Building science consultant Steve Easley outlines cost-effective ways to build energy efficient, low-emission all-electric homes, covering heat pump performance, duct placement, attic air sealing and envelope details. He also explains why electrification largely has to happen on the customer side of the meter, including the service upgrades it can trigger.
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Mike Collignon: To February. You know, today is Opera Day. And I thought in the spirit of the day, I would sing a few bars from my favorite opera, Turin by Puccini. So let me back up to my microphone. I don't read line anything.
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Mary Kestner: Mike. Mike. I think there's something wrong with your audio. Mike.
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Mike Collignon: You didn't hear me?
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Mary Kestner: No. Couldn't hear you.
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Mike Collignon: Oh, well, I would sing more, but we really need to get on with this webinar. We're starting late, so maybe some other time. What are we talking about today? Well, we're going to explore how to create energy efficient, low emissions, all electric homes that meet our electrification challenges. And we're joined today by building science consultant Steve Easley. Now, if you haven't seen or heard from him before, what's odd, because he's an internationally recognized building science expert and educator, he has more than 30 years of industry experience performing thousands of job site quality surveys and presenting building science seminars just like this around the world.
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Mike Collignon: His work focuses on increasing quality of construction, sustainability and performance, while reducing costly mistakes that lead to construction defects and callbacks. Steve's mission is helping industry professionals build and remodel structures that are durable, energy efficient, healthy, and comfortable to live and work in. Now we have a great sponsor for this webinar and that's Power Shift by NV energy.
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Mike Collignon: They have a program that helps residential and business customers conserve energy and save money on their power bills. Power shift is a one stop resource to find energy efficient products and services. For more information, please visit their website at. Vienna.
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Mike Collignon: Now. During the course of today's presentation, you can submit questions for our guest. Simply use that questions box on the right side of your screen. We're going to take those questions during Steve's presentation. All right. Aloha, Steve.
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Steve Easley: Hello. Nice to be here. Thank you for the introduction. And welcome, everybody. So today's class is really just about understanding, you know, what we can do to, you know, reduce our carbon emissions and understand the kind of the cost effective concepts of electrifying our homes. It's a little bit of a complicated process in the sense that, you know, depending upon where you're at in the country, your grid may or may not be, you know, more friendly towards this whole concept of electrification.
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Steve Easley: But certainly electrification is key to, you know, reducing the impacts of climate change. So in this class, we're going to focus on mostly the technologies and concepts and best building practices that will give us the best pathway for electrification homes. I would like to point out that one of the issues associated with, you know, doing a national webinar like this is that codes vary widely.
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Steve Easley: Building practices vary widely throughout the United States. So please keep in mind to always check your local construction practices, your local building codes, all those types of things that really have an impact on what you're allowed to do and kind of what you're not allowed to do. One of the things that I think it's important to recognize that if electrification is really, really going to happen in the United States in kind of a meaningful kind of way, it's going to have to happen on the customer side of the meter.
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Steve Easley: I'll give you a great example of that. I'm building a house in Scottsdale, Arizona, and when I submitted my plans, they basically said that I had to upgrade my service entrance because I'm switching from my natural gas furnace to natural gas water heating, my natural gas furnace, natural gas cooking, all that was switching to electric. Plus we have an electric car.
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Steve Easley: So they said, well, you know, we're not really sure that, you know, your transformer is going to be able to handle that. And so they did some analysis and said that I might have to actually pay upwards of, you know, 10 or $12,000 to replace the transformer. So it depends on where you're at in the country. Some utilities may or may not, you know, be more open to providing, you know, this pathway to electrification.
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Steve Easley: And it's not that my particular utility was not. It's just the way that the structures are or these utilities are set up. So my point in all of this is, is that for electrification happen in kind of a meaningful way, is probably going to have to happen on the customer side of the meter. What I mean by that is, is that as we start to switch to all electric everything, the loads are greater and the local infrastructure might not be able to quite handle that well.
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Steve Easley: So we can help that by making sure that we have a really good building envelope, making sure that we're using, you know, friendly equipment in terms of amp draw and those types of things. Those are the kind of things I'm going to get into today. So we want to identify the five key technologies that provide the most cost effective pathway for electrifying homes.
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Steve Easley: Identify how variable speed heat pumps are very, very different in terms of efficiency, comfort and operation. You know, we certainly now have cold climate heat pumps that have really changed the game. The heat pumps that we had of yesteryear are certainly not like, you know, you know, the heat pumps of today. I remember one of the first homes I built back in the late 1970s was we had a heat pump.
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Steve Easley: And, you know, once you got the temperature got below about 35 degrees, it would still work, but it wasn't very efficient. Today's heat pumps are way, way different. And I'm going to explain why. We're going to identify the kind of the top ten building efficiency measures, methods and technologies so that we can reduce our electrical demand. And that's what I mean by being able to, you know, work on the, you know, on the customer side of the meter.
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Steve Easley: In other words, if we can reduce the loads that certainly reduce the stress on the grid and reduce the potential for having to do things like replace transformers, things like that, because maybe your localized grid isn't capable of handling, you know, several homes with all electric, everything going to the top ten, design and installation mistakes that lead to poor heat pump performance and space conditioning, water heating and leading customer kind of dissatisfaction and rejection of these types of technologies.
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Steve Easley: Once these technologies are designed in the store property, they look very well. As you'll see from some of my real world examples today. So, I mean, I can show you we're going to show you some examples of heat pump technologies that work well below zero for those of you in the cold climates. So again, as as Mike said, it's a pretty informal presentation.
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Steve Easley: We got a lot to cover today, but we're going to try our best to get through that and then also answer your questions. I mean, I'm a big believer that if you have questions, don't forget to raise your hand and, you know, ask questions. And I'm happy to try to help the best of my ability.
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Steve Easley: Okay. A couple resources you might want to think of if this is we wrote a book for the California Energy Commission called The Real World Zero Net Energy, and you can download this book for free. I'll tell you how to get that. If you go on Amazon, you can buy it for $30. I don't encourage you to do that at all.
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Steve Easley: It's paperback, but you can download it off my website for free. And this is a book again, we did for the California Commission that sort of documents a series of zero net energy homes that we did with habitat for humanity out in the Central Valley of California. So you simply go to Steve easily. Com and that's easily just Google Steve Easley.
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Steve Easley: You typically take it right to my website, and I don't ask for your personal information or anything like that. So you don't have to worry about being on some mailing list. But anyway, if you go to articles and publications page at my website and then click on Steve's articles and books, you can download these books and publications there on a variety of topics that relate to this.
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Steve Easley: Also, if you go to Green Builder magazine and you click on vision House and then you click on the Scottsdale Revision House home, you can see kind of what we're doing with this project that I'm building in Scottsdale, Arizona, the home I'm building for ourselves. I think it's important to recognize that almost all major scientists, over 90%, in fact, of scientists in the country agree that, you know, climate change is real.
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Steve Easley: And we're looking at five different organizations that track climate issues, and they're all pretty much spot on with regards to what's happening with being in agreement with how much the Earth is warmed. And it's about 4 to 7°C over the last 5000 years. Now, get this, in the past 100 years, it's raised almost three quarters of a degree.
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Steve Easley: So that's what's got people alarmed is the rate of change we go through in the United States. About 40 trillion gallons of oil burned since 1980. That's a never give you an idea how much that is to never cover the state of California. About 16in deep in oil, about 96 million barrels of oil per day, 19 in the US, about 30,000,000,000,000 cubic feet of natural gas per year, if you can believe that.
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Steve Easley: And for every kilowatt hour of electricity use, that's about a pound of greenhouse gases that goes in the atmosphere. And so as far as natural gas goes, that's about 120,000,000,000,000 cubic feet worldwide. We had about 50 billion tons of carbon each year, and it takes about 1000 years for nature to remove it. So there's no doubt that as population is as increased in the last 100 years, that we have really increased our carbon footprint.
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Steve Easley: And certainly that has had an impact on climate change. And that's reflected itself until many natural disasters, like, for example, just in 2022, just last year, we had over $165 billion in damages due to weather related disasters. And then when you look in 2021, we had over $20 billion climate related disasters and then worldwide. Check this out. We had over $47 billion plus disasters, some of which is high as 75 billion.
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Steve Easley: And so there's no doubt that we're starting to see the impacts of climate change. And so that's why electrification is really such an important issue. Because as we start to to move away from fossil fuels, you know, for natural gas, for example, for heating our homes and heating our water and localized level, that really helps us offset that with renewable energy.
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Steve Easley: So that's that's kind of the concept behind the left is really just, you know, trying to move away from using possible fuels on a localized basis. That means not only just natural gas appliances, but also, you know, electric cars and so forth as well. You know, that's certainly, you know, transportation is a huge impact on on climate change as well.
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Steve Easley: And then when you look at what's happened since 1980 and you look at these billion dollar weather related related disasters, you can see it's pretty plain to see that as we've added more carbon to the atmosphere, we have more natural disasters. So with that in mind, that's really why moving to electrification strategies is really important. So about 83% of all new homes have gas furnaces, about 12% for heat pumps.
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Steve Easley: About 57% of existing homes are now gas and about 10% of homes are all or propane. So it's not just natural gas, it's it's all and propane. And that means that are fueled as well. And so in fact with all electric home would, you know, save about two and a half, you know, metric tons of carbon each year per house, the United States, we have roughly 100 million, you know, homes and, you know, roughly okay.
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Steve Easley: So top five solutions that I think we need to pay close attention to is to switch to a variable speed heat pumps for space conditioning and water heating. Notice I said variable speed because there a big difference between your typical single speed and two speed equipment in terms of not only their overall efficiency, but also their amp draw which has a huge impact on the grid.
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Steve Easley: Also switching to induction cooking, switching to heat pumps for clothes dryers. And also, maybe I didn't say this, but I meant to say not just heat pumps for space conditioning, but also water heating, and then also employ a real time IQ sensors so that we can control our IRBs. Traditionally, we we run our our ventilation systems according to a 62.2, which is a standard which says you have to based on the square footage of your house or however many people you're living there, that you're providing real time ventilation, using real time IQ sensors that can actually monitor indoor air quality and control those ARVs based on your true in the air quality is definitely a
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Steve Easley: step in the right direction. Instead of a formula that just runs a fan so many minutes out of every hour or so many hours out of every day. And then, of course, I can't emphasize the importance of making the closure you're building enclosure more energy efficient. That's really, really critical. The a good example of that. I was talking to a person yesterday that said they put in a heat pump in the northeast, and they said they couldn't get their house over 63 degrees, and that's just not necessary.
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Steve Easley: I mean, these I'll show you examples of how these heat pumps can work really well. So having your building envelope and shape before you do some of these measures is really, really important. So the bottom line is why why heat pumps for heating and cooling and domestic hot water heating one. There are 2 to 4 times the efficiency.
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Steve Easley: They have lower operating costs. They're can have lower operating costs depending upon your local utility rates. They're certainly better suited for low load homes. As we make our homes more energy efficient, we tend to have equipment that tends to be kind of oversize. And the beauty of variable speed heat pumps is that you're not quite so worried about them being oversize, because what they do is they know the temperature of your house, that you set, the what you want, your temperature, your house to be.
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Steve Easley: They know the outdoor temperature. They they know you know how what the ramp up time would be to make this happen. And so it can actually vary the speed of the compressor to your actual load. So you're not really you're not really worried quite so much about oversize in this equipment. You certainly can have greater comfort because, you know, you don't have these big temperature swings.
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Steve Easley: They're compact in size. To make it easy for zoning, I'm going to show you some real world examples of that, because you could use these individual evap coils to have individual zones so that you can create individual temperatures for each room based on your needs. You don't have the venting issues that you have with combustion appliances that you typically see with water heating and furnaces.
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Steve Easley: And then, you know, we have we have less environmental impact than you have with other types of systems. So those are kind of the top big reasons why it makes sense to do this. When you look at your traditional furnace equipment, basically what you have is a, you know, some type of a, you know, a burner and a heat exchanger.
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Steve Easley: And the newer systems have much more sophisticated heated changes. This here is a furnace that will be about 65% efficient, wouldn't be allowed by code for that matter, but newer systems are anywhere between 80 and 98% efficient on the gas side. But still, you're putting a lot of, you know, carbon in the air on a localized basis. Whereas when you're dealing with your traditional heat pump type systems, you typically have if it's a split system, you typically have an indoor unit, and that indoor unit has a core inside coil, it has a return air deck, the supply or deck to blower that distributes air throughout the home.
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Steve Easley: And then we have a line set that connects to the outside unit. And that's basically the components that we see in, you know, your traditional, you know, heat pump designs. And so the new technology is not much different, except it has a variety of different configurations. So with that in mind we would tend to look at the older equipment we're looking at.
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Steve Easley: We have basically two speeds single speed equipment. The newer technologies. We've had variable speed equipment out there for some time, but when we're looking at the newer technologies, we typically are using inverter based compressors, which means that they can really vary their speed based on the load. So very unique type of systems that are available, and they're very much more energy efficient.
