Energy – Samsung savings

July 16, 2015 – Although variable refrigerant flow heat pumps are known to have advantages, higher initial costs and difficulty in quantifying those benefits serve as deterrents to their widespread use. ORNL’s flexible research platform, however, provides a solution that enables researchers to characterize real-world performance. In a controlled showdown, Samsung’s variable refrigerant flow heat pump outperformed a conventional rooftop unit, providing heating and cooling savings of 80 percent and 26 percent, respectively. The evaluation was performed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s flexible research platform, an instrumented two-story small office building with 10 thermal zones.