Energy usage of HP pool Pump vs Intelligent Pump

[ajpslp]

I have a 1.5 hp Hayward pump for my 13x26 inground pool . I run the filter pump 6 hours a day and seems to use around 2 -3 kilowatts per hour . Is this correct? Spoke to a few people who put the variable speed intelipump (sp?) instead of the standard hayward pump. They said it saves them tons of $$ in solar energy. Anyone have insight on this variable speed pump and the cost vs savings ? thanks

[HX_Guy]

I have a new Pentair Intelliflo variable speed pump and I can tell you when I run the cleaning cycle, it consumes 1.5kWh at 2950 RPM.
We also have a water feature and with the variable speed pump, you can set a different run speed since it doesn't need nearly as much power to run it as the cleaning cycle. For the water feature, it's set to 1600 RPM and uses only 0.3kWh.

Not sure why you said your pump uses 2kwh - 3kwh, it should be a pretty fixed number and that's a pretty wide range.
Let's say it uses 2.5kWh, or 1kWh more than my pump...at 6 hours per day, that's 6kWh extra, X 365 days is 2,190kWh per year.
Depends on when you run your pump and what your local rates are...here that would translate to $192/year (at 8.8¢/kWh off-peak).

[inetdog]

They said it saves them tons of $$ in solar energy. Anyone have insight on this variable speed pump and the cost vs savings ? thanks

As a general rule, no energy saving feature can save you more than the amount you were already paying, so start from there to see what the maximum possible savings are.
If the issue is the size of the required solar PV system for an on-grid load, then the greatest savings will come from not going solar PV at all.
Or is this talking about the associated electrical costs for running a solar thermal heating system?

[russ]

seems to use around 2 -3 kilowatts per hour . Is this correct?

Put an amp clamp on the pump feed - see what it really is.

[Volusiano]

I used to have a Pentair 3HP single speed pump for 15 years, running at 3450 RPM and it drained about 3KW running moving about 88 gpm. About 10 months ago I switched to a Pentair IntelliFlo variable speed pump and I run it normally at 1400 RPM and it drains only 250W moving about 36 gpm. So if you do the math, the single speed pump took 12 times the energy to move only 2.5 times more water flow. So you can save as much as 5x the energy moving the same amount of water using a variable speed pump.

The variable speed pump I have is capable of running as low as 750 RPM drawing 120W, all the way up to 3450 RPM drawing 2,550 W. But the Power vs RPM curve is an exponential curve. The power consumption EXPONENTIALLY increases with higher RPM, so the more you can keep your RPM at the lower end, the more you can save on your energy consumption, not just linearly, but exponentially. That's the main advantage of the variable speed pump.

For people who have in-floor pop up heads for their cleaning system (which I do, too), it's not possible to operate it at a low RPM and still have the in-floor system work properly. So for things like that, you may still have to run your variable speed pump at a higher RPM. But if you can run it at high RPM for cleaning for a number of hours, and the rest of the time switch to lower RPM, that can still save you on energy, although not as much.

Although I have an in-floor cleaning system, I never found it to be very effective at cleaning the floor myself. That's because the pop up heads can only push and stir the dirt on the floor up into the main water body so that it gets filtered eventually. This is a slow process and takes a lot of time and sucks up a lot of energy (in terms of having to run the pump at a high enough RPM for it to work properly). So even before I installed a variable speed pump, I already bought a mechanical robot floor cleaner and use it to suck up the dirt on my pool floor, and it does this much more quickly and effectively. So after I switched over to my variable speed pump, I only needed to set the pump speed at around 1800 RPM (draining 444 W) for the robot to operate properly. I no longer rely on my in-floor cleaning system to clean the pool floor for me since I have a better solution now (the robot).

And I don't use the robot every night, only when I need to, maybe every other week for 1 night. So most of the times I run the pump at 1400 RPM for a 250W drain. I just need to run it longer than before a single speed pump in order to have at least 1 water turn-over a day. But it's actually good to run the pump longer so that your water will circulate longer and remain stagnant in less time.

Before I have the variable speed pump, after the AC, the single speed pool pump was the second biggest energy draw in my home. Now it's become a much smaller part of the energy draw in my home. In my case, it'll pay for itself in energy saving easily in a couple of years.

In Arizona, new pool construction now are required to use variable speed pump. You get some state incentive to help you switch to a variable speed pump (used to be $200 but now only $100). Variable speed pump used to be pretty expensive a few years ago (part of the reason why I held back from switching). But now that it's getting more popular, the price has gone down enough for me to justify switching to one last year.

[mapmaker]

I run the filter pump 6 hours a day and seems to use around 2 -3 kilowatts per hour . Is this correct?

You better hope that's not correct. I think you mean that it uses 2-3 kilowatts.

Kilowatts is a rate of energy use. Kilowatts per hour is a rate of a rate.

If your pump is drawing 2 kilowatts at noon, and at 1 PM it is drawing 5 kilowatts, and at 2 PM it is drawing 8 kilowatts, and at 3 PM it is drawing 11 kilowatts, then you could say its power use is increasing at the rate of 3 kilowatts per hour.

I have a new Pentair Intelliflo variable speed pump and I can tell you when I run the cleaning cycle, it consumes 1.5kWh at 2950 RPM.

kilowatts is a rate of energy use. kilowatthours is an amount of energy. When you say that the pump consumes 1.5 kwh, you are saying that it used 1.5 kwh of energy. Is that how much it uses every day? every minute? every hour?

--mapmaker

[Volusiano]

I think what ajpslp meant to say is that his pump uses 2-3 kwh per hour.

And what HX_Guy meant to say is that his pump consumes 1.5 kwh per hour at 2950 RPM.

That would be my read of what they meant.

[HX_Guy]

Correct, 1.5kW per hour.

[mapmaker]

Correct, 1.5kW per hour.

NO! still wrong. It draws 1.5 kw period.

or you could say it draws 0.025 kwh per minute. or it draws 1.5kwh per hour. or it draws 36 kwh per day.

--mapmaker

[ajpslp]

NO! still wrong. It draws 1.5 kw period.

or you could say it draws 0.025 kwh per minute. or it draws 1.5kwh per hour. or it draws 36 kwh per day.

--mapmaker

for every hour the filter pump is on it draws 1-2 kilowatts . I can watch my consumption meter an when filter goes on it draws 1- 2 kilowatts each hour its running...

[Volusiano]

Just to clarify the nomenclature, KW is the power, KWH is the energy.

If you say your pump draws 2 KW, for example, that would be the instantaneous power that it draws at the instant moment you're looking at the meter.

Over time, all the instantaneous power draw accumulates into an amount of energy drawn. So for example, if your instantaneous power draw is a constant 2 KW for an hour, then the energy your pump consumes is 2 KWH for that hour.