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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : Freon compressor died.
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| Paul_L Guru  Joined: 03/03/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 769 |
@chronic -- I suppose I could jury rig almost anything, but that's not what I'm trying to do. I installed this abortion back in 2012 in order to curtail the $10,000 per year cost of fuel oil. It did that admirably well but something, probably too much flux residue left in the system by a really sloppy soldering job by the original assembler, caused it to fail. Now, 5 years later, I'm interested in even higher efficiency. I'm thinking about larger heat exchangers, variable speed or multiple smaller compressors, and less electric consumption pumping water through needlessly inefficient heat exchangers. Specifically I'm trying to find out what the efficiency will be for a condenser or evaporator coil immersed in a tank of water which depends on convection to move heat into or out of the coil. This thing has still been using about 28 MWhr of power a year at a cost of nearly $3400! I should be able to do better than that. Paul in NY |
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| robert.rozee Guru Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 2463 |
firstly: i've found this thread really interesting, even though i don't understand much about heatpumps. regarding the electricity consumed pumping water round the system, how would it work out having a large header tank high up that held a water reservoir, and a windmill to pump the water out of the aircon and up into said header tank? for times when there was insufficient wind to pump the required volume of water, you could have a backup electric pump - possibly with solar panels. just a crazy idea that came to mind! in new zealand (and australia) many rural properties used to use (multiple) small windmills to pump irrigation water from underground aquifers. cheers, rob :-) |
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palcal Guru Joined: 12/10/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 2006 |
I doubt flux residue was the problem, more like if the superheat setting was wrong, air conditioning compressors rely on the cool gas coming back from the evaporator for cooling. To use that amount of electricity this thing must run almost continuously. You could move to a better climate.  Paul. Edit... I just calculated that your electricity cost is about 12 cents for 1 Kwh, here in Oz it is about 25 cents, and we call this the lucky country. "It is better to be ignorant and ask a stupid question than to be plain Stupid and not ask at all" |
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| Paul_L Guru Joined: 03/03/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 769 |
@Rob -- right now the temperature here is 8°F (-13°C). Last week it hit -14°F (-25°C). My yard slopes upward from my patio by about 23 feet. The cellar floor is 4 feet below the patio. I buried 6000 feet of 3/4" HDPE pipe 7 feet deep in a rectangular grid in a hole 100' x 60' toward the top of the sloped yard. 2" HDPE pipe feeds this rectangular grid of pipes. The pump that pushes water through this heat exchanger at the rate of about 25 gallons per minute is 1/3 HP or about 250 W. A 5°F temperature rise at 25 gallons per minute (200 pounds per minute, 12,000 pounds per hour) produces 60,000 BTU/hour which is equivalent to 17.5 KWh per hour. The Freon compressor and pumps consume about 5.2 Kw to produce this 17.5 Kw of heat. The header tank would probably have to be elevated above the top of the yard exchanger at the top of the slope and would probably freeze solid. The ground freezes to a depth of about 2 feet so the exchanger grid is well below the frozen zone. The exchanger captures low density geothermal heat drifting upward through the crust of the earth from the molten iron core of the earth 100 miles below. The low density of the heat dictates the large surface area of the exchanger but the amount of heat available is enormous. We used to use a lot of windmills to pump water here. Back in the day of steam railroad locomotives every 50 miles or so across the deserts out west there would be a windmill with a shaft driven pump deep in a well pumping water into a holding tank which would drop water into a locomotive by gravity. @Paul -- The idiots who assembled this heat pump were slobs. Back in 2013 I had to replace the freon reversing valve which had jammed. Look at this wonderful soldering job they did with the overheated copper turned purple and the excessive flux.  Look inside of the old reversing valve, that white stuff looks like crystallized flux to me.  I shook this white crystalline stuff out of the old reversing valve into an ashtray.  Do you still doubt that flux residue was the problem? Electricity cost varies wildly from state to state and within each state. South of here in New York City it's $.25/Kwh, here in the Hudson Valley it's about $.12/Kwh, west of here nearer to the big generators at Niagra Falls it's as low as $.06/Kwh, all within New York State. 3000 miles west in the state of Washington it's as low as $.04/Kwh because of the big dams on the Columbia River. 