Pool Heat Pump Sizing 

I guess I'm the "someone in the comments". I used to have a pool and whirlpool in the central area of Arizona. Had a large Propane gas heater and could be directed to heat the whirlpool only or the pool or both. One November, I invited some friends over for Thanksgiving Holiday. Plan was to have a nice comfortable, warm whirlpool after the big afternoon meal and watch the sunset. Turned on the heater at 9:00 AM. A 5:30 PM the whirlpool was still quite cold, so we changed plans. I used up two large tanks of propane in the process and called a service to have them refilled. The guy came and asked me "why refill them now at the end of November?"; since any fool knows that even the large, powerful heater I had was going to be useless until mid March or later. Again, since you're a nerd like me, it would be interesting to see the record of heating and pool use for the next >6 months. As you state, pool heaters are only useful for adding a couple of extra months during the changing of the seasons.

We have a Madinack pool heat pump in Brisbane. Works well but yet to get our first power bill. The heat pump tends to make the water a bit too warm, so will lower the set temperature. We run it on auto now so it can heat and cool. Brisbane pools can get a bit hot.

I am able to keep a 18.000L above ground pool to 29C with a 5kW heat pump from mai to september in Belgium. Your pool is underground and you live a much warmer region than me which most probably/certainly makes that 11kW more than enough. Just make sure to get that cover in asap because it really makes a huge difference (you'll also save money not needing to refill the pool).

You can build the scheduling with Home Assistant :)

Your heat pump heats the pool and cools the air. Wouldn't it be cool (haha, pun) if you could use the cool air to cool your house and/or the solar panels?

About the automation of switching it on when you have excess solar. You could DIY this with smart plugs and some sensors. It's not gonna be as reliable probably, but you can fix it yourself and implement it however you want. I bought a random bunch of smart plugs for cheap, they have ESP8266 inside typically, flashed the ESP8266 with community made open source firmware like Tasmota or ESPhome to liberate the devices from the clouds and have them available on my network and then I set up Home Assistant on a RaspberryPi to log the data. Home Assistant has a few web widgets, one of them is a thermostat. So I made a few temp sensors using ESP8266 devkit boards and made myself a thermostat. Once you have the data on the RaspberryPi, you can code whatever you want but I am sure there are premade solutions for some things. I like it because I can do whatever and it's all ran locally.

Yes - Eddie is the controller for dumping energy into hot water tank, Harvie is the comms hub.

COP of 16? What were the testing conditions? My pool heater, R6450ti (US market) gets only a COP of 6.

My folk's house in Florida runs air con much of the year. Also running ~5kW pool heat pump much of the year. I'm looking into a retrofit heat exchanger that bypasses the air source AC condenser and routes instead through a special heat exchanger that dumps the heat into the pool water.

Sea water where I live peaks at 19 C at end of summer, no problem for the kids when the sun is shining! Around 12 C in mid winter - only the brave and well clad in neoprene can manage that - but there are a hard core who do it every day!!

Today my barometer and thermometer both read "FN hot". Pools are definitely summer thing, and heater just gives you the shoulder season, winter is a fools errand.

Interesting. I have a solar heater for the pool on the garage roof, one of those arrays of black pipes. My electricity bills are high enough without an electric heater. I wonder how the efficiency and cost compares between my solar heating and solar panels + heat pump? Also, remember you need to take into account the energy use of the pump itself if you run the heater at times when the filter is normally off. What's the power requirement of your pool pump? Here's where you could have saved energy with a variable speed pump because it can likely run on low speed for only the heater, especially if you can bypass the filter.

What I want to know, is how many bald eagles per gallon does that heater put out? (( Being a Yank.. familiar with BTU, Tons, and degrees Frankenstein.. )) none of that Science rubbish.

your solar inverter might have a dry contact output for when it's making excess. Fronius ones do.

👍 A like alone for the "Fahrenheit rubbish".🙂

The Audio levels are down on this video...

The huge capacity installations are twinned and tripled units, not a single bit one.

This is strange, no bots.

I wonder if we'll ever see water-cooled solar panels that you can connect to your pool plumbing. Cool the solar panels for optimal performance and put all that waste heat into the pool!

Dave should start a dairy... this pool sure is getting milked!! ...its a friendly bit of banter/joke people!.. :) do they not make them solar(hart) water heaters they used to put on roofs like solar panels?..the one with the tank and water pipes in the panel..... surely one of them would be perfect or atleast take load off heating the house water.. ..and theres another idea Dave, you could make a cover for the box and heat pump with some poles and a solar panel!

MEasure, measure, measure!

28 degrees isn't a pool, it's a bathtub.

Heat pump DO NOT have an efficiency greater than 1. They have a coefficient of performance greater than 1. AKA you can improve the system and use less power while still having the same COP. I'm sure Dave knows all that but as a mech eng I found the statement at 1:54 misleading.

120KW for the Max -> Just spews out boiling water 😂

A like for the flat earth comment

First !