WaterDrop Systems Making a Splash in the CHPWH Landscape
/A lot can happen in a year, especially with innovation. We sat down with WaterDrop CEO Albert Rooks to learn what has happened in the past year with WaterDrop Systems and what is planned for 2024.
What would you say have been the biggest developments in WaterDrop since our last in-depth interview in 2022?
Droplet two at Parkside Project
Well, I’d say the biggest development is that we have produced 14 skid pairs over the course of 2023. And production has gone well. At the start of the production period, early in 2023, it took a good amount of labor to create one and by the time we moved through mid-year and towards the tail end of the year, we got it down to almost half the number of hours that it took to produce a skid compared to earlier in the year. So that's a nice indicator that you like to see as a manufacturer and that the production quality has been really very good. We've gotten numerous compliments from customers on just how good they (the WaterDrops) are and how excited they are to work with them. They report that all the way through their construction process, it's gone well, and it's been a very smooth product to integrate into the building.
In our previous interview, the Droplet product line had just been introduced. How has the Droplet model line evolved or changed since 2022, if they have?
Close-up of Droplet two
Well, they’ve changed a lot. In 2022, the droplet models were on a rack system that hadn’t yet had a seismic evaluation and was limited to only having two heat pumps high. They didn't have really provision to carry a service panel and an integrated controller.
Over the course of 2023 we made a lot of changes in the Droplet product line, and I think they're good. The first change is we developed a new racking system and have had a full seismic evaluation. The seismic evaluation allows us to expand the number of heat pumps to much bigger than the original system would've carried. The new rack system works with two heat pumps high or three heat pumps high. The three heat pumps high heat pump size is important; it's still under eight feet, which makes it fit various spaces well and that means we can put a lot of heat pump capacity together in a pretty tight space. We can break it into increments of two, three, four, six, eight, nine and twelve. That’s a big important change. These new frames have structural provisions to carry a new series of service panel where we land the 208 single phase or three phase power.
In addition, that service panel has our master staging controller integrated right into the panel. So, now it's one service panel and the service panel has an outside LCD screen that reports the controller operation and conditions of the plant. It’s visible right on the outside of this service panel, so there’s no more having two different boxes on the frame. It's one box and another integration is that the small droplets, Droplets Two, Three and Four are available in a single-phase power connection, which makes it easier for small buildings with limited power availability. The larger Droplets (six, eight, nine, twelve, etc.) are available in three-phase in that single integrated panel with the integrated controller in the panel.
Are there any innovations that apply to both droplets and full-skids?
Tank with Multiple Thermistors
We’ve also completed the design of a new tank offering to pair with our systems. The new tanks have multiple thermistors placed vertically. This allows us to sample the working temperatures across various points in the tank array to give us a much better idea of what the total capacity, or the total charge rate is of the plant. It’s kind of like looking at your cell phone’s charge status indicator that tells you how much battery that you have left. We are still in the process of developing the new systems and getting them programmed into our controller. because we’ve set the thermistor levels or the thermistor placement and understand the storage capacity of the tank, it really makes a much smarter system. The next step we're working on is utilizing all that new information into the ability to provide load shift or demand response. That's something that we hope to offer with skid systems in early 2024.
Phase change material was a big focus of WaterDrop development last year. What has happened during 2023?
Well, we've had a lot of challenges with our phase change research and development. The challenges are both in simple mechanics, understanding the properties of phase change and how to design heat pump systems to work with phase change. With the lab operational; we're cycling hot water through the phase change material and beginning a new round of data collection.
One of the prior challenges we faced was getting the leaving temperature that we wanted entering the entering the phase change material. We've had to make some changes there. We’ve been learning new ways to work with (phase change) material and to work with the mechanical plumbing apparatus that feeds the material. So, while we can't point to any great breakthroughs, we can point to a series of learnings that just put us in a better position to get the system and the material to work in the way we hope to get it to work, which is storing energy in roughly half the physical volume; it’s just steps along the path and learning how to do that.
Are there plans for Phase Change Material in 2024?
So, the data collection we’re acquiring right now is going to help us. We’re going to take that (data) and begin gearing up for another two-year project to take the base learnings that we have right now and spend another year learning how to optimize. There's a lot of things to learn, both on just the mechanical operation side the heat exchange side and that's just the raw hydrated salt side. Figuring out how to get all those things to lineup and work together right. We're going spend another year working on that. Then, in 2025 we hope to produce a Phase One thermal battery. We begin maybe a couple of demonstration projects in 2024.
