Dan Rettig, product manager, Lochinvar, and Isaac Wilson, national specialty commercial manager, A.O. Smith, are featured in the latest episode of the Percussive Maintenance Podcast. In this episode, the two discuss the effectiveness of heat pump water heaters, the applications they’re most applicable for, the union between Lochinvar and A.O. Smith, and much more. 

Here is a snippet of the conversation:

Engineered Systems: Both companies offer quite a portfolio of water equipment. Specifically, let's focus on the heat pump water heaters. These come in multiple different varieties, including electric, air-source, and water-source models. Can you catch us up with some of the latest technologies that you guys have recently brought to market?

Dan Rettig: Yeah, so back in July, the organization we released a total of 20 models. There were six water-source heat pumps, six air-source heat pumps, and eight modular water-source heat pumps. And those modulars are kind of unique, as they allow us to customize that kind of the footprints of those units to meet the mechanical room.

For those who aren't familiar with the heat pump technology, we’re absorbing heat out of the ambient space with the air-source unit and then pulling that into the refrigerant and transferring that into the domestic hot water. With the water-source units, we're using what could be chiller rejection water, something that's got some kind of heat into it that we can absorb and move into the refrigerant, and then, again, rejecting that into the domestic hot water. I think everybody’s at least heard of heat pumps for space heating, but we're applying them for domestic hot water. So, it’s pretty much the same concept, it’s just that we’re trying to achieve different purposes. 

These heat pumps make the water heating system extremely efficient, because they're primarily transferring heat instead of creating it, such as a typical water heater may do. So, they pull the heat from those sources, it's usually more almost a free source, you could say, especially if they're using outside ambient air.

Listen to the entire conversation here.