I found this from LINK
David Bullen says:
April 14th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
I have some first hand experience with geothermal heating/cooling which you might be interested.
My wife and I purchased a earth sheltered home in the NW suburbs of the Twin Cities in 1993. The home was 12 years old at the time and was about 2250 sq ft.. Propane was used to heat the home. When the existing furnace began giving us problems I started looking for a new heating plant and also wanted to add air conditioning to help control the humidity in the home. I thought that the concept of geothermal was a great idea and fit right into the other energy saving features of the home (solar hot water, full earth sheltering). Also, I wanted to eliminate the large propane tank on the property. I’m not comfortable with propane and Natural gas wasn’t (and still isn’t) available so really my only choice was electric resistance, air-to-air heatpump or geo. I knew electric resistance would be far too cosltly to operate and air-to-air just isn’t viable in this climate. So, I got bids from two different companies to supply the geo equipment and elected to go with a company that installed equipment manufactured by Water Furnace.
The system consisted of a inside unit and an outside closed loop. Because of the soil in our area is heavy clay it was decided to use four 150′ verical collectors connected together to form the heat collection/dissapation section and a down draft inside unit.
Because this was a rhetrofit, extensive outside work needed to be done. A well driller was brought in to install the loops and bring the loop inside to the utility room. This sub-contractor created a huge mess and actually created some problems with which we had to deal with over the rest of the time we owned the home.
Installation of the inside unit was quick and straight forward, the only snag was that the wrong unit was ordered. This unit had the same capacity as the one specified but had the water heating option installed. Rather than wait for a new unit to be shipped and wait we elected to go with the unit and not connect the water heating portion. (This was in early November and we needed heat!)
The entire installation cost $13,000 for equipment and labor. Our monthly energy bills at the time were about $250 (gas and electricity)without a/c. After the installation our energy costs dropped to about $150/mo with a/c. We owned the home for 12 years after the equiment was installed and it and itself worked flawlessly. It was quiet and did a good job of keeping our home warm in winter and comfortable in summer. Only on extreemly cold winter days did the extra resistance heat come on.
At the time of the installation some utilities were giving rebates on installation of energy saving heating equipment. Xcel, our utility company was not, but they did give us a price break during the heating season because the home was a “total electric” home.
Would I do it again? A qualified yes. If I were building new absolutely. Rhetrofit, no. I mentioned the loop installer created some problems. They broke drain tiles around the area where the loop came into the house, and disrupted the water shedding barriers. Whenever there were heavy snow melts or extreamly heavy rains we’d have water comming into the utility room that was impossible to stop.
Hope this helps.
|