HeatPumPro Overview

and I’m Jason from Arzel Zoning and today we’re going to be covering the HeatPumPro, some of the features and the benefits of the panel and just a brief overview.

So with our HeatPumPro panel, it’s actually good for any 24volt controlled piece of equipment out there. So it’ll work for your most basic application. So single stage conventional piece of equipment and it’ll actually work all the way through a dual fuel application and you don’t need any additional controls or anything like that.

The panel itself is going to ship with a leaving air temperature sensor which will give you your high and low temperature limits. And it’s also going to ship with an outdoor temperature sensor as well. That’s going to go outside. If you guys have a heat pump application or a dual fuel application, you’re going to want to run that sensor outside and that’s going to provide you with your changeover temperatures, but it’ll also give you resistance heat lockouts and that kind of stuff as well. And we’ll kind of touch on that a little bit further along.

Um, so really you don’t need any additional controls. Um, and the panel will do up to 35 dampers as shipped. So you don’t need any additional controls. It’ll control up to 35 dampers on one system. If you guys ever have a need for more than 35 dampers, we can build a custom panel. Um, it essentially has two pumps built into the bottom of the panel box and then we can essentially do up to 70 dampers. Um, just keep in mind when you guys are counting the dampers, some of your larger size dampers that have two actuators on them, so two of the heads where you connect your airlines, each one of those is considered a damper. So, if you have two heads on a bigger damper, that’s going to be two dampers essentially. Just got to keep that in mind. It’s per actuation head. And that’s how we get that number from.

As far as your thermostats go, on zone 2, three, or four, if it’s a four zone panel, you have to use heat-cool thermostats on any application. It does not allow anything else besides heat-cool stats on zone 2, three, or four. All it needs to know from those specific terminals is if we’re running heating or cooling. And then based on the parameters you set on initial startup of the HeatPumPro, it’s going to output accordingly to your equipment. So even though you get just a heat call W1, the panel itself will be able to provide for heat to cool on your outputs. And it’s going to do that based on leaving air temperature run time and how you actually set up the panel. Also with your zone one, you can use just a heat-cool thermostat on that zone as well. There’s no need to use a heat pump stat even if you guys are doing heat pump or dual fuel. Um, the only thing to keep in mind is if you use a heat-cool thermostat, make sure there’s a setting in your setup wizard which will ask you what your zone one stat type is. If you use a heat-cool thermostat, make sure you reflect that in the setting. If you use a heat pump thermostat, make sure it’s set that way. Otherwise, the panel will not respond to the calls. So, you can do it either way on either application.

The only true benefit to using a heat pump thermostat on zone one is if you want your emergency heat function to be able to work from the thermostat. Otherwise, the HeatPumPro is smart enough to know if it can’t maintain temperature running just your heat pump or primary source of heat. After 6 minutes of run time, it’s going to realize that shut down that piece of equipment and run whatever the backup heat is. So, there’s really no need for emergency heat if you don’t need it. Um, and there are other other options as well. If you guys use a heat-cool thermostat, you can do just a normally open switch and it’ll go to your zone one terminal strip between R and E. And then essentially when the customer flips that switch, it would lock the panel in emergency heat and output for your backup heat source. So, it’s really up to you guys how you want to achieve that auxiliary heat function. Um, you can let the panel do it. You can use that heat pump thermostat with the emergency heat terminal. So really depends on how you guys want to achieve it. But you have both options as far as thermostats are concerned. So really depends on how you guys want to set it up.

Most of us in tech support will tell you to use just heat-cool thermostats. It takes all the brains away from the stat, gives complete control over to the panel, and you’ll have better, more efficient equipment operation that way because it’s maintaining those duct work leaving air temperatures, and it’s going to stage that equipment based on an overall temperature rather than just that area of the home. So, that’s typically what we recommend you guys do, heat-cool stats on all zones. But, it does give you the option if you guys want to go ahead and use heat pump stats.

