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NEEP cold climate ASHP database

Anybody have opinions about the Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships' cold climate air source heat pump database? Is it to be trusted? I'm mostly interested in the efficiency of the system at low temperatures. There seem to be some strange anomalies, such as systems that have the same COP at every temperature but the HSPF is different, or AHRI # 10514711 where the maximum BTU/hr is 102,000 for a unit rated 64,000. Sometimes the COP is higher at minimum power, sometimes at maximum power, and sometimes there seems to be little correspondence between the rated quantities and the minimum and maximum quantities.

Naively I would think it would be a lot better to get something rated HSPF 12 instead of HSPF 10, but now I wonder whether this database is really accurate enough to make such comparisons meaningful.

Thanks!

Comments

  • Zman
    Zman Member Posts: 7,561
    I looked that a while back and was thinking the same thing.
    It looks like they send a memo to the manufacture and ask them to fill it out. https://neep.org/sites/default/files/resources/Cold Climate Air-source Heat Pump Specification-Version 2.0_0.pdf

    I have looked long and hard for actual test data or a white paper on this and have come up empty
    "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough"
    Albert Einstein
  • SuperJ
    SuperJ Member Posts: 609
    There are definitely typos but overall it's a good resource.
    For ASHP it's usually better to compare based on HSPF rather than COPs at specific temperatures and loads. There are tables to de-rate HSPF for harsher climates (HSPF assumes zone 4 in most cases).

    A heat pump with a higher HSPF may not necessarily have a higher COP under every test condition. Pan heaters and modulation play a role.

    I do like that there is some information (like pan heater algorithms) that isn't really published anywhere else.