Tesla's Heat Pump System and Octovalve

[Tronguy]

It's small gains in efficiency, but at the end of the day a fair chunk of the heavy lifting still needs to be done by a good old resistive heater.

In a cold environment rather than just dumping 20°C inside air, and drawing in outside air at 0°C, your essentially pre-heating that outside air using the stored energy in the waste air and other heat sources in the car.

Um. The heat-pump function in modern Teslas does something that a non heat-pump car can't do: Extract heat energy from the outside air and put it in the cabin. Or wherever.

There's this efficiency rating, SEER. Let me look it up, one sec. It's BTU's per hour divided by the energy usage of the system. It's been a while; but, generally, with air conditioners and heat pumps, the ratio of energy moved vs. energy used to do the moving is about 5 to 1. (The units on SEER are dividing BTUs per hour by kH-hrs, and the units makes my head hurt.)

Compare that with a resistive heater, where the energy consumed and the energy generated by the thing is, literally, 1 to 1. So, this isn't some incremental improvement. If I had a bit more time I'd go snag my thermo book from several decades ago and look it up.

Quite a while ago combined heat pump/air conditioning systems were pretty rare and found primarily in places like Florida, where the heating requirements were, shall we say, not that extreme. The capabilities of these systems of vastly improved in the interirm; now one finds these things up in Maine and Canada, and they're cheaper to run that burning oil or gas.

And, of course, one finds them in Teslas. And, I think, other electric vehicles that, fundamentally, don't have the extra waste heat from an ICE that ICE-based cars have.

 

[GeoQuack]

What's so cool about Tesla's system is that everything in the car that requires heating or cooling is connected to the same system so that you're not using energy to heat one thing while using more to cool something else. It's like in your house having all big users of heating and cooling connected so if one thing needs heat (hot water, pool, etc) while another cooling (house air conditioning) you can move heat from one to the other, rather than having one air source heat pump heating the outside air while another cools the same outside air. The heating and cooling needs would rarely be balanced so a radiator would be required as a last resort just as it is in the car.

Because of their software intellectual property, stationary storage and solar integration, I suspect that Tesla will get into HVAC and water heating leveraging what they know from the car and using excess solar to do it whenever possible.