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Steve Easley: Okay. So how does how is a heat pump more efficient. How does a heat pump basically create heat out of the air? Well, the air has quite a bit heat in it. In fact, some physicists estimate that air at that zero degrees has 80% or more. The heat of air at, you know, almost 100 degrees. So the interesting thing about this is there's already quite a bit of heat from the environment.
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Steve Easley: So what a heat pump does essentially is let's just say we have we have heat in the air. And even if it's if it's 30 degrees outside or for that matter, even if it's, it's five degrees outside, as you'll see in a moment from some of my diagrams, there's still quite a bit of heat in the air, and all we do is take our heat pump basically takes like one unit of electrical power from the grid, and then uses that through the refrigeration cycle to extract that heat out on the environment.
00:17:11:17 - 00:17:34:23
Steve Easley: So we get three kilowatts of energy from the air heat that's already in the air. And then we get one kilowatt from the grid. And that produces for for example, kilowatts of heat going into our homes. And so if we had no heat in the air, absolute zero would be like 459 degrees below zero. So there is quite a bit of heat in the air, as I said.
00:17:34:24 - 00:17:51:15
Steve Easley: And all heat pump does is use the magic of refrigeration to extract that heat out of the air. So let me show you an example of this. And then I'll ask for some questions. But here's what I do have. Here is a thermometer. And you notice it's at 70 degrees. And then I'm going to take some alcohol here.
00:17:51:15 - 00:18:13:06
Steve Easley: And I'm going to pour it over the probe of this. And what I want you to notice has how quickly the temperature drops as a result of evaporation. So that would be cooling by evaporation. So as I pour the alcohol over the probe, you'll notice that the temperature drops very, very quickly.
00:18:13:09 - 00:18:37:10
Steve Easley: And so essentially on one level that's kind of how an air conditioner work, except we use refrigerants that have the capability to boil much, much colder temperatures than, say, alcohol, which is probably 77 degrees. I would guess that 80 degrees. But notice here how our temperature drops to 56 degrees from 70 degrees. So it's like a 14 degree temperature drop pretty quickly.
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Steve Easley: All right. So how does that work when we think about the modern day refrigeration cycle I think people are always kind of confused about that. Kind of like how does this possibly work? How do you take heat out of the air and moving in our house? So I think the easiest way to look at it is like a refrigerator refrigerator in your home.
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Steve Easley: It takes heat out of your your freezer. It takes heat out of your icebox portion of it or the rich portion. And it takes that heat and just dumps it in the air in your house. And so it uses that cooling, that refrigeration process to make this happen. So let's first talk about the cooling cycle. And this was first developed by Willis Carrier back in the early 1900s.
00:19:17:16 - 00:19:41:25
Steve Easley: He was actually trying to figure out a way to dehumidifier the air for a printing company that was having problems during the hot, humid weather with their printing presses jamming up. And so he figured out a way through to reduce the humidity in the air and in the process, kind of developed the modern refrigeration process. So when we talk about the refrigeration cycle, whether it be a heat pump cycle or a cooling cycle, it's basically the same.
00:19:41:26 - 00:20:05:09
Steve Easley: The only difference is we just reverse the cycle. So we start with, in this case a refrigerant and which boils at -55 degrees okay. And so let's just look at some of these temperatures and pressures here. And we have a compressor and we have an outdoor coil and we have an indoor coil. And so let's just say we start out with a high pressure liquid just like my alcohol.
00:20:05:10 - 00:20:26:23
Steve Easley: My last little video. And let's just say for fun it's at 100 degrees and 319 pounds per square inch. Then it goes to an expansion valve. And when that liquid changes from a liquid to a gas, just like in my little video a minute ago, we noticed cooling happen. So anytime I change something from a liquid to a guess, I have to add heat or take heat away.
00:20:26:24 - 00:20:48:18
Steve Easley: So what happens is, is that refrigerant goes through this, goes through this expansion valve into the evaporative coil. It starts to change from a liquid to a gas and it absorbs heat. So we have room air for our blower motor and our furnace or air conditioner that is pushing air across that coil. And so the room air, you know, that heat always goes from warmer or colder.
00:20:48:18 - 00:21:17:01
Steve Easley: So it's absorbed into that refrigerant and the outdoor air is 55 degrees. Our pressure drops to 143. Our temperature drops to 50. It goes to the compressor. The compressor compresses the Intel. It's just about ready to condense. And then it releases that heat into the outdoor air. So that's how it works during the cooling cycle. We're simply are taking this concept of boiling and compressing the liquid to, to really just move heat from one place to another.
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Steve Easley: So he pumps don't create heat, air conditioners don't create cool. Essentially, they basically just move that heat from one place to another. And so when we talk about a heat pump, all we do is add a reversing valve. And in this reversing valve what that does is that reverses the cycle. So now we're taking heat out of the outdoor air and we're moving it to the inside of the house.
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Steve Easley: And so that's simply how he pump works. It's a pretty simple, reliable process. And in today's units they've certainly made tremendous strides in their efficiency and performance. So Mike do we have any questions so far?
00:21:55:04 - 00:22:16:01
Mike Collignon: Yeah actually I was just going to interject with 1 or 2. So we do have a question from Jean wanting to know if a properly sized heat pump will allow an eight degree night setback in older homes.
00:22:16:04 - 00:22:49:24
Steve Easley: Yeah. My opinion about that is highly unlikely. And the reason for that is, in fact, most of the manufacturers are leaning more towards advising people not to do setbacks. My my guess would be about the best you could ever do is maybe your 2 or 3 degrees setback. So my, my gut feeling about that is, is that in older homes, you know, because of the fact the heat pumps their their capacity is a function of the outdoor air temperature.
00:22:49:27 - 00:23:13:06
Steve Easley: Certainly their efficiency is a function of the outdoor air temperature. And the recovery time is in fact is related very closely to the outdoor air temperature. So what happens is, is if you've got an older home and I'm going to get into this and talk about the building enclosure stuff here very quickly. But if you have an older home that is not very efficient, it's leaks like a sieve.
00:23:13:08 - 00:23:35:24
Steve Easley: It's not very well insulated. When you set back that temperature, that unit has to work so much harder to extract that heat out of that colder outdoor air, that you're probably not going to be able to to to set back your thermostat. So most manufacturers are not encouraging setbacks. Just set it and forget it at the temperature that you like.
00:23:35:24 - 00:23:39:05
Steve Easley: So that that would be my thought on that Mike.
00:23:39:07 - 00:23:54:06
Mike Collignon: All right. Sounds easy enough. And then one other question from Robert. He wanted to know if at some point you're going to get into ground source heat pumps and talk about maybe advantages or disadvantages of those, didn't know if that was part of this or not.
00:23:54:08 - 00:24:13:22
Steve Easley: Yeah, I am I am briefly I'm going to talk about that. Absolutely. Yeah. There's no doubt about it that you know, ground source or water source heat pumps. Obviously you're using the heat that's stored in the ground or the heat that's already stored in the water. And so you don't, you know, they're much more efficient, a little bit more expensive, but they're definitely much more efficient.
00:24:13:22 - 00:24:37:24
Steve Easley: So I will talk about that. So with regards to the we measure the efficiency of these equipment, gas equipment we measure through annual fuel utilization efficiency air conditioners. We imagine that through seasonal energy efficiency ratio. And sometimes we use air. For those of you out in the West, in the southwest in particular, where you have very hot temperatures, air is a much better.
00:24:37:24 - 00:25:11:24
Steve Easley: Our two is a much better metric to measure the overall performance of your air conditioner. For example. Coefficient performance is another way that we measure that. And I'll talk about that. And then heating seasonal performance factor and heating seasonal performance factor two as a result of January 1st that we've had some significant changes. So the heating seasonal performance factor is a big metric that we use to measure the performance of heat pumps, and it's simply the total heating season BTU per output divided by the electrical power input in what hours.
00:25:11:24 - 00:25:31:15
Steve Easley: And then as of January of this year, we now have what we call heating seasonal performance factor two. Okay. And then when you talk about copy a lot of people like to use this coefficient performance. What does that mean. It simply means that copy of three means that one kilowatt hour of electricity yields three kilowatt hours of heat.
00:25:31:15 - 00:25:53:25
Steve Easley: Now, it's not uncommon to see some of the newer heat pumps be up in the four range. So that means, you know, you get one kilowatt hour of electricity yields four kilowatts of heat. And again, we're not creating or generating heat. We're just simply moving that heat from endorsed outdoors. And as you can imagine, as the outdoor temperature gets colder, it becomes a little bit more of a struggle.
00:25:53:25 - 00:26:17:19
Steve Easley: You has to work harder to do that. But these new cold climate heat pumps do a much better job of doing that. So the outdoor air I said earlier already contains heat and heat pumps. Simply extract that heat that's already in the outdoor air and move it to the indoors. So again, the coefficient of performance. If you're interested in this later you can review this presentation because it's going to be recorded.
00:26:17:27 - 00:26:44:17
Steve Easley: It's basically the useful energy output and BTUs per hour divided by the input. And watts times 3.413 BTUs per watt if you're interested in those technical details. So when we talk about Seer or Seer two, that's typically what we're referring to for air conditioning efficiencies. So air is simply the betas per hour divided by the input wattage. And Seer is that for the entire cooling season.
00:26:44:19 - 00:27:07:29
Steve Easley: Now for those of you that are out in the Midwest and out east, Sierra is probably in two is probably the most important number if you remember when you're selecting air conditioning system. But if you're out in the West, you know, we care more about air or E.R. two. So E.R. is simply the net capacity and BTUs divided by the power input.
00:27:08:00 - 00:27:31:05
Steve Easley: So it's simple. So if I've got a four ton unit or a 48,000 BTU per hour system and I, it takes 40 800W to operate that it has an air of ten. And so you may be asking, well, what is this two. And this heating system performance factor too. Well, they changed as of January 1st of this year.
00:27:31:08 - 00:28:01:04
Steve Easley: Basically there has been some concerns about the methodology of the old system for really determining what the heating system performance factor in the Seer ratings were. They said it wasn't very realistic because it didn't really reflect real world performance, because the static pressures, when you look at the pressure buildup that your typical ductwork provides, they're looking at in the real world, you know, you're probably looking at more like point five, whereas when the old standards were like 0.1.
00:28:01:04 - 00:28:25:00
Steve Easley: So they all got together and said, you know what we need to to make this system for testing these units for, for Seer and for heating seasonal performance factor a little bit more realistic based on how people's systems are actually installed in their homes. And so they said we're going to revise all that. So they came up with this heating seasonal performance factor two for heat pumps and then also Seer two for air conditioners.
00:28:25:00 - 00:28:44:01
Steve Easley: And so basically depending upon where at in the United States, whether you're in the north or the southeast or the southwest, whether you have a split system, which is a separate outdoor and indoor coil, or whether you have a package system or it's all in one, one package that determines really what those ratings are. So you can check based on where you're at.
00:28:44:01 - 00:29:05:06
Steve Easley: And it's pretty easy because the manufacturers just can't sell equipment anymore. That doesn't meet the new Doe standards. So I don't think you have to worry about buying a piece of equipment that doesn't meet the standards unless somebody is using really old equipment. Questions? Mike.
00:29:05:08 - 00:29:21:21
Mike Collignon: Hold on a second. We have one question here. Chet wanted to know, can you estimate the temperature of heat pump, heated air at the outlet versus gas, hot air heat.
00:29:21:23 - 00:29:41:05
Steve Easley: Hold on. I'm going to show you some examples of that. I'm going to show you one of my own examples from the heat pump that I have. So hold on. It's again the discharge temperature is a function of the equipment efficiency and certainly the equipment, the capacity, but also the outdoor temperature to some extent. But that's changed with the cold climate heat pumps.
00:29:41:05 - 00:30:06:02
Steve Easley: So it's kind of a complicated answer. But I'm going to get to that. Now, for those of you that might be viewing in from the West, I talked earlier about why air versus Seer. This is a good example. Let's just say we have a Seer ten, 12 and 14 piece of equipment is what we're looking at here. And 85 degrees will be ten, 12 and 14.
00:30:06:03 - 00:30:30:23
Steve Easley: But look what happens as the outdoor temperature gets warmer. So what I'm saying is, is that the seasonal energy efficiency ratios even two there, based on getting some latent cooling capacity out of dehumidifier in the air, like we have out in the Midwest and out East. But in the West were so dry, we don't really get any additional cooling capacity from the air because the air is already so dry.
00:30:30:23 - 00:30:55:07
Steve Easley: So when you look at 105 to 115 degrees, look how all of the seer ten, 12 and 14 come together. And so this is why in states like California, for example, title 24, they require that manufacturers post their ear efficiencies so people will base their purchase decisions based on real performance, not on this concept of Seer, which really doesn't apply.