As a central heat pump water heat heater plant, WaterDrop holds promise in helping move towards electrification, what barriers do you see WaterDrop and other central heat pump water heater plants facing in the future?
Space for water storage and the cost of transition are both significant barriers. First, central heat pump water heaters rely on larger volumes of primary storage than gas boilers do. Central heat pump water heaters are more expensive, so I think they'll be the two biggest challenges. I'm really hoping that there's utility support to soften that transition and that we can improve what produce to make it more cost-efficient.
What can be done to mitigate those barriers?
I think we've got a couple steps that are going to help mitigate those barriers. For space, California's has a good approach, where basically the energy code has affected the rest of the building code and the structural code, which is going to require roof systems to be able to carry the weight of water tanks and equipment on the roof. Which then means we can solve some of the space issue by using available roof space and that code is requiring new designs to have suitable structures on the roof to carry these heavier loads.
On the cost side of things, it’s early, but I see a lot of promises in California’s offering of the upcoming Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP). The SGIP program really relies on demand response load shifting and it rewards on load shifting and as we can more efficiently design water heating systems and offer these load shifts and make the building available for utility incentives that we've got a way to kind of soft “first-cost” so it's more about designing and creating and selecting for performance and some additional demand-response features that'll help buy the systems down. I think that's a great idea, because I really think we’ve just started to scratch the surface on how we can manage the systems as thermal batteries and relate these thermal batteries to interact with the grid.
The other dial we can turn is the operating cost. If we can build the right logic and get the right signals moving, then we can do load shifting. We can do it in a way that focuses on a purchasing electricity focus and about how much storage we have when our load’s get used. That would allow you to buy electricity at the lowest rate available over the 24-hour cycle and then start managing the buying rather than buying it in an unmanaged and untargeted way.
Installing water has pretty much always been the territory of the plumber. What would you say to a plumber who potentially could see this system as a threat to their livelihood?
It's not a threat, it's a bonus. It's a big way to take complex liability off your shoulders and your scope of work and put it onto a vendor. And a vendor and a who’s going to want to earn your business again. In the plumbing trade, we’re already connecting water heaters up to distribution systems that plumbers install; that's really the main part of their livelihood. It's not really providing the equipment or at least the water heater per se, it’s really designing and installing all the plumbing fixtures and distribution systems in the entire building. That requires a real experienced trade and a high-quality company to deliver. Asking that same company to be experts in creating these central heat pump water heater plants, which have their own needs, their own set of rules, and their own requirements is asking for a lot. So being able to work with a plumbing contractor and just hand them unit that they can effectively install with very simple steps is really a bonus.
This program evolves out of a history of parts and pieces projects and building owners may still see that as a solution. What do you think building owners may not consider when the comparing the cost of a site-built versus a full package system like WaterDrop?
WaterDrop skids are commissioned by the WaterDrop team onside to ensure that systems work properly with minimal onsite disruption.
WaterDrop stands behind (or in this case, in front of) the systems they design. WaterDrop team members Albert Rooks, Donald annis, Tom Murgatroyd and Bryan Perkins pause for a picture in front of a pair of water drop skids installed on the roof of our menlo park project.
For building owners, I think the first cost of a site-built system versus a package system is also running along the lines of reliability and efficiency: Who's going to be standing behind the system? The plumbing contractor has got a scope where they're going to site-build the system and they're going to stand behind the system and confirm that it works correctly, you know that’s a good step. Knowing if it really works correctly is hard understand. Where, with a package system, we know it works correctly. It has reporting data that confirms how well it's working, and it comes with a full warranty. That warranty is based on our years of watching site-built systems often struggle and an installer finding some issues and not really being able to figure out what's at the core of the issues. It can take a long time for numerous people to come out and help them understand what the issue are and where the corrections need to be made. So, it's both a matter of quality and risk.
In addition, WaterDrop can do things like you can't do easily as site-built system, like installs on a roof economically. With a roof-built system, not only is the mechanical room already built, but the space also that would have been allocated for the interior mechanical room can now be used for other purposes. So rather than just a cost per cost comparison it takes a little it takes a little deeper digging to understand what the overall cost picture looks like. Even down the point that a package system provides part of the cost that's typically in the electrician’s bid, so the electrician bid can be reduced since it’s really included with the water heater system. The electrician doesn’t need to wire up all these all these individual circuits. That cost is not always transparent in the plumbing bid. If there’s a problem with an on-site system, the owner will need to call the plumber and hopefully the plumber is still engaged there and ready to support them.
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