Heat pump water heater: Ducting to help cool house?
GBA Folks,
I recently bought a heat pump style water heater / hybrid style. It is a Richmond model, I’ll provide the link to it below for reference. Anyway my question is, would there be a noticeable benefit to ducting the cool air it produces to my main living floor to help cool the house in the summer? The water heater is located in my basement and currently has no ducting at all just pulls air in and releases it into the same open basement. We only have window air conditioners in our house due to electrical heat and no existing duct work. I have noticed the air being released from the heat pump is quite cool, so my thought was to route it to the living room up stairs to alleviate the heat from our Iowa summers. I have looked into the pricing on it and could run one duct approximately 15′ and put a floor register in the living room for under $75 dollars. I’m just curious if we would really notice much of a benefit from it or not. There are two adults and two kids in the house, pretty much showers in the morning and dishes at night so I don’t know how much it would actually be running to help cool the living room. I don’t expect it to keep it thoroughly conditioned just curious if it would help at all.
Thanks look forward to your feedback.
-Brent
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Replies
Yes, it will help a little...but will you notice it? Probably not much. The cooling effect would be similar to running a smallest-available-window-unit AC (~1/2-ton) for a few hours each day.
It's enough to make a noticeable dent in the latent loads on days when there is little to no sensible cooling load. It's a lot like running a room dehumidifier but instead of putting out hot dry air it's putting out cool dry air, putting the heat in the tank.