1000 miles south in the Tennessee Valley it's as low as $.02/Kwh because of the federal dams on the Tennessee River. Most generation is done by private companies. The TVA is federal and heavily subsidized. The older private generating companies generally have the least efficient plants and the highest costs. Consolidated Edison (started by Thomas Alva Edison) in NYC has some 100 year old plants still running. Our local electric utility, Central Hudson, has four 1950 vintage natural gas turbines (430MW) (Google maps Danskammer) and a 1923 vintage 1210 MW steam turbine fueled by coal, oil or natural gas (Google maps Roseton). We have the oldest industrial infrastructure in the world. The railroad line that runs past Danskammer and Roston on the east bank of the Hudson had its roadbed laid in the 1820s by a guy named Vanderbilt! The roadbed was built correctly and it still works fine at 120 mph! That's what happens when you don't have a whole bunch of little countries tearing up the countryside fighting stupid internecine wars every few decades because they don't like the way the neighbor talks or dresses, like they do in Europe. So there! How do you like my imitation of Trump???????? Paul in NY |
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| lizby Guru Joined: 17/05/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 3466 |
"So there! How do you like my imitation of Trump????????" Way too civilized, not to mention knowledgeable. You didn't insult anybody--"fighting stupid internecine wars" is too generic to count. PicoMite, Armmite F4, SensorKits, MMBasic Hardware, Games, etc. on fruitoftheshed |
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| Boppa Guru Joined: 08/11/2016 Location: AustraliaPosts: 816 |
more than 270 characters, so obviously fake news lol |
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| Paul_L Guru Joined: 03/03/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 769 |
I'm sorry, I'll try harder the next time. |
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| Paul_L Guru Joined: 03/03/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 769 |
FIDDLESTICKS! There's little to understand. All that heat is there in the ground continuously moving up to the surface, you've got to interdict it and pump it up the temperature hill to a hotter temperature and temporarily store it in a house. You take Freon backwards and forwards through its entropy of vaporization and condensation and you pump the heat uphill. Using well water directly as a heat source and then returning it to the aquifer through another well is called "open loop geothermal" as opposed to "closed loop geothermal". It can be very efficient if the source of the water is clean. If the well water is either a salt solution, highly acidic, highly basic, or carries a lot of debris it just messes up heat exchangers. My well water, which I drink because we are too far out in the boondocks to have a municipal water supply, has some very strange stuff in it. There is no harmful bacteria, but I personally think there might be a decaying brontosaurus down there. I run it all through three filters, 20 micron, 1 micron, and a carbon block, then an untraviolet sterilizer just in case. Then I have an osmotic filter hooked up to the kitchen sink and the refrigerator ice maker and the coffee tastes more or less normal. I still would not like to put it through a heat exchanger. I suspect that the heat exchanger would require frequent, repetitive cleaning. Besides, open loop pumping would require more pumping power than closed loop. The acquifer I tap is down about 245 feet. The pump would have to overcome the static head plus any dynamic head produced by the heat exchanger. Then the water would be returned down a second well thereby losing all the potential energy built up in it by lifting it out of the first well. In a closed loop using deep vertical bores the weight of the water in the downbound loop will counterbalance the weight of the water in the upbound loop thereby reducing the pumping power drastically. My loop does not use a deep vertical bore. The pump is in the cellar. The loop runs up the shallow hill behind the house and returns back to the pump in the cellar. The net static vertical head is zero. The pump just has to overcome the dynamic head resulting from the movement of the water through the 6000 feet of pipe and the heat exchanger. I am using two 1/6 HP pumps in series to pump 25 gallons per minute. In an open loop vertical bore 250 feet tall I would probably require about 1.5HP to pump 25 gallons per minute. There is no way I could tap that much reliable power from a windmill in this relatively flat location in the Hudson Valley. The idea is to move the heat carrying water around by using the smallest amount of power which dictates the use of a nearly horizontal closed loop with a small static head. Paul in NY |
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| Paul_L Guru Joined: 03/03/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 769 |
