Goodman Heat Pump Test Produces Dramatic Results

   IceCOLD may be poised to revolutionize the heating industry.  It is showing much greater performance gains when installed in heat pumps than had been predicted.  Recent testing at the Goodman facility in Topeka has shown eye-popping gains in heat pump performance that go far beyond any expectations.  The system at Goodman delivered increased heating capacity and those gains are greater as the weather gets colder.  From 37 degrees outdoors down to 11 degrees, the gains improved from 2.5% up to 80% in stage I operation. When operating in stage II, the gains ranged up to 50%.   Below 10 degrees, the treated heat pump was producing approximately double the heat that it did prior to IceCOLD.  The colder it gets, the better it works.

   The impact of these finding is huge because it is in this temperature range that expensive supplemental heating is required.  Reducing or eliminating this need will dramatically decrease customer's electric costs.

    Early testing on IceCOLD has shown considerable improvement in evaporator performance. When this technology is applied to heat pumps operating on cold climates, the evidence suggests that heat pumps could produce more heating capacity in cold weather than untreated equipment. Our testing was designed to identify any such gains and to quantify that improvement.  This test strongly suggests that further testing will be required.

    Our testing protocols did not anticipate this type of gains and, as such, we cut off the heat pump at +5 degrees F.  Weather was available for testing at -10 degrees, but we were not prepared for that possibility.  The results suggest that the improvements we found will be available at much lower temperatures.  Further testing at a similar facility next season will be necessary because pre-testing electrical data will be inconclusive.  We noted and corrected a manufacturing defect during the test that invalidates all electrical measurements prior to that discovery.  Post test electrical data is not compromised, however.

    Given this, we DO believe our findings are validated by the very close way test data mirrored available specifications for this piece of equipment.

Cooling Degree Day Normalization

    The concept of cooling degree day (CDD) normalization is used by utilities and energy auditors to compare one year to another and one geographic area to another.  It is a "low precision" tool but it does have a place in such use.  It is based on a very simple calculation for each day.  The highest temperature and the lowest temperature for a given day are averaged and 65 degrees is subtracted from the result.

     The number cannot be negative. As an example, a day with a high of 95 and a low of 75 is averaged to 85 degrees.  Then 65 is subtracted from 85 and the result is 20 degrees for this individual day.  The individual days are added and each week, month and season "earns" a total number of cooling degree days.

     Over the course of an entire season, using CDD normalization for comparing residential air conditioning strategies has some merit.  For example, a given summer "earns" 2,000 CDDs while we are using air conditioning strategy A.  The next summer earns 2,500 CDDs while we use strategy B.  The CDD technique says the second summer had 500 more cooling degree days; it was 500 divided by 2,000 times 100% or 25% warmer and under "normal" conditions we should use 25% more energy if all other factors are equal.  If strategy B in the second year gives a result that increases costs by less than the 25% increase in CDDs, it can be assumed to have saved energy and that strategy is assumed to have merit. 

    So far, so good!  But here is where things do not work so well.  We recently saw a test from a Nebraska Pizza Hut and the tests were normalized using CDDs.  The week before the test was quite warm and after IceCOLD was installed the weather got cooler.  Using CDD normalization technology, the surveyor got no meaningful results for one of the two AC units.  The indication was that IceCOLD did not work in one system but did work in another.  The problem was not the product but the testing. Cooling degree days use a baseline of 65 degrees. The assumption is that little or no cooling is required below 65.  In a Pizza Hut it certainly is.

    Reviewing the data we saw that a considerable amount of cooling was required below 65 and at temperatures down to the lowest available during the test.  Nonetheless, three of the five days of the testing after installation, "post-test," earned no degree days at all.  The daily average for these days was below 65 degrees.  A far more realistic concept for commercial air conditioning is "growing degree days" (GDD.)  This technique uses a base temperature of 50 degrees and GDD information is readily available.  At this restaurant, even this did not work, two of the five days in the post-test period earned no GDDs, either.

    The Pizza Hut trial demonstrates the short-comings of CDD or even GDD techniques for very short tests like this one.  Even using GDDs, there were two days where the cooling ran, but no "DDs" were earned.  The greatest concern about any such technology is that neither gives us real information about anything but the "relative" warmth of the weather.  As an example, let's create an imaginary day with very high humidity that has a low of 75 degrees in the morning and it warms to 90 in the afternoon.  About closing time a storm moves in and the temperature drops to 60 degrees outside.  This day earns 15 degree days just like a much milder day that never got hot or humid.  Nothing so far reveals why one of the units used more power after the installation than it did before.  Any normalization insists that it was cooler, regardless of how it is calculated.

    There are other techniques that do give us reliable information.  In our next post we will discuss alternatives to cooling degree day normalization and whether there may other ways to look at IceCOLD and get meaningful data.  We will look again at this Pizza Hut with a very different approach.  HINT: It's GOOD

Golden Corral Refrigeration Study

 
   The Topeka Golden Corral announced in the fall of 2013 that they will install Ice COLD in all their cooling and refrigeration systems.  That decision was made at the end of the last cooling season and the plan is to install the product in all systems as soon as the spring of 2014 weather warms enough to allow adequate pre-installation testing. The refrigeration systems, however, allow us to do some important research with Ice COLD prior to the warm weather air conditioning season.  This series of tests is taking the research in a very different direction and we needed to test new protocols and techniques. 

  In prior testing, the results always showed significant savings in electrical costs after the installation of Ice COLD, but some important questions remain such as exactly how the product interacts with the system and how each of the three components work in concert.  The really valuable part of the test is that refrigeration systems actively control head pressure independent of outside temperature and any benefits of the product in the condenser.  Thus, we are able to identify the increase in evaporator capacity (12%) and the reduction in compressor running time of 21% after Ice COLD installation.

    Subsequent testing later in the spring of 2014 will involve an additional cooler and bring more details into the testing.  We have learned what testing strategies give meaningful results. Specifically, we know that Ice COLD results are measured in hours, not weeks and a shorter data logger recording interval will allow us to achieve greater precision.  For this next test, we will record temperatures and Amperes at one minute intervals.  We will be able to look more closely at the rates of temperature change in the evaporator and condenser both before and after product installation.