Nebraska ClimateMaster Trilogy 45 qMode System

Here's a screen capture from the phone app. It was 30F outside when I took this picture. This weekend it is supposed to get to a low of around 18F. It will also be after the tank has been replaced. Ill post some data then. If anyone is interested maybe I can dump some excel spreadsheets from the admin logging.

 

The new water heater is installed. I'll let you guys how everything goes this weekend. There is a winter storm warning. The thermostat that wasn't showing the outside temperature started to show the temp correctly when the address was reprogrammed for the fourth time. Dunno why it didn't work before.

 

Soda,
I used a Whirlpool 80 gallon electric water tank for my Desuperheater hot water storage tank. I only use it in the cooling season per the Trane Manual.

The XL spreadsheets would be interesting to see. With the data downloaded into the spreadsheet you could add some math into the Spreadsheet cells and auto calculate performance parameters like Loop Delta Ts, Inlet & Outlet Air temps, and Loop Delta Ps. If I remember correctly an XL Spreadsheet can also be converted to Bar/Pie/ and other Charts to show performance of your unit over time.

Add the XL Spreadsheet and if it hasn't already been set up to auto calculate, I can jazz it up and put it back on this website for you to use.

 

Thanks, Mrrxtech. My parents say everything seems to be working fine. House is comfortable even with low temps and deep snow on the roof. The auxiliary heater for the water heater kicked on when they first installed the new water heater, but that makes sense since it would have been filling up with cold water. It hasn't come on again since it got the water up to temp when it was first filling. Ideally with this system, it is using geothermal nearly all the time the time to heat the water. I've attached four different spreadsheets. A three day period, a monthly, and a 3 month. I also included the month of August since I figure it was cooling instead of heating then. All are from the first floor thermostat. If you are interested in seeing others I can make them. The zoning was installed sometime about 3 months ago so I think the first week or two of the data from the 3-month spreadsheet includes data from before the additional thermostats were installed.

Let me know what you think. I'm very interested in your analysis of how well the Trilogy 45 is operating.

 

Soda,
That's a lot of data. I've widened the cells so I could see the column titles.
All of the XL Spreadsheets were laid out the same way so it will only take one spreadsheet to convert the data to a performance XL.

Do you have the Loop Entering Water Temp (EWT) and Entering Air Temp (EAT) or the Loop Pressures In & Out? If so it will help to compare the unit to the tables in the Owners Manual. Then again with the Compressor Capacity listed you might not have the other parameters in the owners manual table.

Having the Compressor Capacity tells a lot about performance even if you don't have the above parameters.

My Brother said his Variable Speed Geothermal can produce an extra Ton over its listed Tonnage, so that would be available for heating the water where my 4 Ton Unit is at it's Maximum output at 4 Tons.

To make the XL Spreadsheet a one sheet data review, I'll try doing an hourly average or delete all but on the hour data whichever works best.

I'll wait to see if you have and can include the data points above before experimenting with the current data.

I can see that knowing the Compressor Capacity & Inside vs Outside Temperature from year to year would provide an early trend of Compressor problems slowly developing over time.

Thanks for sharing the data Soda.

 

I don't believe I have that data. I'll double check when I get home.

 

I don't see any way to see the EWT, EAT or Loop pressures. Sorry.

 

Soda,
Yesterday I scanned through the XL Spreadsheets to see what the maximum Compressor Capacity used was. When cooling I saw one +80% capacity use and in heating one 79% capacity use and a few 77%, but usually the Compressor Capacity was loaded much lower for heating the house. That's a good sign since the Unit is Heating and Cooling the house with plenty of reserve for those cold days ahead. If it were running at closer to 100% this early in the heating season, I would conclude the Unit was undersized or had an issue from the install, but that's not the case here.

I'll find your Unit Owners Manual on line and see how the technicians determine performance for initial startup. On the non-inverter powered/single speed Units they use Air In vs Air Out temp, Loop In vs Loop Out temp and Loop differential Pressures across the Unit to determine performance.

There are several columns of information on the XL Spreadsheet that exist but don't provide any real data, like the Stage of the Compressor always reads 1st Stage since it has no stages. I started to delete all columns not needed but that would make it difficult to download from your source to the XL Spreadsheet, so I didn't save what I was working on.

I'll get back to the XL Spreadsheet tonight after looking at the Owners Manual installation performance section.

 

Climatemaster has the manuals behind a wall on their website for Elite dealers. I'm not sure you will be able to get it or not. Hopefully someone out this site is an elite dealer or knows one. The actual contractor for my parents' install was not an elite dealer, which I found weird. I assume they must have worked out a deal with one. When the time came for the zoning to be installed an elite dealer was there in addition to the original contractor and a climatemaster employee from Canada.

