Skip to content

Reduce minimum ambient temperature for HPWH operation #9758

@jmaguire1

Description

@jmaguire1

Issue overview

When modeling HPWHs, E+ only allows the minimum temperature for HP operation to go as low as -5 C. This limit seems to be hard coded into the water heater code (see https://github.com/NREL/EnergyPlus/blob/0b1a165e0aa6b1f9fc88991c987673fdcd366dad/src/EnergyPlus/WaterThermalTanks.cc#L1537-L1544), so there doesn't seem to be any way to work around this. There are several products on the market that can operate at much lower temperatures than -5 C, such as the SanCO2 which can operate below -30 C (https://www.eco2waterheater.com/_files/ugd/e88920_293f399a2a3a432396b1805a76f21c80.pdf). To be able to properly model these products, we'd need to lower this limit. My suggestion would be to set this to at least -40 C for products like the SanCO2. It'd also be nice to move this lower limit to the .idd rather than hard coding in the event that someone needs to lower this further for some new product with an even broader operating range.

Checklist

Add to this list or remove from it as applicable. This is a simple templated set of guidelines.

  • Defect file added (list location of defect file here)
  • Ticket added to Pivotal for defect (development team task)
  • Pull request created (the pull request will have additional tasks related to reviewing changes that fix this defect)

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

Labels

No labels
No labels

Type

No type

Projects

No projects

Milestone

No milestone

Relationships

None yet

Development

No branches or pull requests

Issue actions