Is it possible to use an air conditioner to heat a pool? It seems like I might be able to use a liquid heat exchanger to cool the hot part of the air conditioning cycle using swimming pool water. Can someone give me an overview of how to build a system like the following myself
If you're talking a wading pool it might work - but why bother. I think you're P****** into the wind. A high capacity pool would require considerable BTUs to elevate the temperature of all that water. And even if your A/C ran full time, it probably would be ineffective - except for the electric company! Good luck.
How do you expect this system to work? Why would you heat your pool in the summer when it is already hot outside? The sun naturally heats your pool. That is when you run you air conditioner. Wouldn't you want to heat your pool in the winter when it is cold outside? You're not running your air conditioner at that time.... That's probably why no one else is doing it.
I have never seen an actual AC heat a pool but by theory it would work. It probably wouldn't raise the temp of the pool enough to notice but it should make your AC more efficient. I wired up a system 6 months ago that had the same components as an AC (compressor, metering device, coils) that heated some doctors pool. It pulled 100A though. I don't know if it would be more efficient than gas. Email me at and remind me to call him to see if it worked well, if it was efficient, and what name brand. I have also installed water heaters that are pre-heated by a heat pump. The superheated vapor circulated through the water heater before returning to the condenser. Hope this helps!!!
My answer is no it won't heat a swimming pool but it will supply your hot water needs in the house, often 100%. They work best with air to air heat pumps. There are two basic types and I will describe the one I like best. It is called a Go Between. Constructed of stainless and copper, it has no moving parts. It mounts on the side of your hot water heater and utilizes the heat from the compressor discharge gas before said gas enters the condenser coil. Back to the swimming pool. If you had a slaughter house in the back yard the refrigeration equipment would be big enough to help out with the pool. These things have been in use for many years in industry and the residential versions have been around a long time as well.
It has been done. I used to work for a pool company here in Ontario that not only did pools but also residential heating and cooling. The unit we'd used was a Water Furnace brand geothermal unit that provided domestic hot water, air conditioning and heating for the house. It was a simple matter of adding a heat exchanger for the pool to the loop The priority, water wise, was domestic hot water first, then pool so that spill over heat after heating the domestic tank, even when it was on demand, would still be heating the pool if needed. If domestic was satisfied the unit concentrated on pool heat alone or as a byproduct of household air conditioning. This is geo heat remember, so even if it was fall, the amount of heat scammed from the earth was constant and you didn't have to run household AC to get pool heat but if it was running, that byproduct went into heating the pool. Free pool heat.
