Knowing the audience, I’ll bet a number of you skipped straight to this point and I would encourage you to watch the Water-Source Heat Pump lesson before you start with the Ground-Source Heat Pump lesson. I could sell out and give you exactly what you think you want but the best way to learn this is to learn water-source heat pumps first and then learn ground-source heat pumps second. You’ll see why right now.
We don’t need to change anything, all the way from the Project Information to the Assign Rooms to Systems. That can all remain the same from the project that is currently set up as a water-source heat pump.
What we need to change is at the plant level. And at the plant level, all we need to change is the default water-source heat pump to a geo-thermal heat pump. You can see now that it changed some of our other values and we’ll leave these as is. What’s important here is that the thermal storage changed. There are a lot of values we can pick from here. Typical is 25x or 50x. If we scroll through the GLHE fields, we get a much larger gallons-per-ton than we started with. Let’s scroll through these… In fact, one of the GLHE fields has 479.6 gallons-per-ton. That means, with this being an approximately 36-ton system, that means that the water temperature will change very slowly as we extract heat from it.
We’ll stick with the 50x thermal storage type. We note that there is a primary chilled water pump here, as well. Apply that….
One thing we want to point out at this point is that we only have one piece of equipment. If we go to the Configuration tab, we can see we only have one water-source heat pump, which is, in fact, a ground-source heat pump. You could actually set this up so they were staged. However, because we used a weighted average and we’re modeling this as one large compressor, that would not be advisable. I just want to make the point that that is an option because where we’re going to go next, there’re some fields that only apply only to that situation.
Where are we going next? The Controls button and then we are going to the Cooling Plant & Geothermal Controls.
All of these options on the left have to do with having multiple pieces of equipment in the plant. They’re what you call Plant Level Controls. So for instance, if we had a Secondary Distribution Pump, that pump would apply not just to our first piece of equipment but it would apply to all of our pieces of equipment. We can still have a Secondary Distribution Pump if, in fact, that’s what we need. That depends on your individual set up.
What we’re interested in here is this geothermal loop. The typical person probably selects this ISGHPA value and when we select this ISGHPA value, it gives it a number of defaults. We can set the pump and let’s select something that’s variable volume and let’s put in 50 ft of water. There’s a reason why I’m not using kilowatts here. And the Flow Scheme is Fully Mixed or Bidirectional Cascade. We’re going to assume Fully Mixed. In fact, the Bidirectional Cascade is when we’re modeling geothermal chillers, which will be in the following lesson.....