had mentioned in some of a previous posts, that the geothermal supplemental hot water generator (desuperheater) really is not optimized when using one tank.  I'd read some forums that even claimed it could be costing me energy with calls for geothermal system manufacturers to remove the 1 tank setup from its installation procedures.   Well, this new hot water tank was connected in series with my "old" hot water tank (now un-powered).  The "old" tank will act like a preheat tank allowing for maximum hot water generation via the desuperheater.  This preheated water will feed the GE Geospring.  So overall, the energy required for hot water generation is cut substantially.

3) The Geospring is so efficient because its an ASHP hot water heater.  Essentially that means its an air conditioner connected to hot water heater.  So it will "condition" (remove heat and humidity) the air and instead of discharging the heat outside, it takes the heat and pumps it into the hot water tank.  Why does this benefit me?  Well, recall I've been using a dehumidifier in my crawl space to reduce moisture...and its been a fairly large energy consumer.  Well, the Geospring will now take the place of the dehumidifier by simultaneously conditioning the air (removing moisutre) as it heats the hot water.  Thus, I'll hopefully be able to negate using the dehumidifier entirely! That should save me somewhere around 7 kWh/day alone.

Overall, I'm hoping this work will reduce my overall power consumption by about 9.33 kWh/day.  It could be higher including optimization of the desuperheater, but I have not way to quantify this yet.  Even at 9.33 kWh/day this is about 280 kWh/month!  If you consider that in the last year (Sept 2011 - Sept 2012), I've averaged 853 kWh/month, then the 280 kWh/month will result in a roughly 33% reduction in consumption!  That equates to roughly $31/month.    This project cost me about $1200 to install, so that's a 3.19 ROI (not assuming any rate increases).  I'll take that... Only time will tell what I actually achieve...   

 

More dehumidifier stuff

OK...so I ran the dehumidifer with the fan on for about 2 weeks.  Mind you...the dehumidifier itself should turn the air over in the crawl space at least 24 times per day...in a perfect world.  So with the fan running it should do a better job.  Well, it ran constantly for a long time and when the dehumidifer started cycling, I knew I must be close.  

So yesterday, I turned off the fan and just let the dehumidifer do its thing.  Unfortunately, I didn't read the manual and thought that setting it on the "3 hrs" mode would mean it would run for 3 hours then turn off.  Nope...it means its runs for 3 hrs...then turns off...and then 3 hrs later it turns on.  Seriously?  It has a 6, and 12 version of the same thing.  Really?  So there's no way to save on electricity?  It's 12 hrs of operation or Auto?!?

Come on!

OK...so this morning I switched it back to "Auto" mode...and from the figure below you can see that its constantly cycling again.  Dang it!

My guess is that I'm going to have to purchase a cheap-o $15 box fan and install it down in the crawl space with it hooked up to one of those "smart strips".  Such that when the dehumidifer turns on...then it turns on the box fan also.  Maybe that'll fix this annoying constant "on/off" cycling.  It's OK, if it turns on once every hour...but ever couple minutes sucks!

BTW, my power usage jumped up to about 45 kWH/day (OUCH!) with the fan and the dehumidifer running non-stop.  Once I turned off the fan, it went down to 36 kWh/day.  My goal is to get it back to 30 kWh/day if I can ever get the dang dehumidifer to stop running for 8 hrs!

Pic of finished crawl space

Here's a pic of the finished crawl space.  Nice, huh?  I put down unused shingles at the entrance and around the hvac equipment to minimize damage during routine maintenance.

Posted from my Android phone via Blogaway