Well, I'm finally making progress here. I bought a slightly smaller Freon compressor, 54,000 btu instead of 70,000 btu, together with a new reversing valve and they will be brazed into the system sometime during the coming week. I will take care to make sure that there is a continuous flow of nitrogen gas through the system while I am brazing to make sure that no internal oxidation of the copper pipes occurs at the brazing temperature. I will be using a "silfos" filler material containing 15% silver + 80% copper + 5% phosphorus at a temperature above 1300°F (700°C) when brazing. http://www.silfos.com/assets/product_support/technical_data_documents/silfos-brazing-rings/Sil-Fos-15.pdf I acquired a Little Giant 2-MD-SC magnetically coupled pump and used it to circulate an ester based cleaning solution, Comstar's CF20, slowly through the two stainless steel brazed plate heat exchangers, and the thermal expansion valve, for about 30 hours last week. I was also able to disassemble the thermal expansion valve and clean it mechanically. http://littlegiant.com/media/130762/995752.pdf http://www.comstarproducts.com/cf-20 The heat exchangers have 80 plates where each plate is about 4 x 24 inches and provides 20 tiny passages for water circulation and 20 tiny passages for Freon circulation. In other words there are 1600 individual paths for the water or the Freon to take in passing through the heat exchangers. That provides A LOT of opportunities for carbonaceous crap from the motor burnout to hide! When I finished the 30 hour slow flush the CF20 was staying pretty clean so I think I've got all of the crap out of the system. The reversing valve is not really cleanable so it is being replaced. It is a pilot operated valve. A small 24 vac solenoid vents a tiny amount of the high pressure Freon from the compressor into one of two tiny capillary tubes which then shoves a large (1 inch diameter) sliding valve body one way or the other. Those capillary tubes are so small that any carbonaceous junk from the burned out compressor which gets pushed into one of them will not be removable. When all this brazing gets finished I should have a working heat pump again. Then I will have to re-start my two year old project designing a control program for the heat pump system using MMBasic. It's just as well that this project has been on standby for the past year. I see that the Explore 100 board is up to revision 1D which provides an optional 1455 USB connection to the MMBasic console, built in ICSP, an on-board SD card slot, RTC and MEMORY modules, and it will interface with a piggy backed LCD module. All these whistles and bells will make programming this monster quite a bit easier. In my 60 plus years of experience with computers I have learned one thing. If a system is debugged and running successfully, IT IS ALREADY OUTMODED AND SHOULD BE SCRAPPED FOR SOMETHING NEWER AND BETTER! Anyway, youse guys can look forward to seeing weird questions again from this crazy Polack Yank. I'll bet that some of you had figured that I had gone away. Paul in NY |
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Chopperp Guru Joined: 03/01/2018 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1106 |
 I haven't heard that statement in many a long year. ChopperP |
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| Paul_L Guru Joined: 03/03/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 769 |
Hi Brian, we haven't spoken before and you just found TBS this year so you haven't been warned about me.  I've only been here at TBS for two years but I'm one of the real geezers around here. If you want a lot of useless info about how things were done back in ancient days just ask me.Here's the approximate time line with some of the begats. Univ Penn >> Moore School (1941) >> John Mauchley + J Eckert (1943) >> Eckert Mauchley Computer Corp (EMCC 1943) + Manhattan Project >> BINAC (binary processor 1943) >> ENIAC (decimal processor! 1948) 1949 EMCC bought by Remington Rand (typewriters) >> UNIVAC I (1951 first production) >> 1952 predicted Eisenhower's election >> 1954 merged with Sperry Gyroscope >> SPERRY RAND 1956 I met John Mauchley See what I mean. You are forewarned. Anyway, thanks for reading the entire thread! Paul in NY |
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| Chopperp Guru Joined: 03/01/2018 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1106 |
Hi Paul in NY Good to have a chat. Actually, I've been a TBS lurker since the CMM came out & have read most of the posts since this forum started. Seen quite a few people come & go over the years but it's good to see a solid core still holding the fort so to speak. I've come to sort of 'know' most of the Shedder's including you & have enjoyed your input. In your defence (or is it defense), of what/who you say you are, you have let us know of your ethnic origins etc & also being a Yank.  . We all have so much to learn from others, no matter who they are or where they come from. I just hope I can contribute even a small amount in some way.I started as a trainee back in 1970 for the government agency which looked after all the Navaids, Control Towers, Air/Ground comms, Radar etc at airports here in Aussie land. Got out of it for a while then came back in again to work at an Army Aviation base nearby on ground equipment. In that time I was also able to visit a good part of the this vast land down-under. (I missed out on going to Tassie) Just recently retired. Now spend a few days a week helping out at a Railway museum in town, mainly playing with an old diesel Loco getting it ready to go back on line again. Have use a couple on MM projects on it: One to calibrate the Speedo another to check & adjust throttle setttings (Tacho) Anyway, enough for now. Regards Brian in Toowoomba, QLD ChopperP |
