Heating my house with icecubes.

???

Yeah, it works like this: My house has a heat pump.  The compressor (the outside part) was oh-so-cleverly installed under the drip edge of the roof (tin roof, no gutters) so that when it rains, water flows right into the blow-ey parts.  Do you know how much heat water gives up when it hits the cold heat pump coils and turns to ice?  A lot, 334 J/g to be precise.  Compare that with the specific heat capacity of air, about 1 J/g-deg.  So if a heat pump is spitting out air 10 degrees colder than its surroundings like it’s supposed to do, it’s only getting about 1/33rd of the bang-for-gram as it would turning water into ice.  

Really then, heating with icecubes works quite well.  The downside is that the ice doesn’t exit the scene as gracefully as cold air would.  There’s always a downside.

So last Thursday night we had freezing rain, said freezing rain runs off the roof, into the heat pump, finishes freezing, then... waits right there until the control unit detects decreased airflow.  At which point the heat pump reverses cycle, melts the ice from the coils, ejecting the ice shards into the blower.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

Did I mention how loud ice hitting the fan at 3:30 a.m. really is?  Or the part about the fan motor bearings going out?  Still studying my options here, but it’s shaping up to be $350 for a new fan motor and I still have the same crappy heatpump and ice problem, or $2500+ for a new heat pump on which the compressor will be located somewhere other than under the roof edge.  At least for the moment I do have some heat from the auxiliary resistance heating strips.  Stay tuned.