00:30:55:07 - 00:31:21:13
Steve Easley: It's a national rating, but it really doesn't apply too much to the southwest, where it's very hot and very dry. Okay. All right. So let's kind of review this quickly because I know I'm covering a lot of material quickly. Efficiency of a system is related to the outdoor air temperature. In other words as the outdoor air temperature drops because the heat pump is basically trying to extract heat out of the air.
00:31:21:13 - 00:31:50:02
Steve Easley: So it makes common sense that if you have a virus colder, that unit has to work harder and longer to extract that heat out of the air. The capacity in terms of this ability to cool your whole entire or excuse me, heat your whole entire home is also based on outdoor air temperature and to some degree, altitude. Because the density of the air, the colder the areas, the longer the unit has to run to extract that heat from the air.
00:31:50:05 - 00:32:18:25
Steve Easley: So the cold or the air basically the the lower the cop for traditional equipment. And so that's why it's important that we have our ductwork insulated, our ductwork sealed, our building envelopes well-insulated or building envelope fairly airtight before we would want to retrofit a heat pump. Now, it's also important to recognize that a lot of the systems require that you have backup strip heating in the older traditional heat pumps.
00:32:18:25 - 00:32:45:08
Steve Easley: That's because for two reasons. One, you just needed it to be able to heat your house because the older technology heat pumps, you know, they just didn't have that a good of a capacity to extract that heat out of the air. And so once you got down into the 20s, or in some cases even higher than that, it didn't cost you any more to run these electric resistance strip heats than it did to run your epoch, because it was just had to work so hard to extract that heat.
00:32:45:15 - 00:33:07:23
Steve Easley: They just weren't that efficient. The newer technologies they can get by without this backup heat. Now, that doesn't mean you don't need some type of emergency heat, because, you know, if the system ever would go down and you're in a very cold climate, you want to have some type of backup heating. Now, another thing that's important to recognize is that the capacity is a function of outdoor air temperature.
00:33:07:23 - 00:33:28:28
Steve Easley: So if you look at a traditional saying look two speed heat pumps, let's just say we start out here at 50 degrees. You know, we might have, you know, 100% of the capacity of our system. So let's just say we had a four ton system and it'd be operating at four tons that at 50 degrees. But look how quickly the curve drops off as the outdoor temperature approaches zero.
00:33:28:28 - 00:33:48:11
Steve Easley: So we might have 22% of our capacity at zero degrees, whereas at 50 degrees we had 100% of our capacity. That's not the case for inverter driven heat pumps. And that's one of the biggest misconceptions that we have out in the industry right now is people think that these the heat pumps cannot eat your home in cold climates.
00:33:48:11 - 00:34:09:10
Steve Easley: And I'm going to show you some examples where that's true. Now another thing that's important to recognize is that what happens to the discharge temperature at the register. So for example if I look at this chart here this is the heat pump return supplier temperatures. And we look at this and we're looking at just looking to supply temperatures here where we're at 55 degrees outside.
00:34:09:10 - 00:34:39:02
Steve Easley: We might have a discharge temperature at that register of 125 degrees. But notice as the temperature starts to drop outdoors, then also the temperature at the discharge drops. So one of the things that I think I've noticed in these communities where they, you know, basically outlawed, you know, new natural gas hookups and people have replaced and this paid attention to this, people have replaced their, you know, gas furnaces with heat pumps.
00:34:39:02 - 00:34:57:16
Steve Easley: And then they install these newer, they install the new heat pump. And the people say, wait a minute, it feels like cold air is coming out of the register. And the reason it feels that way is because, you know, heat pumps simply have traditionally have a little bit lower discharge temperatures. Your traditional equipment, newer models, of course, can have much higher discharge temperatures.
00:34:57:16 - 00:35:18:13
Steve Easley: But my point is, is that if you don't insulate your deck work and you don't seal your ductwork and you know you can have lower discharge temperatures, and when if you have air coming out of that register that's lower than your body temperature, it still might be 95 degrees, but which is plenty enough to heat your house. But if you feel that air coming off the register, you might feel it.
00:35:18:13 - 00:35:40:02
Steve Easley: Since it's cooler than your body temperature, you might say, well, wow, this seems like it's kind of cool to me and it doesn't feel quite right. So it's really important to help set customer expectations that they're discharged. Temperatures out of a heat pump might be cooler than what their traditional used to. I mean fossil fuel furnaces. The beauty of those is they can, you know, your old dinosaur burner.
00:35:40:04 - 00:35:56:20
Steve Easley: They can throw, you know, hundreds of thousands of feet of heat in the air in a very short period of time, simply because, you know, you've just got a flame that lights and poof, you know, so that can liberate that heat very quickly, whereas heat pump has to work harder to extract that heat out of the outdoor air.
00:35:56:24 - 00:36:26:29
Steve Easley: Now, the good news about the heat pump, it's it's way, way more efficient and certainly environmentally less hazardous, particularly if they're using renewable energy to offset the electric power generation. So give you an example here in Scottsdale, Arizona, I have an old traditional heat pump. This house that I'm living in, one building, my new house. And so this is about a fourth I would say this probably is a 14 seer piece of equipment that's probably an older home.
00:36:26:29 - 00:36:50:10
Steve Easley: Home was built in the 70s and the outdoor temperature at 47 degrees. My first register closest to the to the my unit is this star chamber is 140 degrees. I go to the second register, it drops to 99 degrees and the third register is down in the very low 90s. So that's because the we know the deck works inside the house.
00:36:50:10 - 00:37:16:10
Steve Easley: It's not insulated. And so you slowly drop temperature. But my point is, is that even with the outdoor temperature at 47 degrees the hottest, my registered temperature coming out of that ductwork is 104. So. But the newer and more efficient equipment, you can get much higher performance out of that. So just to kind of review here, the advantages of the new variable speed and driven heat pump systems is typically they don't need a heat backup.
00:37:16:10 - 00:37:44:08
Steve Easley: Not to say that you don't need emergency heat, but I'm saying typically you don't need accelerate backup elements. You know, and many of the climates, for example, the supply temps are much warmer than two stage and single speed systems. They can supply upwards of 110 degrees supply air attempts. To my last person's question there, you can get upwards of 110 degrees supplier temperatures down to 38 degrees outside.
00:37:44:11 - 00:38:07:16
Steve Easley: Single stage and two stage systems might give you an 89 degree maximum temperature supply temps during that time. So just, you know, one customers that traditional equipment, traditional heat pump equipment is going to feel cooler coming out of the register. By using variable speed inverter driven compressors, you can avoid adding 40 to 50 amps of panel load in some cases.
00:38:07:16 - 00:38:32:06
Steve Easley: I think the system that I'm using, some of these things, there will be less than ten amps at, you know, more traditional loads. So that's really important when it comes to, you know, this grid issue. And particularly if you have solar and you're doing battery backup. So for example, in most parts of California, the electric utility rates are $0.50 a kilowatt hour between 3 and 8:00 at night.
00:38:32:06 - 00:39:03:08
Steve Easley: So if your air conditioners cranking away, which it usually would be at 3:00 in the afternoon and you're on solar and you have battery backup, boy, these batteries do you can't handle the big amp, all of these larger compressors. So having the variable speed inverter driven compressors are much more battery friendly for those of you that are trying to offset those peak loads and flywheel through those peak times of the day, but with no heat installed, the amp we size, the amp load and air handle.
00:39:03:10 - 00:39:25:02
Steve Easley: You want to make sure you size those appropriately and make sure you pay a little closer attention to that. So bottom line is, with no heat installed, we size the amp, load and air handler appropriately and use two 40 volt breakers obviously for that. And you can use these SIM lines that allow you to free up some space.
00:39:25:02 - 00:39:41:19
Steve Easley: So those of you that are have existing homes. What I'm trying to say here is, is that oftentimes when you have existing homes and you have minimal panel sizes and you're trying to electrify, it becomes a little bit challenging because how do you get enough breakers in the box and still meet all the electrical codes for fire and safety?
00:39:41:20 - 00:40:08:08
Steve Easley: Right. And so I'll give you an example. I have 100 amp service in this 1970s vintage, 2100 square foot home I'm living in. And we have an electric car, we have electric cooking, we have two air conditioning systems or two heat pumps, and we have a heat pump water heater. And we've never ever blown a breaker. So there are ways to, you know, but you know, to make a smaller panel sizes work.
00:40:08:09 - 00:40:17:06
Steve Easley: You just got to make sure that you meet all local electrical codes and proper inspections. All right. So the questions.
00:40:17:09 - 00:40:35:09
Mike Collignon: Yeah, you had had a couple of questions. I wanted to interject. Before you get too much farther, there are questions about metrics. The first one from Jean, will his two give more accurate annual energy use estimates.
00:40:35:12 - 00:41:00:26
Steve Easley: Yes. So great question. And here's why. The reason, the whole reason the Department of Energy made this change is because they recognize that. And this is largely due to the fact in the last 30 years, we've almost converted 100% to flex debt. And as you'll see later in one of my slides, the impact that Flextech has on static pressure and systems.
00:41:00:26 - 00:41:25:19
Steve Easley: And for those of you that may not be into the technical side of this, I want to make this really super simple. But the bottom line is, is that the reason that this metric changed for seasonal energy efficiency to and heating seasonal performance factor two is because the old systems were over rating the efficiency of these units in terms regards to how they perform in the real world.
00:41:25:19 - 00:41:46:23
Steve Easley: So what happens is, is we add flex duct and we have all these restrictions that impedes the ability of that unit to deliver heated or cooled air out into your home. And so what do we realize is that in order to drive the efficiency standards even higher, we better take a hard look at how these systems relate in the real world.
00:41:46:23 - 00:42:17:23
Steve Easley: So their test methodology to certify this equipment was not realistic to the way this stuff was really going in in the real world. So then we change this to this new, new system so that we would actually get a better, more realistic view of what the efficiency of the equipment were purchasing really is. So yes, to answer your question, it's a it's a welcome change and it's confusing I know, but the bottom line is higher is better by the highest you can afford.
00:42:17:24 - 00:42:20:00
Steve Easley: That's the bottom line.
00:42:20:02 - 00:42:35:20
Mike Collignon: And then that kind of is a lead into Carrie's question, which is will the performance metric be labeled differently. So are we going to see steer two on documents or are we just is it going to go to seer even though it's seer two?
00:42:35:22 - 00:42:55:03
Steve Easley: Oh excellent question, great question. Yes it will be Sarah two, HSP two and E.R. two for that matter. So absolutely. So that's what you want to look for. And by the highest you can afford. Great. Thank you.
00:42:55:05 - 00:43:17:18
Steve Easley: So when we look at the options for these new variable speed heat pumps. And again these are not your grandmother's heat pumps. And the heat pump that I has the homes that I've had in the past, you know again their efficiency their recovery capabilities are not even comparable to the systems that we can put in today. And the beauty of is we have so many options.
00:43:17:18 - 00:43:43:10
Steve Easley: So for example, this looks like your air handler doesn't it. So this is a multi position air handler where can be mad at horizontally vertically. It's more like your traditional heat pump system. However the guts on the inside are very different. They're all inverter driven variable speed. You know much more efficient piece of equipment. And then you might be familiar with this.
00:43:43:10 - 00:44:05:02
Steve Easley: This is where I'm broadcasting from today in Hawaii. This is a I have a I don't have it bumps. We don't need the heating over here and Maui. But here we can see here I've got a coil that's mounted in my living space. There's another one in the bedroom, and we simply have two separate zones. Now, we're mostly familiar with these as many splits.
00:44:05:02 - 00:44:28:07
Steve Easley: So they've been around forever and used all across the world. We go back to this type of piece of equipment. This is what we would use if we had a more traditional ducted system in your home. But the bottom line is the inverter technology is the same. Now we go to where the house I'm building in Arizona, and each of the rooms I'm putting in one of these ceiling cassettes and these again are ductless systems.
00:44:28:13 - 00:44:46:15
Steve Easley: This is ductless. This is ductless. This is ducted okay. So we can use these inverter driven heat pumps to be a ducted system. Or it can be like a traditional mini split system. Or it can be like these ceiling cassettes. This is what we call a one way ceiling cassette. And you might be saying, well Steve, it looks like it's ducted here.
00:44:46:16 - 00:45:04:28
Steve Easley: I see a duct. Now this is where my v so my v it will bring fresh air into the home. It will dump it in here. This will pull this into the return side of this coil. And we'll heat it up cooling it. And the beauty of these one way cassettes, they only protrude down from the ceiling about a half an inch.
00:45:05:04 - 00:45:26:13
Steve Easley: They're all 100% serviceable. Below they have a condensate pump that will pump the condensate out to the outdoors. So I don't have to have any ductwork and I can each room. Excuse me. Each room can have its own zone so I can control the temperature of each room. And you can put up the eight of these on one condenser.
