Residential Total Energy System Installation at the Canadian Centre for Housing Technology

Abstract

Distributed cogeneration in single households may provide a vi-able alternative to the construction of new central power plants in thecoming years. A key issue in residential cogeneration is how to size andintegrate the required technologies to satisfy the total energy needs ofthe household, consisting of electricity, domestic hot water, space heatingand space cooling. An interesting pathway to a more sustainable futureinvolves the use of the earth surrounding the home as both a source anda sink for energy, especially if it enables the recycling of summertimewaste heat from the generator.This demonstration project was planned and implemented at theCanadian 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 thathave the capacity to assess energy and building technologies with dailysimulated occupancy effects.This article describes the residential total energy system installedin one of the houses at the CCHT, consisting of two one-ton ground source heat pumps, an air handler for supplemental/backup heating, anatural-gas-fired hot water tank, an indirect domestic hot water tank anda multistage thermostat. The bore-field consists of three vertical wellsarranged to suit a typical suburban landscape. Two of the wells servethe heat pumps and the third well is arranged between the other two tosink the waste heat from a cogeneration unit scheduled to be installed inMay 2007. The heat pump system was sized to satisfy the cooling loadin Canada’s heating dominated climate, leaving room in the operationof the system to accept waste heat from the cogeneration unit, eitherdirectly or indirectly by recycling the heat through the ground to theheat pumps.Following an earlier paper that introduced the installation anddescribed initial ground thermal response testing, this paper presents,summarizes and discusses operational results of the heat pump systemin heating mode over a continuous 47-day period ending December 21,2006. The article will also describe the con figuration planned for therecovery of heat from the cogeneration system.