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| Paul_L Guru Joined: 03/03/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 769 |
Hi Brian, Playing with an old diesel locomotive sounds like fun. Is that at the Downsteam Tourist Railway? I worked in the broadcast and recording industries during the 1950s and 60s then went with Pan Am in the engineering department in 1967. I stayed there until Pan Am went bellyup in 1991, then I played around buying, rebuilding and selling tugboats in Texas for a few years. Now I just hang around the house trying to find ways to get into trouble. You're probably pretty familiar with the ground installation of VOR, ILS, ATC transponders, DME, and VHF comm equipment. Are they still using 400 hz motor generator sets to modulate the VOR transmitters? Paul in Fishkill Plains, NY |
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| Chopperp Guru Joined: 03/01/2018 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1106 |
Hi Paul DownsSteam is the place  Been here over 20 years & didn't know the place existed until about a year & a half ago. Playing Locos can get you dirty & greasy & smelly. I have to shower as soon as I get home. Ordered by SWMBO. The days of the motorised modulators & keyers where phased out in the 70's. Solid state modules replaced NDB keyers & VORS etc went completely solid state. I still vaguely remember as a trainee in Perth, going out to the ILS (LLZ) at the main airport & seeing the two 'paddles' for the 90HZ & 150Hz modulation driven by a motor. I also recall when I worked at the main transmitter station in Perth, we did actually have a NDB with a mechanical motor driven keyer. Can't recall when it was upgraded though. Bringing back memories. Brian, Cotswold Hills, Toowoomba, QLD, AUST. ChopperP |
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CaptainBoing Guru Joined: 07/09/2016 Location: United KingdomPosts: 2171 |
MAN-SMELLS!!! I keep telling my better half that Isopon P38 is a man-smell and she should indulge me... not having it! |
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| Chopperp Guru Joined: 03/01/2018 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1106 |
Unfortunately, my better half has extreme chemical sensitivities which makes life a bit awkward most of the time. ChopperP |
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| Paul_L Guru Joined: 03/03/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 769 |
Hmmmmm .... interesting permutation .... everyone across the pond seems to think that Yanks are an ethnic group. It's actually a mental state ... we absolutely know that we are better and smarter than anyone else.  I, like most of you, had four grandparents, a nice little old lady named Anna Grimm from York, England, a feisty big old lady who was the daughter of a serf named Agnes Uzarowicz from Stari Pryp'yat, Ukraine, a gentle ex civil servant / bookkeeper named Vladimir Lepkowski from Nowa Wies Szlachecka, Krakow, Poland, and an obnoxious know-it-all Prussian cavalry officer (complete with the pointed helmet) from Leherheide, Bremerhaven, Germany. In other words, I'm a north american mutt! To create confusion around me I have taken to introducing myself as Pavel Artur Jan Waclaw Lepkowski in a thick Polish accent while pretending that I don't understand English. Waclaw, an ancient name, is pronounced Vats-waff, and Jan is pronounced Yan. I also like to mention that polaks don't mind strange odors, in fact we encourage them by eating things like Bigos, Golabki, Golonka, Kielbasa and Kapusta.   Bet you're sorry you asked about ethnic origins now! (In Polish "polak" means a male pole, "polka" means a female pole. The "ski" suffix on my name Lepkowski indicates that I am male, my wife's last name used to be Lepkowska, but here lately it has become Lepkowskova.) Pavel in NY |
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| Chopperp Guru Joined: 03/01/2018 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1106 |
Hi Pavel in NY You certainly have a diverse family tree . Great story. Interesting to hear how names are made up. Most of my ancestors are from Pommy land / UK somewhere. My wife knows where. I do think we made be getting a bit off topic with this thread though. Great chatting. Enjoy the rest of your afternoon over there. Brian. ChopperP |
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| Paul_L Guru Joined: 03/03/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 769 |
@Brian Naaaaa ... this isn't off topic. My Freon compressor died, I'm trying to replace it then write a program to control it, if I don't get it working I'm going to get hot and sweaty which is very bad for a Polak half-breed, I would have to limit my intake of Kapusta and Kielbasi to avoid strange chemical reactions. It's all part of the job. Paul in NY |
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