A bit of a roller coaster two days. On Monday ...
Geothermal International turned up at about 11am, they had come from Coventry,
4hrs away, so I should not complain, but I was awake half the night worrying about today.
They started to install the Ground Water Heat Pump. This is the inside of the gismo.
At the bottom is the heat exchanger transferring heat from the water circulating in the pipes under the ground
(which has been warmed by the ground water from 6.1 degrees to 11.8 degrees), to the refrigerant gas,
that cools it back to 6.1 degrees. The refrigerant gas is then compressed back to a liquid,
when its temperature is over 60 degrees which is circulated through the upper heat exchanger,
where it warms up a circuit of water in the house from 55 degrees to 60 degrees.
This hot water transfers its heat to the domestic hot water, what comes from a tap,
via a cylinder inside a cylinder, and also heats the water tank supplying water to the underfloor pipework,
what heats the house.
Here they are, Steve (plumber) on the left, Paul (Electrician) on the right, working as a team.
Here they are fixing the pipework to the heat pump before moving it into place, (when they couldn't.)
Meanwhile I am fixing curtain poles, and Margie is fixing curtains.
Here the heat pump has been moved into place, and a sack barrow containing a pump and tank and pipework
moved alongside.
It is connected to the underground pipework to drive out the air in the pipework,
and introduce 35 litres of methylated spirits (10% by volume), to act as an antifreeze.
This is the setup partway through the installation/commission. A real mess.
The underground pipework is heavily insulated, otherwise it would be drenched with condensation.
One thing we found was that the underfloor heating pipework was not full of water.
Steve and Paul, along with a phone call to Rob at Chelmer, filled it up and bled the air out of it.
(It was not their job, they just did it to commission the heat pump.)
Here you can see the blue caps on the actuators at the top indicating they are open,
and the red tell tails in the flow indicator tubes below showing flow through all seven
underfloor loops upstairs.
But luck/fortune did not last. The underfloor heating control system failed, it blew its fuse.
There was water splashed over the electrics from venting the air from the system via the top pipe,
so we got Margie's hair dryer to dry the wiring. But even after drying with toilet roll and dryer,
and even disconnecting the pump, still the fuse blew.
In the end Paul and Steve set the ground water heat pump into manual mode,
set an electronically controlled valve manually to open, to provide a load,
and commissioned the heat pump.
Here it is, all tidied up, turned off, but ready to go when we have a working load.
It uses 2.6Kw of electricity to provide 8Kw of heat, the difference comes from heat in the ground water.