 

That's a lot of attention for an install, but being an Inverter Powered Unit which is complex and expensive, it would pay to ensure the install was correct.
My Brother's Daikin Inverter Powered Unit has a wall of instrumentation that he put in on his own so he could see what the Unit is doing at a glance. I'm waiting for my Unit to be made, when the price drops due to everyone slowly changing over to this design.

I found the Climate Master Elite distributor section, but no manual. I tried looking at the Daikin Inverter Manual which has no graphs but some of the Control Cards have inputs from Return Air, Suppy Air temps and Loop Water Inlet and outlet temps, no Pressure In & Out of the loop and no graphs.

Looks like efficiency will be tied to Compressor Capacity for now. I'm thinking Compressor Capacity is the same as Rated Power vs Actual Power to come up with the percent. Using an Amp Meter on a compressor power source is as good replacement for the normal parameters above in my opinion.

I'll put some math into the XL Spreadsheet and see what I can come up with.

 

This PDF has a little bit of detail about load and efficiency.

http://www.climatemaster.com/commer...ting-and-cooling-system-consumer-brochure.pdf

My parents have the QE-1860 with 4 tons of cooling and 5 tons of heating.

 

Soda,
Attached is the XL Spreadsheet. Here is what I have so far.

Since there are 8000 lines of data, I decided to start off by auto finding the highest values (or lowest value for outlet water temp in the heating mode) for significant data in these columns and displaying them on line 2. For the data that I don't see as useful for now, I Compressed the Columns to keep from scrambling the data when dumped into the XL:
Compressor load; Wind Speed; Exit Air Temperature; and the Lowest Value for Exit Water Temperature. I find that these parameters including House to Outside Temp Delta T and excluding Compressor Load, are what cause the Unit to have to work harder.

I'm thinking the House to Outside Delta T needs to be added as a new column on the end of the spreadsheet, then the highest value displayed at the top of the page. For now it's only the Delta T of the first line of data. Adding the Delta T column came to me as I was typing here.

When you dump the data into the XL Spreadsheet, make sure you always start on line 7 so the upper 6 lines always appear for performing calculations on the lower cells.

I have a working knowledge of XL Spreadsheets for tracking projects, but no formal training, so this is new to me, but I'm slowly figuring out what formulas I can use to arrive at some useful data.

I'll run this spreadsheet past someone who took labs in college on how to apply XL Spreadsheet and see if he can come up with an improved product. He doesn't have a background in geothermal but had some heat transfer & fluid flow so may be able to apply his knowledge to improve this spreadsheet. If not, we will come up with something over time.

Once you get use to seeing Compressor Load compared to these parameters with the Unit being new, as the Compressor Load increases you can predict a problem is slowly creeping into a process of the Unit.

On traditional Geothermal Units, the Data Tables in the Owners Manual are used for evaluating performance, but so far none of these data tables have shown up with the Inverter Powered Units. It would be useful for trouble shooting to have the Tables when using PT Ports for reading Loop Delta Pressure and the missing Loop temperature reading in order to determine if the loop is the culprit causing a performance issue.

The engineers probably have developed a better XL Spreadsheet for this Unit. If so hopefully someone will drop a copy here on this post for us.

 

Soda,
I added the "Inside-Outside Temperature Delta T" column at the end of the data so the Max Delta T could be determined and shown at the top of the page.

Now if I can figure out how to identify the Row the Red data comes from, you could compare these rows to see how each max value affects Compressor Load.

If you increase the data sample time, the amount of data collected could be reduced.
There are 8500 lines of data in the XL Spreadsheet. The rate of change of most data is very slow, so if you had an Average Hourly rate of data collection, it would reduce the number of lines required to sort through when looking for problems like I had in the Max Delta T.
The value read as 7o degrees due to Outside Data being dropped which allowed the Inside temperature data to show up as the maximum value.

 

Mrrxtech, thanks for working with the data. I appreciate it. The only settings I can change for the data collection is the number of days collected. I can't adjust the intervals. It's supposed to get down to around 8F later this week. I will be interested in to see if the compressor hits 100%. I'm wondering at what point does the auxiliary heater need to turn on. I want to make sure they properly sized the electric heater since they improperly sized the water tank, I can't be totally sure.

 

Soda,
The Thermostat will control the Aux Heat when the house temperature is 2 to 3 degrees below Thermostat set point. If someone raises the Thermostat to a higher temperature and doesn't do it by 1 degree increments over time, the Thermostat will change modes to the Aux Heat which is the Resistive Heat Unit if installed.

