I am doing solar panels so I can have electric for the entire house. I would like to convert the gas heater for my pool to an electrical heater. But they don't have it for residential. Will the heat pump work well here in Southern California?
I hope you are getting the biggest solar system you can afford. I did, and am eternally grateful. As you can imagine, the cost per kW of generating capacity goes down as the size goes up. For a heat pump, you could consider the type of system usually installed for ground source. Some of these depend on water from the ground, pumped through a heat exchanger. In your case, you could use the pool water., circulating it past the heat exchanger, and back to the pool. You could arrange it so the waste cold is sent outdoors when you don't want to cool the house, and to the house on hot days. If there are winter periods when you do not want to heat the pool,, you could have the heat pump draw heat from the pool, for heating the house. Of course you could use a resistance heater for the pool, but it would be two or three times less efficient. You can buy pretty big inline spa heaters. They are on the Internet.
Go solar + an inline POOL heater. The tankless heaters you see for homes are not rated for the kind of flow rate that a pool pump produces. As for heat pumps not working when it's cold, hogwash. There is heat everywhere and air to air heat pumps are good down to near freezing, geothermal heat pumps (which draw heat from the ground) work well below freezing. Backup is either electric or gas, like every other heater.
Solar can be used to heat a pool but a pool is a large volume and takes a long time to raise the temp. I would use the gas to raise the temp and then the solar to maintain. An auxilary electric heater would be expensive for that purpose. You are in a good area for solar. You might also collect heat from air conditioning since it is wasted.
