Has anyone been following the developments with ClimateWell AB.  If not familiar, Google ClimateWell.  This technology looks promising to me but expensive.  If it is as efficient as indicated, then the payback will not take long to offset the high initial price.

I have also been following GeoColumn geothermal technology by GeoEnergy Enterprises for some time.  Lately, I was told that it may be another 18 months before sales begin.

I browsed site - lots of sizzle, no steak detected

Tell me more.

Engineer,

I believe the latest article I have found on the internet is
http://www.climatewell.com/Document..._Paper.pdf
It shows that energy savings on cooling is 100%, heating is 50% and DHW is 100%.

I ask about this system because one of my clients has contacted the company to check on availability and cost.  I read somewhere that the cost will be 2.5 to 3 times more than an air-to-air heat pump which will probably make it cost more than geothermal.  But if the performance is really there, then it may be worth the extra cost.  Reliability should not be too bad since they claim no moving parts.

I have read several articles on the internet but have not talked to this company.  From what I read, this system will work best in hot climates that need a lot of air conditioning.  That is why Spain became the test site instead of Sweden where it was invented.

Contact info for their USA rep is listed on their web site.

I just got word from ClimateWell that at the moment they are targeting only AZ, CA and HI.  Oh, well, maybe next year.  The Southeast has hot weather also.

While I'd expect pretty good sensible-cooling performance, sticky swamps like the Gulf Coast states have needs for lower-temp coils to handle the latent loads, so don't hold your breath on getting the same level of performance out of it there. In much drier AZ/CA/HI it should do OK though.

Yazaki has had larger-scale solar-thermal chiller technology for commercial sized applications for awhile now too.

As the cost of photovoltaics continues to fall and given the higher temp requirements (=lower collection efficiency) of solar-thermal chillers I'm not convinced that a PV-mini-split technology solution won't be a more cost effective solution at the single-family home sized system. A 15% PV panel coupled to a scroll compressor system with an average COP of 5 is achieving ~75% effective solar efficiency, whereas a thermal array running at 180F+ is getting maybe 60% raw efficiency on a good day, before derating by the 0.6-0.9 of the chiller, assuming you can even USE all of the excess in summer (swimming pools NEED apply!), dropping the net efficiency to under 50%, probably under 40%, which means the raw area of the solar array needs to be larger.