00:45:26:13 - 00:45:50:18
Steve Easley: And so this allows this inverter driven system allows us to have very individualized zone control and draw a much lower than your traditional, you know, heat pump would do. So it makes it much more friendly, much more friendly to the grid. And these things are incredibly quiet. This one way cassette, as it's called here, this is manufactured by Mitsubishi.
00:45:50:20 - 00:46:10:14
Steve Easley: This actually pushes air across the room. It can move air as far as 30ft, and it has a vein that can direct air up and down and has another vane inside that you can't see that can move the air left or right. So you have tremendous ability to, you know, circulate air and provide conditioned air where you want it.
00:46:10:16 - 00:46:26:24
Steve Easley: This is a builder friend of mine that is utilizing the same equipment, except this is what we call a four way cassette. And this allows you to distribute air in four different directions. You'll notice this is a fairly large house. We have two four way cassettes here. You'll notice this little bump out here is a little hard to see.
00:46:26:25 - 00:46:49:22
Steve Easley: But that's actually a infrared sensor. And you can even program these to direct cool air or heated air towards the heat source or away from the heat source. So again, they're incredibly quiet. These are and again these are duck duck systems. So and then we also have what we call why. We also have what we call ducted systems to.
00:46:49:23 - 00:47:11:08
Steve Easley: This is a ducted coil that can mount up inside of a ceiling. So I'll return air ducts here. So this is maybe 12in tall and maybe 42in wide, maybe 36in deep. So these can be put almost anywhere. So you could do ducted or duct assistance but still take advantage of the inverter driven technology. So here's what I want you to look at.
00:47:11:08 - 00:47:35:15
Steve Easley: This is kind of a fun chart. If we look at your typical non inverter typical heat pump system, air conditioning system, the thermostat culture heat it turns on cools everything down. Then it goes to this huge big temperature swings. And it's drawing full power all these times. So this is not exactly grid friendly. If you've got, you know, five houses on a transformer that are all trying to do the same thing, right?
00:47:35:16 - 00:47:57:12
Steve Easley: So, you know, you have these big temperature swings where it is inverter driven technology. It tends to notice that like I said earlier, it said it knows the temperature and the the set point temperature is it knows the outdoor temperature. It knows the temperature in the room. So it can actually compute and run this, the compressor at exactly the right speed to match the load.
00:47:57:12 - 00:48:21:08
Steve Easley: That's really important. These new technologies of heat pumps can actually match the speed of the compressor to the load. And so that way you have much lower amp draws and much greater efficiencies and much greater comfort. So you don't have these big temperature swings. And that's really advantage of these systems that are quiet. You don't have these tremendous duct losses and they do come in ducted systems I said earlier.
00:48:21:08 - 00:48:30:15
Steve Easley: But anyway pretty cool technology question.
00:48:30:18 - 00:48:32:12
Mike Collignon: Let me check.
00:48:32:14 - 00:48:36:28
Steve Easley: The background. There's just some construction going on next door. Yes, Mike.
00:48:37:01 - 00:48:39:28
Mike Collignon: Gotcha.
00:48:40:01 - 00:48:54:03
Mike Collignon: Okay. So under the new performance two rating, do the single zone heat pumps still perform better than the multi zone?
00:48:54:05 - 00:49:33:11
Steve Easley: I would say. Well, what you mean by perform but I would say no. In other words because these units they suffer from this. You know, they remember the efficiency of the HSP two or SCR two doesn't have really anything to do other than the efficiency of the equipment. It doesn't mean that the install efficiency is going to improve that much, because even if I buy a traditional piece of equipment, like for a standard heat pump, and if it's just a big compressor that's a single speed compressor, it may have a high Seer rating or have may have a high HSP rating.
00:49:33:11 - 00:49:51:11
Steve Easley: And this is an important distinction here, but that doesn't mean it has the capacity to be variable speed. So you're still going to have these big temperature swings. You're still going to have these big amp draws, and you're still going to have a bit more. You're going to have more power consumption even though it's it's more efficient than their counterpart.
00:49:51:12 - 00:50:10:10
Steve Easley: The beauty of the inverter driven technology is that you can vary the speed of the compressor based on the real load. Now you're probably asking, what's the downside? Well, they cost more money. They're much more complicated in terms of are much more sophisticated, should say not necessarily more complicated, but it's definitely more sophisticated in their capacity and ability to cool.
00:50:10:11 - 00:50:32:25
Steve Easley: So yes, you can buy a high efficiency piece of equipment and it will perform just like this. You won't get near the comfort out of it, but if you if you go with the equipment, like any of these different variations of this, you're going to get a much more efficient delivered cooling, you know, much more delivered, delivered cooling.
00:50:32:27 - 00:51:01:05
Steve Easley: Now this important chart here. Check this out. This is a cold climate heat pump. And it is a myth that heat pumps don't work in cold climates. So here's an example of these one manufacturers. It can deliver 100% of capacity at five degrees 76 pinpoint equipment 76 and 93% capacity at -13, and operation to -18 below, and even as low as 31 below zero.
00:51:01:07 - 00:51:26:28
Steve Easley: So that's the beauty of this equipment. They figured out some clever ways to be able to take the waste heat off the compressor in order to recover that waste heat, in order to make it work when it's really, really cool outside. There's an example in Colorado, very cool weather. Here's another one where one person said that, hey, it was -22 and still inside of his house was comfortable.
00:51:26:29 - 00:51:51:12
Steve Easley: Now I'm going to talk a little bit more about how we got to get there to do that, because not a matter of just slapping in a piece of equipment. But here's another example of, you know, at 11,000ft elevation. And, you know, we placed a 15 kW electric resistance with, with a, with a heat pump. So, you know, there's another example, but here we go.
00:51:51:13 - 00:52:12:22
Steve Easley: -24. That's pretty chilly and has had three days below -20. And the systems, you know, held up and did pretty well. So I'm really impressed by these systems. This is what example of what I'm putting in my house. Obviously in Arizona I don't need a heap on I'm excuse me, I don't need I don't need a cold climate heat pump.
00:52:12:22 - 00:52:42:11
Steve Easley: But certainly we need heating there because it gets down in the 30s with it. All right. So a couple of things really important to slow down here a little bit and get into how we set customer expectations. There's a big difference between being able to get one of these systems installed perfectly, and getting the kind of performance that you can get versus what might typically happen in the real world.
00:52:42:11 - 00:53:07:23
Steve Easley: If we're not paying attention to some really important installation issues. So typically, what we complaints we get with your traditional single speed and two speed equipment. So when we talk about electrification on the heating side of this, you can say, okay, I'm going to go in and just replace my heat pump with your standard single speed or two speed equipment, which probably the majority of the equipment being installed out there.
00:53:07:24 - 00:53:34:22
Steve Easley: This is probably where people are going to go, but perhaps just because people aren't aware of how and how effective this variable speed equipment is. But let me just say that setting customer expectations is really key to reducing callbacks. For those of you that are builders or those of you that are HVAC contractors. So what happens is what has happened in areas like, for example, where I used to live out in California, there were moratoriums on gas hookups.
00:53:34:22 - 00:53:49:18
Steve Easley: And so people would replace their heat, their gas furnished with their heat pumps. And they said, well, wait a minute. We're not happy with the comfort we're getting out of this because we're used to, you know, being able to come home and turn on our furnace and heat our house in 15 minutes and just take longer to do that.
00:53:49:18 - 00:54:10:09
Steve Easley: So some of the complaints are it takes too long to heat up my house. Secondly, as we talked earlier, the registered discharge temperatures are lower. So people would say, wait a minute, it feels like cold air coming out of the system. And in some cases, if their electric utility bills are high and they're running on peak load, they during peak periods, their bills were higher than they thought.
00:54:10:09 - 00:54:43:25
Steve Easley: So it's really important, number one, wherever possible, to utilize inverter driven equipment because you could better match the loads to the, the home to the the equipment. But also make sure you explain to customers that, you know, you just can't, you know, turn your thermostat up and expect your home to get heated in 15 minutes. And also recognize that the discharge temperatures coming out of the registers might be a little lower, particularly if the contractor didn't take the time to seal the deck work, or maybe didn't take the time to insulate the duct court.
00:54:43:27 - 00:54:52:26
Steve Easley: So let's just say, and I'll explain this a little bit more detail. Show some real world examples. So Mike, do we have any big questions.
00:54:52:28 - 00:55:23:10
Mike Collignon: Actually clarification on the on the prior question. Apparently in the HSP. No. Two okay. So just HSF ratings from the past single zone variable speed heat pumps would typically have an HspA that was 30% higher than a multi zone variable speed. And the question is is that still going to be true with HSP two.
00:55:23:13 - 00:55:50:27
Steve Easley: Great question. Yes absolutely. So remember these are here. Let me back up a little bit. Make sure I'm being clear on this. These efficiency ratings the only change between the two and the previous version is the fact that they're trying to be. The testing for the efficiency better replicates real world performance, the way these systems are installed in typical homes.
00:55:50:27 - 00:56:09:06
Steve Easley: So yes, it will be more efficient. Anything in the new system. The new rating is going to be more efficient than the old system. So how annoying is that noise in the background? Mike? Is that really bad or do I need to move to a different location? I can really easily do that.
00:56:09:09 - 00:56:15:23
Mike Collignon: I think. I think you're fine and I appreciate the clarification on that. On that prior question.
00:56:15:25 - 00:56:40:15
Steve Easley: Okay. Yeah, yeah. So the new rating is going to be more efficient. So keep in mind let's keep in mind like this. The way the reason the new rating was developed was because they recognized that the way these systems are typically installed in homes, the ducks have a lot more restrictions than the initial pastoral show. So it made the systems the old the old method of measuring efficiency made them look like they were more efficient than they really were in the real world.
00:56:40:15 - 00:56:49:17
Steve Easley: So they made this adjustment so that these would have more real world efficiency.
00:56:49:20 - 00:57:12:20
Steve Easley: More, I guess, a replication representation of better real world efficiency. So the bottom line is the comfort concept we want to remember is that with heat pumps, registered discharge temperatures can be lower, which can be a function of outdoor air temperature. Not this not necessarily the case with inverter driven. It will be a little lower, but certainly can be higher.
00:57:12:20 - 00:57:36:16
Steve Easley: Airflow means lower register temperatures. So in other words, if we have more than 400 cfm cubic feet of air per minute, you might tend to have lower register temperatures, longer recovery time than fossil fuels. Just that's just something we have to make sure people are aware of. And this is important. Your closure leakage rates, in other words you have a leaky home has a greater impact on your recovery time.
00:57:36:16 - 00:58:01:03
Steve Easley: That's why the setback question was so important. If I have a really leaky building enclosure and I have poorly insulated walls, that system has to work longer to recover that setback time. So that's why they typically don't recommend set backing thermostats at night. Duck leakage and insulation has a greater impact on comfort and really important to get the enclosure right.
00:58:01:05 - 00:58:19:27
Steve Easley: So let's talk about a few items here. You know, making sure that when we talk about a building enclosure, obviously we're not just talking about insulation, we are talking about early as well. And so some cost effective enclosure tips. I'm a big believer for those of you who are new construction, certainly advanced framing, that helps a lot to reduce that thermal bridging.
00:58:19:27 - 00:58:38:20
Steve Easley: Whether it's new construction or old construction. We want to do a really good job of air sealing. You know, we want to be down at that half an hour change an hour to maybe to three hour, change an hour. Paint upon your climate zone, our windows. We want to have 0.25. You factor 0.25. So he gained coefficient or less.
00:58:38:22 - 00:59:06:20
Steve Easley: Certainly lower is better in both. Those numbers are controlled by to control our V. So I'll show you some examples of that in a moment. Common sense electrical approaches. Sorry about the typo. And then of course high performance attics. So check this out. This is this is not advanced framing. So how in the world can this building enclosure be very effective when it's so over framed when you got, you know, framing factors here.
00:59:06:20 - 00:59:30:00
Steve Easley: This is probably close to 35% framing factor. The homes that we were doing out in the Central Valley for the book, we did for the Energy Commission, we were getting homes in the 11 to 13% framing factor range without any additional impact on structural integrity. If you want a great resource for advanced framing, the American Panel Association has a great guide.
00:59:30:00 - 00:59:54:08
Steve Easley: You can just go to APA, which is APA Woodward, and you can download this advanced framing guide. Is it really great pictorial guide book. It's even got code. References. So if your your code official is not really buying what you're doing, you can show them where it meets the code and then just paying attention to details. So for example here, here's where the builder really was paying close attention to air sealing.
00:59:54:09 - 01:00:12:23
Steve Easley: They used this, you know, air sealing material on every cracking gap. But what do you see this wrong with this picture? You know, they didn't pay very close attention to their mechanicals and their electricals. The exterior walls we want. And you never want to put ductwork in exterior walls. Can you imagine what this would do to your discharge temperature in a winter climate?
