Exactly what is a heat pump?

[cleancloths]

I would love to hear if someone had a real-world design to connect the two systems. I cringe in the summer as I feel all the cold air blowing out of my pool heatpump while I had lots of hot air blowing out of the Central A/C compressor. The two units are about 100' apart so I cannot think of an economical way to make this work.

[sailork]

Maybe I'm only thinking about this because my water pipes are in my attic and the "cold" water tap runs about 95 degrees during the day, but somebody posted a link to Solar Attic a while ago. It looks like a really great idea. I'd buy one if I wasn't in @#$ Houston.

http://www.solarattic.com

http://www.poolforum.com/pf2/showthr...ht=solar+attic

Maybe you folks who often have "Cold" could use this for something. I'd suspect an attic fan that blew out across a grid of pipes from your pump return would be an even more energy efficient idea since it would bring cold air from outside into your attic through the eves. (Yeah, we do that a lot down here.)

[Poolsean]

Aqua Cal Heat Pumps is a sister company of AutoPilot. Carl and Al explained it well.
We take the heat from the air to change liquid freon into a gas. The gas then goes through a compressor to superheat it. The very hot gas then passes through a heat exchanger (this may be made of either cupric-nickle or titanium) that releases the heat to the water. The cooling of the gas by transfering the heat to the water, changes the freon back into a liquid state.
Titanium is being offered more and more due to its chemical resistance (read bad water chemistry).
What's important (and how you can tell which are more efficient) among heat pumps is the COP rating. This is similar to an air conditioner's SEER rating. The higher the number, the more efficient it is. For Heat Pumps, anything over 5.0 is good.

The best analogy for a Gas heater vs a Heat Pump is a muscle car vs an economy car. Both will get you there. However, the muscle car will get you there faster but use much more gas to get there.
Heat Pumps are better at maintaining the heat. Gas is better at getting the heat into the pool fast.

Why not integrate the attic air to the heat pump? Proper ventilation and air flow. If you block the air flow out of the heat pump, you will greatly reduce efficiency. In fact, you may cause the unit to frost up. Another in fact, if you install it too close to the eave of your roof, you can recirculate the cool discharge air around to the evaporator coil, again, reducing efficiency! You will need the services of an engineer to calculate the proper duct work necessary. Much easier to just operate it as it is designed.

Hope this helps.

[waterbear]

Sean, not to sound like a commercial but I have an AquaCal Heatwave Icebreaker 120 on my pool and spa. It's great. It will heat my spa to 104 in about 10 minutes during the summer and in the winter when it was just below 50 degrees it took my spa from 65 degrees to 100 degrees in about 25 minutes! Still waiting for my pool to get hot enough to try out the reverse cycle cooling feature this summer!