CH-89-07-1 -- Data Acquistion and Analysis of Residential HVAC Alternatives PDF

Five residential research sites were monitored by data acquisition systems that collected between 16 and 28 points of data averaged over one-hour time periods. The goal of these five research projects was to collect data to answer various questions regarding a direct expansion heat pump, instantaneous gas backup to a groundcoupled heat pump, room thermal storage heater, hot water storage backup to a ground-coupled heat pump, and a heat pump water heater.

The detailed planning of each project included determining what questions were to be answered for each site, what data were required, how to collect the data, specifying the criteria to be used in the selection of the site, specifying and purchasing of hardware (including the data acquisition system and sensors), installation of the monitoring equipment, collection of the data, and finally the analysis and conclusions.

The monitoring systems have provided substantial information from which major marketing decisions were made. For example, both the instantaneous gas backup and hot water storage backup provided excellent means of heating a home during peak electric demand periods, with little or no load contributed by the primary heating system. The direct expansion heat pump and heat pump water heater both operated very reliably although the coefficient of performance (COP) for each was much below the manufacturers’ published efficiency ratings.