Heat Pump Water Heater using Solid-State Energy Converters

Water heating is the second largest source of energy consumption in a household. Almost half of the homes in the United States use electricity to heat their water and all but a few use resistive heater based water heaters which consume a large amount of electricity. It is possible to use heat pumps to significantly reduce the power consumption of these water heaters but the existing technologies are often expensive and complex. In this work, Sheetak proposes to use its innovative and cost effective thin film thermoelectric modules as a solid-state heat pump with no moving parts. This can enable a significant improvement in energy efficiency of the water heaters without a significant increase in the product cost. As the end of this work, Sheetak expects to have a 50 gallon heat pump water heater design with cost of less than $500 and a COP of greater than 1.1. This product will also meet the spatial constraints of a traditional 50 gallon heat pump and will have a lifetime more than 10 years.