01:00:12:23 - 01:00:31:09
Steve Easley: If you have basically this cavity is going to be uninsulated unless you happen to have some exterior insulation. So now the discharge temperature coming out of this deck work because it's on a cold exterior wall, is going to be much lower than it would have been had this deck would have been placed on an interior wall. Notice all the plumbing.
01:00:31:12 - 01:00:52:18
Steve Easley: Notice all of the tremendous amount of just mechanical electrical that we have in these spaces. So there's a lot of simple things that we can do in the building envelope during construction that allow for better heat pump performance in terms of discharge temperatures at the registers, in terms of recovery time, in terms of overall capacity.
01:00:52:21 - 01:01:14:14
Steve Easley: Attics, for example. We talk about high performance attics. Oftentimes we never air seal interior plates. So for example here I'll give you a great example. This is an older home that I used to have in California is 1970s vintage House 1976. And I decided that I had a bat problem. So I took care of that. And then I air sealed my attic.
01:01:14:14 - 01:01:35:24
Steve Easley: So my blowtorch test before my attic was air sealed. This is for a 3400 square foot house was, you know, 44, 60 after I air sealed the attic, which is basically just air sealing every nook and cranny in the attic with spray foam. Or I didn't stripe O'Neill attic. I just simply sprayed foam. The interior exterior wall plate connections around any penetrations.
01:01:35:25 - 01:01:59:28
Steve Easley: It dropped to 2180. So get this folks, I reduced the air infiltration rate on my entire house by cut it in half just by air sealing the attic and house it on crawlspace. So lots of things we can do. For example, here, the type of connectors that we connect, see these these hurricane clips, they actually shim out the drywall about a quarter of an inch.
01:01:59:28 - 01:02:24:18
Steve Easley: And so that creates a pretty big airlink through here. And also notice the number of fasteners 12345. There's five, ten six almost 20 fasteners. It takes that mountains hurricane clip. Here's an SD fastener. We attempt to take one of these screws and screw up through the through this stud into the plate into the trust for hold down. And again your local codes require different requirements based on where you're at.
01:02:24:18 - 01:02:44:08
Steve Easley: So pay attention to that. But what I'm saying is this counter sinks in there. So you don't have this big attic bypass. Another thing. Here's a great example of what I did from my house in Arizona. I put one inch get this. I put one inch of thermal foam sheathing R6 insulation over the top of my roofing membrane.
01:02:44:08 - 01:03:06:18
Steve Easley: So I had a peeling roofing membrane on this. Put the the one inch foam down poly ISO, R6 over the top of that. This will be the battens for my metal roof. Now check this out. This is part of it. I left it in slated on purpose. Part of it I insulated. So this is the uninsulated portion and it's about 110 degrees outside.
01:03:06:20 - 01:03:33:27
Steve Easley: This is the insulated portion. This is the uninsulated portion. So this is where the foam is at. This is where the foam is not. Look at the difference 140 degrees. So there's almost a 35 degree temperature difference between the insulated portion of the underside of my roof deck and the uninsulated portion. So at about $1 a square foot, I refuse the surface temperature on the bottom side of my OSB by 35 degrees.
01:03:33:27 - 01:03:57:13
Steve Easley: So that's going to have a huge impact on me being able to kind of flywheel through those peak times of the day. And so that's what I meant by being able to design your building enclosure so that you can make it more peak load friendly. And what's happening throughout the United States, electricity generated during these, you know, on peak times, you know, it's very valuable.
01:03:57:15 - 01:04:13:11
Steve Easley: Utilities are really having a hard time keeping up with some in some cases, some parts of the country keeping up with these peak loads. And so being able to make your house more peak load friendly is going to save you a lot of money. As I said in California, for the peak load rates are $0.50 a kilowatt hour.
01:04:13:12 - 01:04:26:25
Steve Easley: In Arizona, where I live on on peak rates are about 28 to $0.29 an hour, versus the off peak was about 12 to 13. So questions my.
01:04:26:27 - 01:04:54:24
Mike Collignon: Yes we do Steve got a couple of them. So one of them is actually going back to this. The single head and multi-head question from before. But this one's coming in from Jonathan because he's he's asking kind of a different way. He's saying that right now the multi-head systems are not as efficient as the single systems. And he's want to know if that will still be the case.
01:04:54:27 - 01:05:21:23
Steve Easley: Yeah. Well, on how you define efficiency, it brings up a good point. Yeah. So the more heads that you have on one compressor, the less efficient is. So if I have one compressor and one, let's say evap coil or heating coil, that is going to be the most efficient. When I start adding more additional units to each capacitor, the efficiency drops because you have, you know, much more, you have more refrigerant lines and so forth.
01:05:21:23 - 01:05:49:08
Steve Easley: So that's true. But when you look at the overall efficiency and not just the the nameplate where you're looking at in terms of delivered comfort and also the balance of overall cost, I mean, for my situation, I'm putting in multiple, you know, condensers. I have cases where I'm only have two on one condenser, but that's just the system I chose to design.
01:05:49:12 - 01:06:20:23
Steve Easley: Not everybody might be able to afford that. But my point is, is that it's you want to look at delivered comfort so and delivered efficiency. So for example, I may have maybe a nameplate number that's less efficient because I have, you know, four units for heads on one, you know, compressor. Right. But the overall fact that I can vary that zone by zone and I can turn that temperature on and off, room by room, my overall cost is going to be much lower.
01:06:20:24 - 01:06:23:11
Steve Easley: Does that make sense, Mike?
01:06:23:13 - 01:06:39:04
Mike Collignon: Yeah. No it does. And I, I wanted to get to another question as well from Eric. He wanted to know have you, have you used insulated concrete forms or structural insulated panels for thermal enclosures?
01:06:39:07 - 01:06:59:12
Steve Easley: Yeah, a matter of fact, if you're into this we have a webinar of Pacific Gas. Electric has me do a webinar on this kind of topic. I think sets are great. We've built not from my own personal use, but built a number of projects. You know, for the International Builders Show, we did a few projects where we use SIPs panels.
01:06:59:13 - 01:07:27:29
Steve Easley: The project couple projects I did with we did with Sarah Susana and yeah, so I'm a big yeah. And the in-state concrete forms. I personally haven't used them on my personal house, but I think they're fine. Fact one of the vision House projects. See our hero if you go to the the website, the vision House websites here on Green Builder Media, you can look at his project, which was a an ICF project.
01:07:28:00 - 01:07:32:03
Steve Easley: Well, yes. So I think those can work great.
01:07:32:05 - 01:07:35:04
Mike Collignon: All right. Great. Thank you Steve. Keep on going.
01:07:35:06 - 01:07:52:23
Steve Easley: Yeah. So a couple areas I think in terms of getting air infiltration right that big things that I see people miss, they typically will air seal this side of the plate. But you need to air seal top side of the plate to actually more air infiltration comes over the top of the plate that comes underneath the plate. So that's important.
01:07:52:24 - 01:08:14:17
Steve Easley: Like I mentioned earlier about air sealing the attic, pretty easy to do. You know spray foam. Now they have such they have low GWP products that are down less than five where these products a few years ago used to be up in the, you know, over 1000. What we mean by global warming potential CO2 has a global warming potential of one.
01:08:14:24 - 01:08:38:07
Steve Easley: But these products are much, you know, lower GWP. And so they do a great job of air sealing. This is a froth pack system that DuPont makes, and it's has a value of about 6.2 per inch and has a low GWP. So just, you know, here's my wall system. I'm simply doing like a stucco wrap material over the top of my OSB.
01:08:38:07 - 01:09:02:05
Steve Easley: And then I'm going over that with inch and a half of polio for my exterior insulation. It's tongue and groove, and then I'll go over that with a rain screen laugh system. And then stucco is very popular in my area, so I'll go over that. So I'll have, you know, our 12 on the interior wall system, and then this will be another this is a number ten.
01:09:02:07 - 01:09:17:19
Steve Easley: I'll have a little bit higher on that because I'll probably backed up with some blown fiberglass because my walls are two by six. And then go over that with stucco. All right. So really important to pay attention to how we install these systems. I can't emphasize this enough. If you look at this picture here what do you see.
01:09:17:20 - 01:09:34:16
Steve Easley: You see all the black marks around the insulation. You know what that is? That's not mold. That's dirt. And that's because the duct is leaking. So it's not uncommon at all in older homes to have 3 to 400 cfm with the duct leakage are almost 25%, the entire systems efficiency being lost through leaks in the deck work. And with a heat pump.
01:09:34:16 - 01:09:58:22
Steve Easley: It's really important because if I'm losing 25% of my heat to the outdoors, that means I'm not delivering that to the inside. And so that means the recovery time is going to be longer, my comfort levels are going to be impacted. And so with heat pumps it's really important to air seal. Oftentimes we see people put in replace systems with heat pumps when they don't bother to insulate the ductwork.
01:09:58:22 - 01:10:16:24
Steve Easley: So you can imagine if this is in a crawl space. This metal duct is a pretty good radiator. And so that means my register discharge temperatures are going to be lower because nobody took the time to insulate the deck work. So what we would do here is we want to seal the ductwork with some mastic sealants and then go over that with some insulation.
01:10:16:27 - 01:10:38:04
Steve Easley: Or you could use a system like aero seal, which seals the ductwork from the inside out. It's kind of like fix a flat. But my point is, anytime you're doing any work on your home, and particularly if you're retrofitting your home or swapping out of gas furnace or fossil fuel furnace for the heat pump, you want to make sure that you air seal the deck, work and insulate the work.
01:10:38:04 - 01:11:00:17
Steve Easley: And this is part of a proper inspections that you want to do, you know, before you ever do this installation. So it's not just a matter going out and slapping in a heat pump and saying everything's going to be good. You really have to pay close attention to all of the details and then getting the airflow right, making sure that you have a licensed professional, size your system based on whether you're heating or cooling.
01:11:00:19 - 01:11:26:03
Steve Easley: And this is really important because you know, you want to make sure you get the loads right. You want to make sure you get the deck work designed right. So typically use aka the Air Conditioning Contractors Association Manual J current version to calculate the loads or equivalent software, and then use manual D to design the docks. Manual S to select the equipment, but spend the money on a professional that can help you design these systems to get the proper airflow unique.
01:11:26:03 - 01:11:50:27
Steve Easley: And then, you know, you have to pay attention to the how the Duckburg system installed when you look at these distribution systems. And one of the reasons why we switched from the old system of Sierra and HSF to two and two and two is because this is the types of things we saw in these systems. And so the installation has a much bigger impact on performance for heat pumps than it does conventional systems.
01:11:50:27 - 01:12:14:24
Steve Easley: Why? It's just because heat pumps, they simply have to take the heat out of the air. So they have to work a little longer than their dinosaur burner, you know, counterparts. Well, that's why we pay attention to those installation details. In fact, a lot of studies have been done on this and found that, you know, we're looking at some of the traditional shortcomings in terms of, you know, three quarters of the time they don't have adequate airflow.
01:12:14:25 - 01:12:44:02
Steve Easley: They don't use the proper method for evacuation refrigerant lines, the failure to use recommended charging methods, all these things are really important in study. So this here, if we look at this capacity of these systems all the systems go. Their bottom line is when we're looking at the capability of these systems they have, you could save easily 2,025% or more just by getting installed right now.
01:12:44:02 - 01:13:04:02
Steve Easley: Let's take a look at summer heat gain, because this I think will really impress you in terms of some work that the California Energy Commission did a number of years back. They just said that if you look at the average amount of square footage of ductwork in an attic, it ends up being about 40% of the floor area of your home.
01:13:04:02 - 01:13:21:24
Steve Easley: So if I have a 2000 square foot house having my ducks in the attic, what kind of penalty is that? So what I'm getting at here is that we're trying to get summertime performance art of our heat pump air conditioning system. We need to pay close attention to one of the biggest kiss of death we can have in our system is having our ductwork up.
01:13:21:25 - 01:13:41:13
Steve Easley: And so we did some basic math here, and let's just say we got a 2000 square foot house, and we got an ad temperature of 140 degrees, and our ductwork is insulated to 2.1. That's an older home. That's a home that has old duck organ. So that ends up being a total load on that deck work of two and a half tons.
01:13:41:13 - 01:14:06:15
Steve Easley: So that means if I've got a 410 system two and a half times, it's just to offset the heat gain in the end. So that kind of gives you an idea of just how ugly attics are in terms of contributing to the overall comfort and cooling load of a system. Now, if we take this and say, let's go to an eight work which is required today, all right, that ends up being about 0.67 tons.
01:14:06:17 - 01:14:32:13
Steve Easley: Okay. So it's still, you know, almost three quarters of a ton of air conditioning just from that additional heat gain. So doing non Bennett attics probably makes a lot of sense. If you're going to have ductwork and you're going to have equipment up in your attic which I highly do not recommend, at least consider some type of a non vented attic where we basically insulate the the bottom side of the roof deck with.
