FARMINGTON – Governor Paul LePage visited the downtown Friday afternoon, spending a few minutes with University of Maine engineering students seeking to build a better heat pump.
The governor visited Tranten’s Market and met with four UMaine seniors who are building a heat pump capable of heating water for their capstone project, before heading off for Franklin Savings Bank and other local-area businesses. LePage also visited Franklin Memorial Hospital later Friday afternoon, to view the NorthStar EMS ambulance that had been painted purple to bring attention to domestic violence awareness.
The four mechanical engineering students, Hailey Girardin, Phil Twombly, Blake Laliberte and Zach Dyson, were in Farmington to tour Tranten’s refridgeration/heating system, which utilizes a heat pump, and meet the governor. For their senior capstone project, the four students are in the process of building an advanced heat pump with a secondary loop built into the device. This loop would lower the temperature of the pump’s liquid refrigerant, improving the capacity of the pump’s evaporator. Improving that aspect of the heat pump, which typically would be located outside the building, makes the system more efficient.
Additionally, the students are typing a water heater into the heat pump system, utilizing the byproduct heat energy to generate hot water. That addition could be critical for residences, according to Jim LaBrecque, who sits on the governor’s energy advisory committee and designed Tranten’s refrigeration system. It meant that a home equipped with the advanced heat pump would no longer to utilize a furnace to heat water.
“Hot water heating is inefficient for the furnace,” LaBrecque said.
The students said that they intended to spend the next year building the advanced pump prototype. The prototype will be housed in a climate-control box to allow testing.
LePage congratulated the students. He and LaBrecque also took the opportunity to distinguish between the governor’s energy policy, which generally focuses on heat pumps and other, quick-payback systems in addition to natural gas expansion, and that of gubernatorial candidate and U.S. Rep. Mike Michaud (D – Maine), who has emphasized the expansion of solar, wind and other, alternative sources of energy. Eliot Cutler, running as an independent, has supported both the expansion of natural gas as a bridge fuel and the development of incentives for alternate energy.
LaBrecque was critical of solar and wind energy generation, saying those systems equated to a few 100-watt light bulbs-worth of power a year, as opposed to the capabilities of heating oil and heat pumps.
“We need innovative products like this,” LaBrecque said, referencing the work of the UMaine students, “to take care of our heating concerns.”
Ben Hanstein and the Daily Bulldog knock one more out of the energy park. Careful reading of Ben’s article along with some due diligence concerning air to air fuel pump based hot water for domestic use leads one to the inevitable conclusion that the UMaine Engineering students in their capstone project research are on the verge of demonstrating and will demonstrate that domestic hot water production tied to heat pumps will result in free, that’s correct, free domestic hot water. The thermodynamics behind such a conclusion is not trivial, but industrial generation of free hot water, already a reality, will surely lead to the domestic version of the same process. Mark my words, LaBrecque and his students will surely prove the concept of this new process and will change domestic hot water production from being one of the most costly energy eaters in homes to a no cost item of the near future.
Reading my initial response to Ben Hanstein’s article on the Governor’s visit to Tranton’s market in Farmington I noticed that I mentioned “air to air fuel pump” when, of course, I was actually referring to “air to air heat pump.” None -the-less, I still feel the same that Ben’s article will be oft quoted when the “free domestic hot water” soon becomes a reality.