Pantry room cooling

Posting as a follow up to many previous discussions about using a heat pump water heater to cool a room.

IT WORKS! And, quite well actually. My basement is all finished space and 72-74⁰, but the HPWH is cooling the room to ~50⁰ after nightly showers and it slowly warms up to ~59⁰ during the day with limited hot water usage when we are at work. That's air temperature… I haven't strapped a temperature probe to a jar, but I assume that is much more stable, as it took several days to lower my daily temperature swings.

I still need to finish connecting my recirculation loop which should help modulate the high and low temperatures by keeping the original 50 gallon storage tank (heated by a boiler) at a consistent 128⁰ instead of slowly cooling to 120⁰. I'm also planning on utilizing a separate loop and radiator to run if the pantry room temperature gets too high.

All in all, I'm quite pleased to be able to have a nice cool spot to store root vegetables and canned goods. I also moved some of my uncanned vinegar pickles down and will monitor them for any signs of bacteria/mold/rot. Previous pickles using the same recipe have kept well for a year in my 34⁰ refrigerator, but mid 50s is obviously quite a bit warmer. Worst case scenario, I'll pick up another refrigerator for the pantry room so we can free up space in the kitchen fridges.

Power usage and time to reheat for the HPWH seem unchanged.