A new air-water dual source heat pump water heater with heat recovery is proposed. The heat pump system can heat water by using a single air source, a single water source, or air-water dual sources. The water is first pre-heated by waste hot water, then heated by the heat pump. Waste heat is recovered by first preheating the cold water and as water source of the heat pump. According to the correlated formulas of the coefficient of performance of air-source heat pump and water-source heat pump, and the gain coefficient of heat recovery-preheater, the formulas for the coefficient of performance of heat pump in six operating modes are obtained by using the dimensionless correspondence analysis method. The system characteristics of heat absorption and release associated with the heat recovery-preheater are analyzed at different working conditions. The developed approaches can provide reference for the optimization of the operating modes and parameters. The results of analysis and experiments show that the coefficient of performance of the device can reach 4–5.5 in winter, twice as much as air source heat pump water heater. The utilization of waste heat in the proposed system is higher than that in the system which only uses waste water to preheating or as heat source. Thus, the effect of energy saving of the new system is obvious. On the other hand, the dimensionless correspondence analysis method is introduced to performance analysis of the heat pump, which also has theoretical significance and practical value.