Residential Total Energy System Installation at the Canadian Centre for Housing Technology
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13052/dgaej2156-3306.2313Abstract
Distributed cogeneration in single households may provide a vi-
able alternative to the construction of new central power plants in the
coming years. A key issue in residential cogeneration is how to size and
integrate the required technologies to satisfy the total energy needs of
the household, consisting of electricity, domestic hot water, space heating
and space cooling. An interesting pathway to a more sustainable future
involves the use of the earth surrounding the home as both a source and
a sink for energy, especially if it enables the recycling of summertime
waste heat from the generator.
This demonstration project was planned and implemented at the
Canadian Centre for Housing Technology (CCHT) in 2006. The CCHT,
located on the campus of the National Research Council in Ottawa,
Ontario, Canada maintains two detached, single-family houses that
have the capacity to assess energy and building technologies with daily
simulated occupancy effects.
This article describes the residential total energy system installed
in one of the houses at the CCHT, consisting of two one-ton ground source heat pumps, an air handler for supplemental/backup heating, a
natural-gas-fired hot water tank, an indirect domestic hot water tank and
a multistage thermostat. The bore-field consists of three vertical wells
arranged to suit a typical suburban landscape. Two of the wells serve
the heat pumps and the third well is arranged between the other two to
sink the waste heat from a cogeneration unit scheduled to be installed in
May 2007. The heat pump system was sized to satisfy the cooling load
in Canada’s heating dominated climate, leaving room in the operation
of the system to accept waste heat from the cogeneration unit, either
directly or indirectly by recycling the heat through the ground to the
heat pumps.
Following an earlier paper that introduced the installation and
described initial ground thermal response testing, this paper presents,
summarizes and discusses operational results of the heat pump system
in heating mode over a continuous 47-day period ending December 21,
2006. The article will also describe the con figuration planned for the
recovery of heat from the cogeneration system.
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