Now return to the naive beginning of this post:
New renters were unaware the unit was running in Electric mode,The garage was not being nicely refrigerated in Summer heat. Quiet in the garage was not alarming.
Half-way through a three month incident I was at last painfully aware, and driven to find a repair. I was the installer. The unit was sold to me by General Pacific, Inc. a large supplier of parts for industrial electrical equipment to Bonneville Power Administration and also a low-cost supplier of heat pumps and more to area weatherization contractors. I buy and install many Panasonic bath fans, with pricing 30% below that at Home Depot. The Rheem HPWH was a one-off for myself.
Who to I call? I talked with a competent plumber at Portland's "Water Heater King" store where I am a good customer, and learned there are large problems with the Control Board, being resolved by Rheem at no cost. Just call the Rheem heat pump service people in Montgomery Alabama, at 800-995-0982 weekday daytime hours. Get parts and do the repair myself. The parts offered are the Control Board, Part Number AP22260, and three identical Thermistor Kits, Part Number SP20845.
Thermistors? They are supposed to be ultra rugged. How could they fail? I would try just replacing the Control Board. Still, get a look at the thermistors. Detach power leads and detach the tank lid with its ten screws,
A Rheem YouTube video will be shared days later but will be of little help:
Rheem hybrid thermistor access
First swap the thermistor easiest to reach, "Suction," on yellow leads.
Higher up on the same pipe, swap a thermistor from blue leads, Discharge.
Gray leads, Evaporator.
Repair completed. I had worked atop a piece of 3/4" plywood resting on the tank cylinder wall and the heat exchanger, doing no harm. The work areas are inconveniently close to the cylinder wall and the heat exchanger. It was never intended that a home owner would do this. I could not replace the six cable ties I cut. In the factory, this tidy assembly might have been completed before the tank cylinder was applied. The odd object at right hand is my banged-up work light propped at the tank wall edge.
I am offended by large pieces of gummy material, two pieces four inches square, not the same as butyl strips about one inch square applied in the factory to better couple a thermistor to adjacent tube surface temperature. The huge squares are not scored for separation to useful size.
If thermistors are a repair item, the factory wrap of tubes and thermistor should be a thick fabric with velcro strips. No foam tubing and zip ties. Surely there are incidents of disastrously cutting a leadwire somewhere, reaching blindly with sharp snips.
Avoid any need of cancer-causing gum.
Study the principal guide for consumers here,
Rheem randomly sent this PDF as an email attachment, following one phone conversation. Now a Google search brings nine results, none the guide. Therefore, I store a copy in Google My Drive:
The troubleshooting and repair parts listings did not imagine the control board failures now occurring. Nothing I have done here is mentioned.
It is odious that one offered solution here while under warranty, is free replacement of the entire HPWH. There's a lot of bad carbon in that. Repairs must be offered at no cost for at least twenty years, the least lifetime I think is reasonable for a water heater. The consumer trust thus guarded is essential to needed adoption of a HPWH, in every home, well-subsidized again in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022,
I await honest statements from Rheem about what is happening. Why the thermistor swaps? Is there a better solution in circuit board recognition of sensors surely still good, avoiding replacements.
4 comments:
Phil, this is a very enlightening blog post. I have been following the energy savings you have tracked with the hybrid heat pump water install. I'll am curious to hear more about Rheem's response to your concerns.
I swapped in the replacement Control Board on August 6th, and replaced the three thermistors on August 8th. There were at least two dozen phone calls to Rheem in North Carolina at 800-995-0982. I'm sure I didn't speak to the same person twice. I was unhappy in only two of these calls, where I accepted the offer to be called back, and it seems no calls are ever returned. Lesson: Don't stay on hold. A real person will take every successful call, immediately. I assure that I want only good publicity of the HPWH opportunity and of Rheem specifically. I want to learn and to share "the story." Better, I want Rheem to tell its story of product evolution to resolve failures, as an important actor in our quest to preserve life on our planet. Step forward as heroic combatants against turning our fossil legacy into squalor and madness.
I learned in a call on 8/19 that Year-2000 production of Fifth Generation units like mine, was especially flawed. It is a Control Board issue, wrongly sensing thermistor signals and thereafter flagging a calling thermistor as defective even with a new Control Board, so thermistors other than Ambient must be replaced. I don't know if this is an accurate summary.
I learned to decode my Serial Number:
Q272026175
Q- assembled in New Laredo, MX
27 - twenty seventh week of the year
20 - year 2000
26,175th unit in the month
I gained faith my new Control Board, AP22260, will serve flawlessly for the next ten years.
I realized that a twenty year lifespan is not crucial in a service that repays investment in a year or two. And, I reckon that federal subsidy is a good investment even if service is for only ten years.
I realize that Rheem will keep my unit running with free replacement parts for ten years. We agree that warranty replacement of an entire unit, must be rare and well-justified.
To the commenter, shown by StatCounter to be that rare many-times reader in Albany, NY: Thank you! Thank you!
Thanks for sharing this wonderful post with us. This is more helpful and useful for find the best and Unique quality of the best Energy Savings information.
I followed the Sedania link, and find it interesting. Good people evidently, in Malaysia, with up-front financing of energy conservation investments. I offer them better visibility in a direct post to the blog. Send to my email and I will post. I would probably link to Perpetuity Math. There is much money to be made in perpetual draw of the savings. I wonder what is the end of a contract. How does quality control work?
Failing to save energy is ridiculous. Where an investment then blocks an investment saving much more, more thorough and more durable, that too is really dumb. I remember a quote of Benjamin Disraeli: "If you can't find the time to do it right, where will you find the time to do it over?" The time and effort in a task are much more valuable than the needed funds.
We have very much to learn and to share.
Phillip Norman
Lake Oswego, Oregon
USA
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