01:14:32:13 - 01:14:54:29
Steve Easley: Typically it's going to be a most climate zones are going to require that you have a non vapor permeable insulation. Typically that's going to be spray foam. In the colder climates that would be cold closed cell spray foam and the warmer climates that would be an open cell spray foam. Check your manufacturers recommendations. But the point is if we have equipment up here, it takes a heck of a penalty as a result of that.
01:14:54:29 - 01:15:17:15
Steve Easley: Like I said, anywhere between two and a half and almost three quarters of a ton of air conditioning. So summary. Make sure the unit is properly charged. One study showed that 62% of the time, another, you know, almost 72% of the time these systems were never charged properly. So look what happens to the the performance of these systems if they're not charged properly.
01:15:17:16 - 01:15:46:05
Steve Easley: We're talking about charge. We're talking about the refrigeration that goes into the system. So let's say we're 100% of a charge are and we're 100% capacity and 100% efficiency. But let's look what happens if we're 25% under charge, 25% under charge are capacity dropped by 25%. And our efficiency, you know, you know, drops. Look what happened. So we we paid for a 410 system, but we get a 310 system.
01:15:46:10 - 01:16:20:14
Steve Easley: Right. And this goes back. This is data we've known for 30 years. Likewise, if we tend to overcharge by, you know, 25% or capacity again dropped by 25% and our power usage goes up 10%. So we pay 10% more to get 25% less. So I can't emphasize the importance of making sure that we charge this appropriately for the university did some more recent studies and found out if we look it over here at 50% of refrigerant charge and we look at overall capacity, look at the curve, how much it drops off.
01:16:20:14 - 01:16:43:21
Steve Easley: So we go from 100% to less than 60% of capacity as a result of refrigerant charge. When we look at refrigerant charge on our efficiency again look at that. We go from 100% down to about 60% if we're, you know, under charged. So I can't emphasize the importance. And then the seasonal efficiency ratio drops off dramatically. So getting the appropriate charge is important.
01:16:43:22 - 01:17:01:04
Steve Easley: So that means that they're using digital gauges not analog gauges like we see here that they're using their weight in the refrigerant, that you have qualified people who know what they're doing. And make sure that we're putting in the right amount of refrigerate, that we're just not filling it up. Right, to make sure that the refrigerant charges properly.
01:17:01:04 - 01:17:26:26
Steve Easley: So getting the sizing right is good for comfort for energy efficiency, performance. You know, the system sizing is really important that we don't use rule of thumb measurements. If somebody says it's, you know, that you're putting a system in and it's going to be, you know, 400ft² for the time you need to find a new person because you might have the same size square footage as your neighbor, but your house may have, you know, double the square footage of glass that faces West.
01:17:26:26 - 01:17:49:13
Steve Easley: You're going to have totally different loads. And so that's why it's really important to make sure that we size the equipment. Right. And the beauty of driven equipment because it's, you know, computerized and based on the load, it's much less, you know, much more forgiving, much less of an impact on overall performance. So bottom line is no more than 10% greater than manual conversion.
01:17:49:13 - 01:18:17:27
Steve Easley: We want to use indoor design temperatures that are realistic for the area that you live in. All in HVAC contractor has to do this. Oversize. Your system is give you a lower design temperature for the summer sizing okay. And then indoor and outdoor coils need to be matched duct size according to manual D. And of course, make sure that our retired air and supplier ducts are designed according to manual specifications.
01:18:17:29 - 01:18:39:19
Steve Easley: Duct installation has a huge impact on overall performance. Duct leaks can create pressure differences that create air infiltration exfiltration across the building envelope. Like I said, it's not uncommon to have 3 to 400 cfm of duct leaks and leakage of course, waste energy. Now check this out. This is really an interesting chart. We talked about this little earlier, but when I talked about the compression rate.
01:18:39:20 - 01:19:02:16
Steve Easley: So in other words if you take a stretch your ductwork. So what I recommend people do when they're stalling their ductwork is they put a metal elbow, say at one end or coupler, and they fasten that to a family member. Then they pull the flex taut like you see here, and then use another. I say metal elbow or coupler and fasten that to a framing member.
01:19:02:18 - 01:19:24:04
Steve Easley: And the difference is, if you look at a 30% compression rate, you have four times the friction loss, whereas if you have a 4% compression rate, which we stress, the deck work. Like I said, you have one X defection loss and they have 15% compression. You have two x. So you know being able to pull this taut is really important.
01:19:24:05 - 01:19:44:18
Steve Easley: And then also keep in mind Flextech, it can be, you know, really hard on your system and have create much greater static pressure differences that make it harder for that system to push air throughout your house. So, for example, if we just look at a bend like this, this is the equivalent of this. The duct length is actually ten feet.
01:19:44:18 - 01:20:04:08
Steve Easley: But because of the two 90s, that gives you an equivalent length of this duct of 50ft. So really important to recognize that the number of bends that we have, we should have long sweeping bends. Use elbows here instead of the flex dock makes them a much better efficient system. And this is really important for pumps because airflow is what it's all about.
01:20:04:09 - 01:20:25:18
Steve Easley: Greater the airflow means greater than comfort. And so making sure that we use stress the deck work. We use elbows that these conditions and metal elbows instead of just bending the flex. Then also inspection is really really important. And then these type of grills are just the kiss of death in terms of proper airflow. I'm a big believer that you use commercial grade grills.
01:20:25:18 - 01:20:42:25
Steve Easley: These are these egg crate grills that you can get these up to two inches thick. So you can put pleated Merv 13 filters, in which filter 85% of all the particles that are less than a few microns, which are really good in terms of, you know, enhancing the indoor air quality of your house without creating great pressure drops.
01:20:43:02 - 01:21:06:00
Steve Easley: Here's the supply registers is what I have in my own home, even my older house. I replace these. So these give you airflow that broadcasts here much deeper into the room, which much greater restriction than you see with these types of. Let me go back here with these types of grills okay. And again look out for these types of problems like this.
01:21:06:00 - 01:21:23:25
Steve Easley: This is just the kiss of death. You know, when you see these types of restrictions and has a huge impact on any system performance, not just heat pumps, but these are the kind of things that we need to pay close attention to here. For example, new construction, they got a 12 inch diameter Joyce attendance diameter duct and a foreign sewer line.
01:21:23:26 - 01:21:42:11
Steve Easley: How thick could this be? So how much air can possibly come out of here? So these are the things we have to pay attention to when we're either, you know, obviously in cases where we're building new construction, but even where we can see the dock workmen retrofitting to pay attention to that, keep in mind that pre-planning is really, really important here.
01:21:42:11 - 01:22:02:23
Steve Easley: For example, plumber always wins. You know, the deck workers put in for the plumbing was installed and therefore we get substantial compression. That's not going to be able to deliver the adequate airflow to the room proper supports. You know, instead of a one inch hanger, this should probably be closer to 3 or 4 if you can don't don't suspend your ductwork from the attic.
01:22:02:25 - 01:22:34:00
Steve Easley: In some places, code officials require that. I never understood why, but anyway, this is not what we want to try to recreate. All of these things are important. So deck run should be straight with no kinks or crushed areas they should have. No. There's a wide angle sweeping turns with, I believe, metal elbows obviously sealed with mastic sealants, flexed connections, the boots with duct ties, and the appropriate tape and duct leakage always meet your local standards, which is.
01:22:34:01 - 01:22:54:00
Steve Easley: The new codes now are doing a much better job of requiring that we eliminate duck duck leakage here. For example, this is where they just put a couple of sheet metal screws. There's no air sealing where the boot to floor connection meets. There's no air sealing takes place where this ducts at again example the dirt dirty insulation. So here's where you do it right.
01:22:54:00 - 01:23:15:04
Steve Easley: You simply pull the liner over the boot. You put few wraps of UL 181 BF tape, put the drawer band on, pull the insulation over that, add another drawer band got a really nice tight connection. Typically the codes require that you use one of three types of duct tape, not the standard gray type duct tape that we use to fix everything in the trunk of a car, right?
01:23:15:06 - 01:23:37:07
Steve Easley: We keep for emergency use, but this is the UL 181 BF tape. It's acrylic as acrylic based on hazing. This has got butyl based on. This is a metal tape with with acrylic bases as opposed to rubber basin which dry out and cause problems. Questions.
01:23:37:10 - 01:23:52:08
Mike Collignon: Well, actually I was going to put out a last call for questions, and we can get to as many as we have time for. But I want to I don't have any at the moment for you, Steve. But when we get to the end, we'll take whatever we've got left.
01:23:52:11 - 01:24:17:06
Steve Easley: Sure. And then I'm going to get into heat pumps and also talk a little bit about induction cooking and heat pump clothes writers. He got some new on that. So when I talked earlier about fresh air ventilation it's required an almost all the codes today. And earlier I said what one of the real things that would be helpful in electrification is to be able to have your very efficient ERV, but have a control by monitoring and or quality.
01:24:17:06 - 01:24:52:00
Steve Easley: So these are these ARVs or standard recovery energy recovery ventilators. They also have what we call heat exchangers, another term for heat recovery ventilation. But for example, the system I'm putting in my house, for example, it'll have the ability to take outdoor air at 110 degrees, and then it takes the stale air from the building, let's say at 75 degrees, and then it will recover that energy and bring me preheated air in at 83 degrees, and then it'll exhaust that air at 105.
01:24:52:02 - 01:25:17:14
Steve Easley: So these systems use very little water. But the beauty of these systems, it allows you to bring in fresh air and recover the energy that you pay to heat and cool your homes. And these are getting more cost effective every day and but allows you to have fresh air ventilation without the penalty of having to, you know, reheat and recall all that area bring into your home.
01:25:17:15 - 01:25:42:10
Steve Easley: Now, I also mentioned that the ability to be able to monitor your true indoor air quality and then run your ventilation system based on what that quality is, rather than, say, just an X-ray CFM per minute standard. And so what I've been experimenting with is this system here, which is basically has a small sensor, and the sensor talks to the cloud and analyzes my indoor air quality.
01:25:42:11 - 01:26:04:03
Steve Easley: You can see here it's green. So things are good but it analyze the interior quality. And then we'll send it to an app. And so this is right off my phone. They'll tell me what my humidity is, what my overall indoor air quality status is, what my CO2 levels are, what my total organic volatile organic compounds are and what my PPM 2.5 are.
01:26:04:04 - 01:26:32:01
Steve Easley: So PM 2.5 of those particles that are less than two and a half microns, a micron is a millionth of a meter. And so when the problem with these ppm 2.5 particles is that they have the ability to bridge the gap between your bloodstream and your lung tissue. So when you're looking for even cooking, for example, inside your home you can generate both electric car gas, it can generate PPM 2.5 obviously volatile compounds or things that we don't want to have high.
01:26:32:03 - 01:27:02:13
Steve Easley: But anyway, this can actually monitor this and actually operate my ear based on my real and rare quality. So if I don't have it in our quality problem, I'm not, you know, ventilating over ventilating my house. And that's the beauty of these types of systems. So what they can do is they can control my brain should they can control my V, I can have individual switches in each room which will monitor in our quality and kind of let me know if I've got polluted air, it's red or if it's above levels, it's yellow and if it's everything's good, it's green.
01:27:02:16 - 01:27:24:09
Steve Easley: But these systems are really clever in terms of their ability to be able to actually monitor interior quality. The reason why I like this is that I'm not paying to over ventilate my house when my indoor air quality is, is not necessary to provide over ventilation. So how much energy. Well, let me just stop before I get into heat pump water heaters.
01:27:24:16 - 01:27:29:21
Steve Easley: Any questions on the these types of systems? My.
01:27:29:23 - 01:27:46:25
Mike Collignon: Well, we have one question from Nicholas, and I don't know if this is an entire webinar or if there's something you can kind of summarize, but he's wanting to know the pros and cons of duct versus ductless in new construction.
01:27:46:27 - 01:28:16:16
Steve Easley: Good question. My advice is unless you can really ducted system can work very well. As long as number one you size them appropriately. Number two, you install them correctly. And number three, you test to make sure that your duct system is airtight and then number for any ductwork that is located in unconditioned spaces, you'd bury the deck worker heavily insulated by highly advise you so you can make ducted systems work.
01:28:16:17 - 01:28:44:25
Steve Easley: There are ducted systems that can work very well and they can be very efficient. The reason why I tend to lean more towards ductless systems is because you just have less potential for problems. Why? The reason why I used all of these? I use seven different of those cassettes and mounted in my ceiling mounted one way cassette is because I wanted to control the heating and cooling in each of my rooms individually.
01:28:44:27 - 01:29:03:24
Steve Easley: I didn't want to have to heat in cool rooms I wasn't going to be using. For example, I want to be able to heat and cool those at different levels based on its occupancy. So I wouldn't say that ducted systems can't work. I just think that ductless systems overall are a little less problematic.
01:29:03:26 - 01:29:06:20
Mike Collignon: All right. Very good Steve okay.
