The main research objective of this paper was to compare exergy performance of three different heat pump (HP)-based systems and one natural gas (NG)-based system for the production of heating and cooling energy in a single-house dwelling. The study considered systems based on: 1. A NG and auxiliary cooling unit; 2. Solely HP, 3. HP with additional seasonal heat storage (SHS) and a solar thermal collector (STC); 4. HP with SHS, a STC and a grey water (GW) recovery unit. The assessment of exergy efficiencies for each case was based on the transient systems simulation program TRNSYS, which was used for the simulation of energy use for space heating and cooling of the building, sanitary hot water production, and the thermal response of the seasonal heat storage and solar thermal system. The results show that an enormous waste of exergy is observed by the system based on an NG boiler (with annual overall exergy efficiency of 0.11) in comparison to the most efficient systems, based on HP water-water with a seasonal heat storage and solar thermal collector with the efficiency of 0.47. The same system with an added GW unit exhibits lower water temperatures, resulting in the exergy efficiency of 0.43. The other three systems, based on air-, water-, and ground-water HPs, show significantly lower annual source water temperatures (10.9, 11.0, 11.0, respectively) compared to systems with SHS and SHS + GW, with temperatures of 28.8 and 19.3 K, respectively.
Keywords: exergy efficiency; grey water heat recovery unit; seasonal heat storage; solar-assisted heat pump.