As far as the software in the HeatPumPro, it is a nonvolatile memory. So, if you guys do lose power, it will save all your settings. So, there’s no need to go back through and reprogram the board. Once you set it up on initial install, you’re good to go. If by chance they go to upgrade their equipment or change it out and you guys do need to go back in, you can always go back in and change any of the settings that you need to. So, just keep that in mind. Is nonvolatile memory. It can be upgraded in the field. Um there hasn’t been an update in a couple of years, so everything out there should be update. Um so you really shouldn’t have to do that. And that’s pretty much it as far as the software goes.

Um the reason that the HeatPumPro was designed originally was just for heat pumps. So it has a lot of features built in for controlling your electric resistance heat and that um it also has all of your dual fuel settings. And then since it’s been adapted in the field, we have done revisions to it. So, at this point, the HeatPumPro is really our go-to panel. It’ll work for a single-stage conventional. It’ll work for dual fuel. It’ll work for two-stage equipment. It really gives you the most bang for your buck on setup and application with the HeatPumPro. So, some of your built-in features that are going to come standard with every HeatPumPro is it’s going to have your balance point setting.

So, with that outdoor air temperature sensor, it’s going to have your balance point. So, your changeover setting. So, if you guys are doing dual fuel, you want the compressor to shut off on the heat pump at 20°, 30°, whatever it may be. You’ll set that the panel to automatically change to your auxiliary heat at that temperature. Um, so it’s a nice added feature. You don’t need, you know, dual fuel stats and that kind of stuff. Everything’s built into the panel.

Um, it also has your resistance heat lockout. It’ll give you hard lockouts on your electric heat source and that’ll just give your guys um more energy efficiency for your customers so they don’t have to run that auxiliary heat when you don’t actually need it. Um that’s based on outdoor air temperature and runtime. And this is kind of field adjustable so you can change this to temperatures. And then you can also set it to a lock in feature. And essentially if it’s set to lock in, it would engage those heat strips anytime it is needed. Um, and that’s based off of runtime. So, if it can’t maintain temperature after 6 minutes, it would kick on your auxiliary heat if it’s set to the lock in function. So, essentially anytime it would be needed, it would engage them and there’s no hard lockout in that feature. So, it’s up to you if you guys want to do a hard lockout or just leave it as is and let it engage as needed. It also comes factory with a low ambient cooling lockout. Essentially, what that prohibits the customer from doing is if by chance you’re in the middle of winter, a kid flips one of your thermostats to cooling mode and it’s too cold to physically engage that compressor, it’ll actually prevent the condenser from running. And that’s a field setable temperature from 50° down to zero. Um, so you guys can change that and then that just prevents equipment damage. So, flooding of the compressor in the middle of winter because you know, if you got a zone house, you may have six or seven zones in there.

You may not realize that that zone set to cooling for a day or two before you’re in that area of your home. So, it just gives them a little bit of added comfort and uh safety, I guess, for their equipment. It’s also going to have outdoor reset controls. So, as your temperature drops outside under 30°, the panel itself is going to start staging more aggressively, just like your typical thermostat would. Um, so it’s a nice added feature. It keeps an eye on that outdoor temperature and as those conditions start to worsen, your equipment’s going to engage and stage up more aggressively to maintain that temperature in the home.

It’s also going to cover your leaving air temperature control. So, freeze protection or overheating should prevent damage to the heat exchanger or to your coil from freezing. Those are setable as well. They come preset for your sensor to be about a foot away from your coil. If you guys need to move it a little bit further than that or a little bit closer to your equipment, then you’re going to need to change your leaving air temperatures just a little bit to make up for that difference. These are just your leaving air temperatures.

So, this is going to cover you guys on high protection and your low freeze protection on the coil. So, there’s a setting for your auxiliary heat, which is going to be your backup heat source. Um, that’s for your high temp. And then it’s also going to have a high temp for the outdoor heat pump as well. And then it’ll have your low temp lockout, so your freeze protection, but also because the way the HeatPumPro works, all of the staging is done internally on the panel. So once we get a call for heat, the HeatPumPro is going to engage your first stage of heat and it’s going to start running first stage heat. Then after 3 minutes of run time, it’s going to check duct work temperature. And if you haven’t hit your heat stage threshold setting yet, it’s going to upstage that equipment to second stage. It’ll run for another three minutes, read that temperature again. If it still hasn’t hit the heat stage threshold setting, then it would engage your auxiliary heat or your backup heat source.

