Field study on heat pump monitoring: challenges and opportunities

Abstract

In view of the decarbonisation targets in the building sector, heat pump can play a key role, marking the shift towards all-electric buildings. Although the heat pump technology is well known, and its use is ever increasing, some issues (practical and operative) are still open in the assessment of the main aspects that influence the efficiency. These complexities emerge when heat pump monitoring is carried out, allowing to assess the real performance. Therefore, in this work, the challenges and opportunities of heat pump monitoring are presented, from a field study of the tertiary sector. The monitoring of an air-to-water heat pump allowed to: (i) assess its real operating performance; (ii) compare the correlations of results with climate data and load profile; (iii) highlight some critical points, as the importance of data mining and data cleaning phase for the reliability of the results; (iv) assess and identify which is the temporal scale needed for a proper data elaboration.