01:29:06:21 - 01:29:29:21
Steve Easley: So let's talk about heat pump water heaters there. If you have an electric water heater you can literally save 75% on on your your bills over an electric resistance water heater. Obviously when you compare it in the gas, you know they're going to be more environmentally friendly because, you know, you could offset that electric use with renewable energy.
01:29:29:21 - 01:29:47:13
Steve Easley: But the bottom line is they're 2 to 4 times more efficient. The savings really depend upon your fuel prices. Also your lifestyle, your hot water demands. Those kind of things are also important. And the climate you're in and where it's located. So here's an example. I replace my electric hot water heater with with a heat pump water heater.
01:29:47:13 - 01:30:15:01
Steve Easley: This is my garage is what to do look like the difference this had do 40 500W and had a copy of 0.85 to 0.93. This in heat pump mode draws only 400W and a copy of four. So when you're looking at over the course of a year, you're looking at roughly $100 versus, you know, over $400. So heat pump water heaters, if you have a can really save you a lot.
01:30:15:03 - 01:30:42:22
Steve Easley: Now here's an example of my usage. I have an app on my phone, and the beauty of these things is that you can actually track your water use. You see heating usage, your energy usage. I can even switch from to vacation mode on using the app, but on average you can see that in January my hot water usage probably averaged in that, you know, roughly at two to 2.5kW hours a day.
01:30:42:26 - 01:31:06:05
Steve Easley: My water heater is located in my garage. Notice for the January 2022 I use 79 kilowatt hours electricity. Heat my hot water just using the heat pump mode. Now look at this. In June I used 40 kilowatt hours and you want to take why? With an average of less than, you know, less than one and a half a day.
01:31:06:07 - 01:31:32:23
Steve Easley: Because I'm in my garage. And so the garage gets upwards of 95 degrees. So let me go back here and show you this. Hang on a second. Sorry. There we go. So this being the my garage, there's my garage was like 95 degrees. So the cop and my water heater went way up because it's so hot. Where in the winter months, you know, it's probably closer in the 40 degrees range.
01:31:32:27 - 01:31:53:07
Steve Easley: So bottom line is, is that no matter what time of year is, you're still saving energy over traditional systems. But I just thought you'd find this fascinating to see. You know, how much less energy you use with one in the garage in the summer versus the winter. So he pump water heaters there, you know, a lot more energy efficient.
01:31:53:08 - 01:32:16:15
Steve Easley: So again, 75% less energy use or a quarter of the energy we're using four times the efficiency of gas or electric. Okay. Now a couple things to note. Electric resistance elements can take about can heat about 20 gallons in an hour. Gas can do in about 15 to 20 minutes. So again fossil fuels have the ability to liberate a lot of heat and short period of time.
01:32:16:17 - 01:32:38:14
Steve Easley: The bad news is not quite as good for the environment. He pump mode can typically average when the when a heat pump water heater is in heat pump mode, about eight gallons per hour, and even less if the if your temperature where the water heaters at is below 60 degrees. But typically people take their showers in the morning or the evening and then it has time to recover.
01:32:38:14 - 01:33:07:15
Steve Easley: So I simply there are two of us. We got by with a 40 gallon tank and never had any issues, just operating in 100% heat pump mode. So electric resistance heat turns 100% of the electricity. In the heat, we typically measure the efficiency of water heaters by energy factor that was replaced by uniform energy factor in 2017. Again, it was just a way to create a more realistic rating.
01:33:07:15 - 01:33:35:09
Steve Easley: That's the reason they changed it, changed it from UF to you've. It just simply provides a more consistent, accurate way to measure the efficiency and performance of water heaters across all brands. UF. Basically, the higher the number, the better it is. It's the efficiency of the water heater to convert energy into hot water. And then of course, typical gas and electric UF ranges, you know, for standard equipment is between six five and nine five.
01:33:35:10 - 01:33:55:00
Steve Easley: Heat pumps can be between 2 and 4. So obviously heat pump water heaters are much more efficient. And you can go online and you can look at a variety of these. This is what I installed. It has a UF of four. So it's pretty pretty efficient. Semi notes it looks similar to a copy slightly different but close enough.
01:33:55:03 - 01:34:11:02
Steve Easley: And then it's important that you recognize that to set these up is important. Because if if you set this up and you're going to run this on high demand all the time, your customers won't see any savings. In fact, you might even see more energy use. You want to have this operate on heat pump mode as much as possible.
01:34:11:03 - 01:34:33:07
Steve Easley: And second to that energy saver mode. And all the different manufacturers are pretty close to this. I mean, they all have a similar interface. They either run a heat pump mode, hybrid mode, a high demand mode, or standard. And you know, you could check your whatever manufactured your choice. But the bottom line is I run mine and heat pump mode and never had any issues.
01:34:33:08 - 01:34:53:16
Steve Easley: That is important to recognize that if you're putting one of these inside your house, that you need to have a room that's roughly 700 cubic feet. So that's roughly seven by ten by ten, and you can have a door on it, you know, but you need to have enough space. This thing can breathe and explain the heat. You could do louvered doors.
01:34:53:17 - 01:35:19:02
Steve Easley: That would certainly help. Or you could duct the system. They make these to where you can actually duct to the outdoors or duct to the indoors and bring fresh air in. You can undercut here, for example, they're saying this manufacturer, this is a system. They're saying if you undercut the door by three quarters of an inch and it's 24in wide, and you could duct this to so you could supply that cool air, the beauty of heat pump water heaters in the summer months, they cool your garage.
01:35:19:06 - 01:35:35:11
Steve Easley: You can even run that duct inside your home. So you could take that roughly 4000 BTU per hour and use that to to cool your house. So that's the beauty of heat pump water heaters. They're basically a small air conditioning. And then you can even duct these where you have air coming into the unit and out of the unit.
01:35:35:11 - 01:35:54:24
Steve Easley: So there's no energy penalty whatsoever. You can even some manufacturers have these kits that you can purchase. And again, so you can add some additional cooling capacity to your house. This is what they kind of look like in the real world. And these kind of ducted systems. It's a really important installation wise. You give it plenty of room to breathe here.
01:35:54:24 - 01:36:13:25
Steve Easley: For example, they put it right up against a basement wall. That's not good. You want to have a room like over here on the left. There's adequate room. Make sure you have room to change the filters. This little air conditioning system. Right. It's it's so it needs to have the capacity to be able to filter the air. So we want to make sure those filters are, in fact, clean.
01:36:13:28 - 01:36:39:13
Steve Easley: And then make sure that many codes require anti scalding devices. So I want to make sure that we take care of that and insulate the piping according to according to national codes. And then also keep in mind where you place these these units, you know put out 49 to 65dB. So if you're concerned, you know about noise you want to make, you might want to not want to put on these near bedroom or other noise sensitive locations.
01:36:39:13 - 01:36:51:04
Steve Easley: So be cognizant of that. They are a little bit more obviously they're going to be noisier than a than a traditional water heater. So questions about hip hop water heaters.
01:36:51:06 - 01:36:56:15
Mike Collignon: Just one comment from Jonathan. He said hey don't they also dehumidifier?
01:36:56:17 - 01:37:11:27
Steve Easley: They absolutely do. Thanks for bringing that point up. They absolutely dehumidifier. They take any air conditioner, you know, obviously takes washer out of the air. So that's a very good point. Thanks for reminding me of that.
01:37:12:00 - 01:37:14:10
Mike Collignon: All right okay.
01:37:14:15 - 01:37:40:11
Steve Easley: So let's let's move forward into, you know, cooking and cooking and also some indoor air quality concerns that you might want to be cognizant of. Let me just say this. All cooking stoves create some pollution. Gas stoves are about 40 million homes in the United States. And I can't emphasize the importance that adequate ventilation is critical to improving indoor air quality, whether you have an electric or gas stove.
01:37:40:13 - 01:38:11:02
Steve Easley: However, there are some more recent concerns, some studies that have come out that have, you know, starting to show that cooking with gas does indicate elevated levels of no. Two nitrogen oxides dioxide. So one study here from Lawrence Berkeley lab so that for the nine homes had higher levels and than you would you would like. In fact a quote is said exceed the national ambient air quality standard of 100 parts per billion.
01:38:11:04 - 01:38:35:15
Steve Easley: So you know it can be a lung enrichment. Thanks for concerned about with gas stoves particulate matter. And that's gas and electric. So when you're dealing with PM 2.5 those particles two and a half microns are greater. Both gas and electric stoves emit those products. That's just a byproduct of cooking. And so proper ventilation is really, really important with gas stoves.
01:38:35:16 - 01:39:02:23
Steve Easley: Of course there's more nitrogen dioxide, nitrogen oxides, which are considered a lung irritant and can be higher than outdoor levels, carbon monoxide, benzene and BTECs. That's a series of chemicals that are of concern. The study, by the National Institute of Standards and Technology found the cooking with gas burners set on high heat emitted lower levels of family high while cooking, with the gas burner set on low level.
01:39:02:23 - 01:39:19:29
Steve Easley: Simmering emitted higher levels of formaldehyde. And I thought that was interesting because at higher temperatures, the high this tends to be consumed as quickly as it was formed, but at lower temperatures, less from how high was consumed, allowed it to communicate in the air. And then, of course, common dioxide. So these are the things that they're concerned about.
01:39:20:00 - 01:39:45:22
Steve Easley: And that's why ventilation is so important. There's also been concerned about the leakage of gas stoves. This was a 53 home California study where they found that more than three quarters of the methane emissions were measured and originated during off conditions, which is disturbing. So even when the gas stove is off, it may be leaking, you know, contaminants in the air, particularly if you have pilot lights.
01:39:45:23 - 01:40:09:08
Steve Easley: Of course, they're less and less frequent, as we see in, you know, homes today. But still there is some concern about this. So the California Energy Commission has done a lot of studies on this. And, you know, with regards to ranch ventilation. So what I'm trying to say here is if you have any type of cooking you want to use, you want to use proper ventilation.
01:40:09:08 - 01:40:40:10
Steve Easley: And unfortunately we only use if these studies are correct, range hoods about 36% of the time in homes and 28% of the times in apartments. And not all of the times are these systems ducted to the outside. So that's a little disturbing. Study that was done by the California Air Resources Board found that a of the number of homes they did, 92 of them, 48% or 90, 92 homes, or 48% of the 193 homes.
01:40:40:10 - 01:41:02:06
Steve Easley: They only use it less than 50% of the time. And the reason they felt like two noisy or didn't even think about it. So I can't emphasize how important it is, particularly if you have gas equipment to make sure that you are using proper, proper ventilation, and they've set some new standards around that. But first of all, let me show you a little bit about capture efficiency.
01:41:02:06 - 01:41:37:09
Steve Easley: So this is why you want your range to do you want your range to be able to get both front and back burner capture efficiency for adequate removal of pollutants. And so that's I can't emphasize that enough. You know, and when they looked at some simulations that they did, they found that the simulation suggests that requiring a minimum capture efficiency at at least 70% is needed to avoid unacceptably high levels of no two average one hour concentration of 100 parts.
01:41:37:11 - 01:42:00:01
Steve Easley: In other words, the outdoor limit for EPA is 100 parts per billion. So we don't want to go above the outdoor limit indoors, right? So when we look at the California requirements now, they basically say that if you have a hood over an electric range and this is ducted to the outdoors, okay. If we have a greater than 1500 square foot home, we need a 50% capture efficiency.
01:42:00:01 - 01:42:23:01
Steve Easley: That means that we're capturing 50% of the pollutants off of that, out of through that hood, off of that electric range or 110 cfm. Now, if we have less, you know, from 1000 to 1500 that capture efficiency is the same. But notice if we have gas in both of these, we have to have a 70% capture efficiency or 180 CFM.
01:42:23:02 - 01:42:52:02
Steve Easley: And if we're looking at 1000 to 1500 square feet and 80% capture efficiency, or 250 cfm and 758, the home gets smaller. Notice the capture efficiency goes up over electric, the the CFM goes up. Notice the capture efficiency goes to 85 to 2 80 to 80. And so bottom line is if we have a really small apartment, you're looking at a minimum capture efficiency of any 5% or 280 CFM fan.
01:42:52:02 - 01:43:17:04
Steve Easley: So this was all really originated out of the works and work that Lawrence Berkeley National Labs did. And this was to try to control those. PM 2.5 so the encapsulate or to get rid of the 2.5, you're looking at minimum capture efficiencies of 50 to 65% or 110 to 100, and, you know, roughly 60 CFM. And then the two again, same numbers.
01:43:17:06 - 01:43:49:18
Steve Easley: The California standards are based off of this 80 to 85% capture efficiency and 280 CFM. So what I did in my home, I just simply switched out my gas range to induction cooking. Induction cooking gives you the control of gas without the extra, you know, pollutants and the concerns over that and the beauty of induction cooking. It heats the pan, not the surface, so it's much more efficient.