You can run a test by raising the Thermostat Set point and watching for the Aux Heat to read out on the Thermostat. I believe the Geothermal will continue to produce heat along with the Resistive Heat, but you can check that when you do the test. When your done, run the thermostat back down and the Aux Heat should shut off. You'll get the burning smell the first time the heater elements power up to burn off the dust.

As the loop cools down it could limit the ability of your Compressor to remove heat from the water, that's when the Compressor will be running at 100% and the house temp will drop 2 to 3 degrees and shift the Thermostat to Aux Heat. Hopefully this won't happen often since it uses the expensive 100% power burning resistor bank. The Geothermal uses motors that allow a 33% power savings plus the power of Freons Latent Heat Of Vaporization to move energy.

I've used several thermostats over the past 2 years trying to fix a problem with a Carrier Unit in a log home that caused the compressor to Lock Out allowing the house temperature to drop 2 to 3 degrees below the thermostat(s) set point switching it over to Aux Heat Mode. The Carrier 3 Ton has no back up/Aux Heat due to the once through water source staying at 55 degrees year round and the 3 Ton Unit is oversized for the size of house it is in. Since its a 2 stage Unit, in the Summer the house is cooled in the 2 Ton Mode, so it's not actually oversized for Summer Cooling. I do have a woodburner and propane logs in the house for Emergency Heat but they are manual and not tied to the thermostat.

The problem turned out to be the Loop Heat Exchanger /Coil Cold water temperature sensor drifting up to 40 degrees, probably due to a low voltage event in 2014 that took out the 24vac Transformer and must have caused the 30 degree sensing circuit to shift to 40 degrees. Last month I finally clipped the card jumper to move the set point to 20 degrees (closed loop antifreeze setpoint) which drifted to 30 degrees, so I've had no more bogus low temp trips. If the water flow is lost, the compressor will shut down due to the water pressure dropping below 9 psig. I added a water sensing pressure switch to back up the freeze protection which isn't needed with 55 degree once through water source.

 

What's the general methodology for sizing the auxiliary electric heater for geothermal? I want to double check. They installed the smallest of three different sizes offered by climatemaster and I was a bit suspicious at the time as I was of the water heater size. But I had no idea how to calculate the proper size. I was wondering if it should be able to handle 100% of the load of the house or not.

 

I'm not sure what the methodology is, but here's my experience. I have a CM 4 ton Tranquility 27 split with an AGL15 heat strip unit. It's got 5kw and 10kw elements in it. My design temp is 15F. At that, the system should be running continuously in 2nd stage. If the load increases (temp drops, doors open, etc...) the aux kicks in. My aux has a board that first energizes the 5kw strip then the 10kw after a timed interval if the need for aux still exists.

Let me just say that during the polar vortexes of 2014 and 2015 I was glad I had aux available. Others will debate that aux should not be needed. That's up to the individual to analyze how they will heat their space(s).

Sometimes you just have to put efficiencies aside and be comfortable, IMHO.

 

Stickman,

How large is your home? My parents have a 10kw electric auxiliary heater for about 4000 sqft. The geothermal can do 5 tons of heating. Climatemaster offers 10kw, 15kw, and 20kw. I was wondering if it made sense for them to pick the 10kw or if they just went with it because it was a bit cheaper or they didn't realize you could order other sizes. This is what happened with the water heater tank.

How leaf

 

Soda,
I'm sure someone on this site can answer your question.
I found this information in a HVAC forum:
4 ton = 48k btu
10kw = 35k btu

Looks like your Parents Auxiliary Electric Heat is sized to be used with the Geothermal Unit limping along carrying part of the load.
If the Geothermal Unit shuts down, you'll need a few Eden Pure Heaters for back up. You can do like the commercials for the Eden Pure heaters show, you heat one room and the restroom.

I used an Eden Pure one winter and the electric bill was the same for 3 months around $60, then I got the Electric bill after someone could get to the meter, the bill was over $400. I missed the code for Estimated Electric Use on each of the bills. Figured the Eden Pures were living up to their reputations, minus the Wood Shop dudes dressed in Old World Garb.

I passed the XL Spreadsheet to the local XL Guru and asked if he could make the Spreadsheet identify the Row where the data came from. Plus I told him he could add some additional info when he figured out what the parameters were.

 

Stick,
You might consider adding a propane tank or hook up to the local gas company and add gas logs or a radiant heater that meets your needs to use as a backup to the electric heat. With the number of Gas wells being drilled in the Utica & Marcellus Shales, the gas prices will be low for years, while the Electric Companies work towards raising customer prices to give you less for more, that is when the power isn't out.