Heat Pump Water Heater

After a four year development project, led by Mike Vlug and Adrian Kerr, including more than a year of field trials, Temperzone NZ has released a unique new range of modular commercial Heat Pump Water Heaters into the market.

Heat pump water heater products have been around in the domestic and light commercial markets for some time.

Unfortunately, many of the commercial products did not deliver on long term reliability and durability.

Temperzone set about to develop a new range of commercial only products that would satisfy the markets quality and reliability requirements. The outcome of the project was in fact two new classes of Heat Pump Hot Water systems. One class aimed at the peak demand potable hot water market and the other at the space heating market.

Key to the new product is some clever new technology. Conventional Heat Pump Hot Water systems use multiple pass technology, where a large volume of water is heated slowly.

Peak Demand Potable Hot Water applications:

The first class of new Temperzone systems heat smaller volumes of water to over 60 degrees in a single pass. Single pass technology is ideal for commercial markets where meeting the peak demand for hot water is the key driver of system capital cost. As it functions in a similar way to an instantaneous hot water system, a greatly reduced storage volume is required to meet the peak demand usage period. This substantially reduces the installed cost of the hot water system and significantly reduces the running cost.

Typical applications include:

• Large kitchens, including fast food restaurants, which have very high hot water usage.
• Youth Hostels, backpacker hostels, dormitories and camping areas which have extreme daily peak demand cycles.

A Temperzone Single Pass Heat Pump Hot Water system have been installed at a number of YHA Youth Hostels in NZ. The system at Pahia YHA hostel has been operational for over a year now and is working extremely well. Youth Hostels have very high demand for hot water between 7am and 10am every day for breakfasts and showers and then quite low demand through the middle of the day with another peak occurring in the late afternoon and evening.

A recently installed system at a Wellington YHA shows how Temperzone heat pump technology integrates perfectly with solar thermal water heating. The single pass technology allows the production of just enough hot water to meet the peak demand periods, which are both outside the peak solar heating period. By only producing enough hot water to meet the peak demand the Heat Pump system maximises the amount of free solar energy that is captured during the low demand part of the day. With differing occupancy through the year the peak demand goes up and down. Single pass technology allows production of hot water to be matched to the actual demand. This provides significant savings on both infrastructure and running costs.

Space Heating applications

The second class of new Temperzone systems integrate inverter technology with highly efficient variable speed pumps for space heating applications.

Typical applications include:

• Large space heating applications like hospitals and schools

The installation at Bay of Islands Hospital is a typical space heating application. The Temperzone units were installed to replace another brand of heat pump hot water system that had reliability, durability and efficiency problems. Two more hospital space heating projects are in the pre commissioning stage.

The units for both classes are based on a modular chassis design and come in 25,35,50,70 and 100kW capacities.

Temperzone has received an order in the last weeks for a significant kitchen application in NZ. Its too early for more detail at the moment but we will run a story on this application in early 2017.

The new single pass units are currently only available for potable water use in NZ. Watermark certification is underway for the Australian market. The inverter space heating units can be sold in both markets.

Adrian Kerr says he believes the innovative Temperzone designs will deliver the durability, reliability and efficiency that will see Heat-pump water heaters become the standard for many commercial water heating applications.

Click here to download the Brochure or contact your Sales Rep for more information.