Um, so that’s really how the staging works. It all it does it based on leaving air duct work temperature. And then there’s a setting for heat stage and cool stage threshold in your settings. Cool stage is the temperature we’re trying to maintain in the duct work in cooling mode before we upstage the compressor. Near heat stage is essentially the same thing but for heating mode. So we’re trying to hit that temperature and if we don’t we’re going to upstage that equipment after three minutes and continue upstaging every 3 minutes until we satisfy that temperature.

So that’s how the staging works pretty similar to your smart thermostats out there. It’s going to do pretty much the same thing in the algorithm, but it’s a more constant reading because it’s actually reading that mix of air in your home because it’s reading in the duct work rather than just that specific area of your home. So, it knows exactly what that equipment’s doing, what we’re producing heat or coolwise, and then it adapts and stages from there. As far as humidification goes, it does give you a humidification terminal on your zone one. So, you guys can do a thermostat that controls humidity or you can do a humidistat if you want. Um, up to you guys.

With the HeatPumPro though, something to keep in mind if you’re going to use the humidification terminal. It only energizes with a heating call. So, if you’re trying to do blower activation, this terminal is not going to work for what you want it to do. If you guys want to do blower activation, ignore the Arzel panel completely. Wire it independent of the zoning panel. So, straight to your HVAC equipment and let your equipment actually kick on with the blower. And if there’s no call on the Arzel panel, all of our dampers are in the open position. So, you would get that whole house humidification.

And then if there is a call on an opposing zone, you’re just going to close those zones off and just humidify the area that’s actually calling at that time. And then once your zones are satisfied again, it would reopen the dampers and continue humidifying the whole home. So, if you guys want blur activation, that’s your better route. If you do, if you don’t mind just running it with a heating call, you’re more than welcome to use it.

Um, they are 24 volts. So, on the output of the panel, it’ll have an H terminal that does supply 24 volts out with the call for humidity. So, if you guys have a powered humidifier that uses its own transformer, you’re going to need to use an isolation relay at that point. If you guys have any questions with that, give us a call at tech support. we can help you out that way as well. One of the nice functions as well, if you guys do end up using that humidifier terminal on the HeatPumPro and they’re using a bypass style humidifier, you can actually order that panel custom with its solenoid built in for the bypass on the humidifier. So instead of your customer having to open and close that bypass on the humidifier itself, it would actually open anytime there’s a call for humidity.

So they would never have to go downstairs every season and open and close that bypass anymore. It would do it automatically for them. So, that is an option as well. And then it does have a dehumidification terminal as well. It’s going to be on your zone one. So, same deal. If you guys want to use a dehumidistat or your thermostat with a dehumidifier option built in, you can do that and it’ll support your equipment as far as using it to dehumidify. Um, and you can also use a de standalone dehumidifier as well and adapt it to our panel.

If you guys have any application questions on that, shoot us an email or give us a call at tech support. Um, we’re real easy to get a hold of and we’ll help you guys out that way. If you ever need to email us, our email is just text supporting.com. It’ll go to all of us in tech support rather than just one of us. Gives you a better option of us getting back to you sooner if one of us is tied up. So, it’s better just to email tech support at our zel zoning. One of us will get back to you really quickly that way.

And one of the best things, my favorite thing when I was in the field about the HeatPumPro is our zone waiting feature. And really what that does is it allows us to separate our air handler and condenser Y1 Y2 terminals. And then we’re actually able to stage those independently of each other. So, what it allows you to do is you can actually lock out your second stage blower on your smaller zones and still be able to produce a Y2 on your condenser, which will give you guys longer run time, better dehumidification, but more importantly, slow that blower down so that you guys can get away from using a bypass or at least decrease the size of the bypass you may need um without creating objectionable air noise for the customer. So, really, it’s a really easy feature.