01:43:49:20 - 01:44:14:21
Steve Easley: Here's a good example of that, where you can see that the acres cooking where we have the induction, you know, ready pan so to speak, the when you're looking at the efficiency of induction cooking, according to Department of Energy and Energy Star, the per unit efficiency of induction cooking tops is about 5 to 10% more efficient than conventional electric and about three times more efficient than gas.
01:44:14:23 - 01:44:40:19
Steve Easley: And if all cooktops when sold in the US in 2021, use induction technology and meet the drafting criteria, the energy savings would exceed about $125 million a year, and 1000 gigawatt hours of energy did a study. Induction cooking is considered one of the most efficient types of technologies, with up to 90% of the energy consumed being transferred to the food.
01:44:40:25 - 01:45:04:24
Steve Easley: So again, it uses the electromagnetic, uses electromagnetic energy to excite the energy of the molecules and the pan, as opposed to transferring the heat from an element to the pan and then into the food. So it's it's quite a bit more efficient, you know, 70% versus 40% for gas questions.
01:45:04:26 - 01:45:12:20
Mike Collignon: I don't see any in the Q at the moment, Steve. So I would say go ahead and carry on and we'll get to some if they come through later.
01:45:12:23 - 01:45:36:06
Steve Easley: Yeah, okay. And we'll finish up here with heat pump closed wires. We're just about done. You know it's always kind of interesting to me when you look at clothes dryers. They draw anywhere between 100 and 10 and probably 180ft of air per minute out of your house. So it takes eat out of your house, let's say in the winter months, your heat, the air to heat that air, and then you're going to take that air and reheat it to, to dry your clothes, and then you're going to push it to the outdoors.
01:45:36:11 - 01:45:56:18
Steve Easley: In the summer months, you're taking air that you've air conditioned, you're pulling out into the dryer, you're heating it up, and to extract the heat out of your clothes. So it's incredibly, incredibly wasteful. So the concept of a of a heat pump clothes dryer is that it uses the uses a heat pump to basically evaporate the moisture from the clothes.
01:45:56:18 - 01:46:19:00
Steve Easley: So you end up getting about a 50% energy savings there. So you don't have to have a flu like you, you know, or don't have to have a to the outdoors. Excuse me, not a flu. They're also since they're lower temperature they tend to be easier on fabrics. And but they do take longer. Now the unit I'm going to put in is going to be it's a it's a hybrid system.
01:46:19:00 - 01:46:43:14
Steve Easley: So it has a little bit of an electric element in it if I want to use it, if I need to get stuff dried quicker. But it also has the heat pump components. So a lot of the newer units are what we call hybrid dryers, where they have a electric element to give you boost. So when you don't have time, you can draw your clothes quicker, because obviously there's slower drying times because it's taking the heat, you know, out of the clothes using refrigeration cycle.
01:46:43:17 - 01:47:10:27
Steve Easley: So it's pretty cool technology. You know, there's, as I said, no vent easier and fabrics lower temperature drawing does not depressurize the home. Your typical dryer basically takes that 100 and let's say 30 cfm of air. And a second that out of your house, that can tend to be a little bit pricey 13 to $1800. They do require you kind of say drain or some type of a tank, but you know, guess what?
01:47:11:00 - 01:47:28:09
Steve Easley: You know, you already have a drain there for your washer anyway, so that's typically not a problem. And it can be, you know, slightly noisier. So those are some of the pros and pros and cons. But essentially this is kind of how it works, is that you have this miniature little refrigeration cycle in here where you have an evaporator and a condenser.
01:47:28:09 - 01:47:53:28
Steve Easley: And, you know, you basically take this blower and it's got double filtration on it, by the way. So it's really important that you keep the filters clean on these, because the efficiency of this system is going to be dramatically impacted if the filters are dirty. But essentially it extracts, you know, the water from the air, which is basically from your clothes, you know, being wet and then recovers that energy and then delivers that heat into the drum.
01:47:53:28 - 01:48:17:07
Steve Easley: So it's a pretty simple process. So I've had extremely good luck with my heat pump water heater. So I'm hoping that this provides me the kind of the same level of of performance. So while we've covered a lot of material in a short period of time, I know I tend to move fast. You know, particularly in light when we have lots of questions, that tends to slow things down a little bit.
01:48:17:07 - 01:48:30:24
Steve Easley: But I always like to answer those questions. And so happy to take some time now to answer some questions. And if I've been unclear about some things, you know, please, please pick up.
01:48:30:26 - 01:48:54:03
Mike Collignon: All right. As Steve said, this is the last call for questions. We do very much appreciate you sticking with us and checking out all the information that he had, because there is a lot to cover on this topic. Just kind of answer a general question that some people might have, and that is that a video of this entire session is going to be posted online.
01:48:54:03 - 01:49:18:04
Mike Collignon: Greenville the media will send out a link to that later this week. So guess you missed any part of it or you want to replay it to your heart's content. Go for it. We did have one question from Daniel will all electric homes be more greatly affected by utility programs that control peak load periods?
01:49:18:07 - 01:49:37:04
Steve Easley: Yeah, you know, what's what's happening, particularly in the West and is happening more and more everywhere is more and more solar and more and more renewables come online. It's shifting the peak load to the evening hours a day. So once the solar sort of shuts down, starts shutting down, these these utilities have to ramp up these power plants in a very short period of time.
01:49:37:05 - 01:50:04:28
Steve Easley: And a lot of the utilities don't have what they call peaking or don't have as much peaking power plants as the load would require. So many of the states are starting to have their energy record. Roads reflect the fact that when you use energy is just as important as how much energy that you use. So some of the utilities will handle this by having rate structures that are punitive to using energy during peak times.
01:50:04:29 - 01:50:27:13
Steve Easley: Other utilities will provide load controllers to customers as an option so they control when your air conditioner runs on and off. They'll cycle, you know, condition on and off. Like, for example, the rain water heater that I showed you. It actually has a module that you can plug into it, where the utility will give you a lower utility rate if you allow them to control when your hot water heater runs.
01:50:27:13 - 01:50:52:29
Steve Easley: Not so. The utilities have two approaches to controlling these peak loads is one is by rate incentives, which means that if you use electricity during those peak times, you'll pay more. Like I mentioned, Arizona, maybe as much as $0.30 a kilowatt hour. California is almost all the major utilities is $0.50 a kilowatt hour. Or they'll encourage you and financially incentivize you to use low controllers.
01:50:52:29 - 01:51:23:03
Steve Easley: So yeah, it's as we start to move more towards an electrified society. It's not as simple as it looks because, you know, the grid's got to be able to handle all this and in some cases the grids capable of it. In some cases it's not. So it's going to be it's going to be a process. And that's why this this webinar was really all about is trying to say, hey, if you want to help move this process of electrification, you know, you can switch to these appliances, but let's just do it in an efficient, you know, smart kind of way.
01:51:23:04 - 01:51:30:15
Steve Easley: But we're not just looking at simply replacing equipment. We're looking at the entire home so that we can be more effective.
01:51:30:17 - 01:51:41:16
Mike Collignon: Well, you mentioned the grid. Steve and Daniel kind of had a question about that. He wanted to know what are the most cost effective grid improvements that can be made at the local level?
01:51:41:18 - 01:52:00:11
Steve Easley: Well, that's really of a utility planning. I mean, in some utilities are much better prepared for this than others based on, you know, just, you know, how they they're set up. But I can tell you, in my personal situation, when I went to switch, the code required me to upgrade to a four and a half service, even though my home is going to be four times more efficient.
01:52:00:13 - 01:52:21:11
Steve Easley: But so part of it, the codes are outdated. But having said that, when they looked at my panel, my electrical, excuse me, my transformer, they said, wow, we don't know if this, you know, transformer can handle this. Sure enough, come back. They said they could. But then I thought, what happens when my other three neighbors went to upgrade, you know, so really it's on a very localized level.
01:52:21:11 - 01:52:40:04
Steve Easley: And that's why I said that if electrification going to happen, it has to happen on the customer side of the meter first, because we need to make our homes as energy efficient as possible. So we put as little load on the grid as possible so that, you know, we can all get there in a more timely way, if that makes any sense.
01:52:40:07 - 01:53:08:06
Mike Collignon: Question from Daniel or I'm sorry, not Daniel. We already got Daniel's question, but to lad's question, what are the options if you don't have a range hood that is vented to the outside and all you have is that kind of under cabinet microwave unit for a fan, and I can relate to what his question is, because that's what's in my kitchen.
01:53:08:08 - 01:53:38:07
Steve Easley: Well, in my 1970s house, that's exactly what I have that I'm living in now, that I'm when I'm building the other house, I have the same exact thing. I have a microwave that is not dug into the outdoors. Now, fortunately, it's house all electric, so that's not and it's not a coil type burner. But yeah, there's I can't emphasize enough about, you know, the importance of having a ducted ventilation system to the outdoors.
01:53:38:10 - 01:54:04:03
Steve Easley: So unfortunately if you have a gas range and you have a microwave that's not ducted the outside about, the best you can do is use that filter and keep that clean and at least keep some of the impurities, you know. But it's it's unfortunately ducted to the outside is what new codes require. And older homes it's really a little problematic.
01:54:04:05 - 01:54:22:12
Steve Easley: So if you have an older home and you switch to induction range, that would certainly help a lot. But whether you have gas or electric, I really believe that the outdoors is obviously the best way to go. You know, that's not magic. Answer you want to hear. But unfortunately that's the case.
01:54:22:14 - 01:54:39:22
Mike Collignon: Well, Michael had a question about going back to ground source heat pumps. I wanted to know if you could talk a little about that. And are they as advanced as the current air source variable rate fan systems are?
01:54:39:25 - 01:54:57:23
Steve Easley: You know, I thought I had some slides in you and that my other heat pump class, I have a lot of slides on water source and, and ground source heat pumps. So they answer your question the more efficient. And the reason is, is because if you go down deep enough into the ground, the water table is going to be the or excuse me, go down deep enough and you hit the water table.
01:54:57:23 - 01:55:16:04
Steve Easley: That water temperature is going to be the average outdoor temperature for the year. So instead of it being, you know, five below zero, it's going to be in the 50s. For example, if it's a ground source heat pump and you're down below the cost line, you're probably looking at, you know, temperatures that are substantially warmer than the outdoor air temperature.
01:55:16:04 - 01:55:33:17
Steve Easley: So the most efficient these systems are is the first day of the heating system. And the least efficient is the last day of the heating season. Likewise, the most efficient they are for cooling is the first day of the cooling season. And then the least efficient is the last day of the cooling season, because you have all that thermal mass that store that heat.
01:55:33:17 - 01:55:58:03
Steve Easley: So the again, the beauty of these metrics that the Doe provides, it allows you to use that to judge the efficiency of the system that you have. So traditionally, when you're looking at ground source or water source heat pumps, you're going to typically be looking at the cops or the heating seasonal performance factors. And again they buy the highest you can afford.
01:55:58:03 - 01:56:22:08
Steve Easley: So to answer your question, or they as sophisticated as the the cold climate heat pumps know. But they kind of don't need to be because air is not the, not the not the medium that you're transferring the heat. It's either the ground or the water table. And what I mean by the water table, what I mean by ground loop, they basically take and circulate that ground water over a coil.
01:56:22:08 - 01:56:33:01
Steve Easley: It's not like you're just pumping water out of the ground and pulling it over a coil and dump it into a lake or a stream.
01:56:33:03 - 01:56:42:08
Steve Easley: To answer that question.
01:56:42:10 - 01:56:46:01
Steve Easley: Okay, can you still hear me?
01:56:46:03 - 01:56:50:15
Mike Collignon: Sorry, I have myself on mute.
01:56:50:17 - 01:56:56:05
Mike Collignon: Yep, I, I was trying to sing again. That's what it was.
01:56:56:07 - 01:57:18:00
Mike Collignon: No, I don't have any other questions right now, Steve. So I want to go ahead and and call it there. But I do want to thank you very much for for sharing your time today and all the information that you did share with us, because this is a huge topic and there's there's different facets to it. And I love how you were able to kind of touch on all of them, or at least most of them.
01:57:18:02 - 01:57:20:20
Steve Easley: You're welcome. Happy to be here.
01:57:20:22 - 01:57:39:29
Mike Collignon: All right. Thank you also to our wonderful audience for attending and asking wonderful questions. We love doing this for you all. And thank you also the Power Shift by Envy Energy for their generous sponsorship of this webinar. Now, our next webinar is actually going to take place in five weeks. That's going to be on Wednesday, March 15th at 2 p.m. Eastern time.
01:57:39:29 - 01:57:55:07
Mike Collignon: We'll be talking with Stephanie Coleman about ESG in housing and what we can learn from the largest builders. So stay tuned to your inbox for more information from Greenville to media on that one. Until next time, stay safe, stay healthy and take care of everyone so long.