Essentially, what it’s going to do for you guys is you’re going to have a zone weight percent for each of your zones. To sum it up, the easiest way I can tell you guys is that’s going to be a percentage of duct work per zone. So, if you have a four zone, just figure out how much duct work is on each zone and create a percentage for that. In this case, each one is at 25%. So, they’re pretty even zones. So, we got zone one, zone 2, zone 3, and zone four all set to 25%. And then there’s going to be a setting in there called air handler stage threshold. Essentially what that is is how much of that percentage of duct work do you want open in the system before you achieve a second stage on your output side of the panel. So if you guys in this case have all your zone weights set to 25. You have your air handler stage threshold set to 50. It would require any two of these zones to call before you were able to achieve a second stage blower operation. So, it’s a really nice feature.

If you guys have any questions about this, um, give us a call. We can help you out on the phone as well. But that’s really the easiest way to kind of communicate that to you guys.

As far as our dampers with our HeatPumPro or any panel, you can mix and match any one of our dampers. So, our insertable dampers, our edampers, EzyFits, um, EzySlides, any of those, you can do any combination of those dampers. And like I said before, up to 35 of them on one system. And that’s factory shipped panel like that. And if you guys need to do more dampers, we can build that custom panel which will do up to 70 for you. And we do offer our EzySlides, which is our most common dampers, which is the trunk dampers and our branch style dampers. Those are going to come in round sizes 4 to 16. And we do offer commercial sizes as well. They go to 16 to 20, I believe. It might be 22. I’m trying to think off the top of my head. Those ones will go in round spiral duct, though. So, all the commercial sizes are pre-installed in spiral duct sleeve. Um, and they’re 32 inches long. So, if you guys do have an application like that, that’s how they would be. Our rectangle sizes are 4 in to 48. And then we do offer custom sizes as well. So, if you guys have an oddball size, if you guys got oval, duct work, something like that, we do make those as well. And typically, we would ship those out within 24 hours of the order. Um, with all our dampers besides the RegiDamper, they’re all going to have a 3/4 in gasketed seal around the blade.

So, they’re 100% closure on the dampers. Um, there’s no bleed by or anything like that as well. And then we are based out of Cleveland, Ohio, so everything is made right here in Cleveland. We are USA made uh and ran company. kind of the last thing with the HeatPumPro. Um, I just wanted to go a little bit into what you guys will see in the field out there. Um, and some of the questions we get the most of about HeatPumPro when you guys are troubleshooting. So, this is going to be your main screen that you’ll see anytime the HeatPumPro is running.

Just some brief info on here. It’s going to give you guys a lot of troubleshooting information if you know where to look. And essentially, when you’re looking at this main screen, you’re going to have HVAC on the top. Really doesn’t mean anything, just there every time you see it.

Then you’re going to have C O N A H on the top. What that is is right under C O N is your Y1 Y2. That’s your condenser. Y1 Y2. That would be if we were energizing Y1 or Y2 on the condenser. You’ll see that underneath there. That’ll tell you what we’re actually outputting to your equipment. And then underneath air handler, you’ll have Y1 Y2 as well. Those are your blower motor. Y1 Y2 signals. So that’s what we’re sending to the air handler blower. And then everything else on that line is just going to be air handler or furnace. So W1, W2 will show up there. Your G, your B, or your O will also show up on that line. So anything that we energize, it’ll show up right there. And you guys can tell exactly what we’re outputting to your equipment. Right underneath that, you’re going to have your OAT and LAT. OAT is outdoor air temperature. So that’s what we’re reading outside. LAT is your leaving air temperature. So that’s going to be our leaving air and your supply plenum. Then kind of right underneath there, compressor lock and purge time.

The only time you’re going to see compressor lock is if we stage back your compressor. So, we got too hot or too cold in the duct work. We drop out one of the stages of cooling or heating. You’ll see that number. It’ll either be a number two if we stage back from second stage. Or it’ll be a number one. If we completely stage back, it’ll be one and two. It means it got way too cold in the duct work. We shut your equipment off completely. And then you would just see a G on your output line that we’re trying to run just the fan to bring your temperature back up to re-engage your compressor.

Um, right underneath that is your purge time. You’ll never see anything on that line unless all the calls just satisfied on the panel. And then you’ll see a countdown. Um, this is settable in your setup wizard for the HeatPumPro. So you actually set your purge time. When you do that, it’s 5 seconds per damper. So count your dampers, multiply by five. That’s where you’ll set that purge time. And that’s essentially how long we run our pump at the end of the call. So once your call’s satisfied, just to make sure all the dampers are open at the start of the next cycle. So that’s all that is.

You’ll see it anytime all the calls are satisfied on there. Then kind of on the left in the middle there, you see zones. There’ll be a number one through four on there. So it’ll be 1 2 3 4 just straight down the line like that. What other number you see there is what zone is actually being served at that time.

So in this case, it’s got the number one. That’s just zone one is being called for and served. Then the WT percent right next to that, that’s your zone weight. So that’s how much duct work percent is open in that system at that moment. So those are what you set your zone weight percent to. It just displays how much of the duct work it’s actually showing. That’s pretty much your main screen there.

But from that main screen, if you hit the enter button, it’s going to go to each one of your thermostat calls. So in the top there, you got zone one. It’s got your weight percent, so the amount of duct work on that zone. tells you if it’s served or not. So, it’ll say yes or no. It’ll give you a serve time. So, how long have we been running this call and it’ll have a timer there. It goes up to 99 minutes. So, if you guys ever hit 99, you probably got an issue. Um, but that’s where the timer actually will stop.

And then underneath call there, it’ll actually tell you what that thermostat’s calling for. So, in this case, zone one is calling for W1, and that’s -HTG, which is just a heating call. So, we’re energizing heating and running that call.

Right underneath there, that’s zone four. Still got your weight percentage of 50. This one says serve no serve time. There’s no serve time because we’re not actually serving this zone at the moment. And then underneath your call, you got wy-L. So this is one of the calls we get the most of in tech support with the HeatPumPro is I got a call on whatever zone and it’s not working. And then we get them to go through the screens. we get to this and you see something similar either like a Y-L WY-ll.

Anytime you guys see that it’s an illegal call on the panel, the panel’s not going to serve that call. In this case, it’s because you’re energizing heating and cooling at the same time. Just remember with the HeatPumPro, all your other zones besides zone one need to be heat cool only thermostats.

So in this case, they either have a short in their thermostat wire between W and Y or they have it set up to energize as a heat pump for that call. And you can’t do that with the HeatPumPro has to be heat only uh heat cools. So anytime you guys see ill for whatever matter, that’s what that means. If you guys ever see a Y-L, it’s because you’re not energizing your fan with a cooling call. All cooling calls, you have to energize Y and G from your thermostat. So, if you ever see that, that’s why. It’s either a bad thermostat relay or that particular thermostat doesn’t have that function, which is really uncommon.

But every once in a while, some of the real cheap thermostats won’t output Y and G together. So, just keep that in mind as well. That’s what that would be. Once you get through each of your thermostat screens here, you’ll hit the blue enter button again. It’ll go to a screen called HeatPumPro status messages. These are not errors on the system, so it’s not telling you there’s a problem. This is what we’re doing in that system at that moment. So in this case here, it’s going to say below balance point. So one of two things here. It’s either a dual fuel setup and we hit our balance point setting. So it got too cold outside to run our heat pump. So now we’re running auxiliary heat.

The other time you’ll see this is if you don’t have a heat pump and you have the panel set for conventional gas furnace air conditioning. Anytime you get a call for heat, then you’ll see that message and it’s essentially telling you we’re running the gas furnace because we don’t have a heat pump. Keep that in mind. Um, that’s what that actually means. And then right underneath that is capacity stage up. So in this case, uh, we weren’t able to hit our heat stage threshold, so we engaged our second stage heat that still wasn’t able to keep up and we either switched over to our secondary heat source or it got too cold outside at that point. So keep in mind they’re not errors, they’re just messages exactly what we’re actually doing in the equipment.