Great site.  We are building a house in Western MA - cold winters with many days at 10 - 20...but summers are great.  We have plenty of land - can accomodate a horizontal loop system.  House will be about 3400 sq ft...very well insulated.  Two stories - all of our living on the main floor, with guest quarters, etc. on lower level. 

We are not big fans of air conditioning and, we hate forced hot air - which is what we have now.  Propane is the fuel of choice where we are (remote).  Can we put in a geo that will work with hot water....what I have read up to now seems to indicate no....but then I read something that said it will work with Runtal type hot water heating.  Does the whole idea make any sense given that we really don't care about the air conditioning?

We expect to be in this house around 10 years...while payback is not the deciding factor it is part of the equation.

Thanks

What is Runtal type hot water heating? Also, what do you mean with "very well insulated"?

You mentioned one thing about propane forced air that I'd like to point out. You called it what it is: "forced HOT air". I'm not trying to make you get something you won't be happy with, but geothermal forced air is a lot more comfortable than propane/fuel oil/natural gas forced HOT air.

Let me explain...

First, propane burns at a much higher temperature than what is needed to heat your home. I can't remember exactly, but I think it's about 1200-1400 deg. F. So what happens is the fuel fired furnace overheats the air. You typically see discharge air temps from 160 deg. F. to 220 deg. F. (depending on how oversized the furnace is). With geothermal heat pumps (GHPs), we typically see 90-100 deg. discharge air.

With high discharge air temp., the thermostat will get satisfied before the air has mixed well. Let me give an example.

You're watching TV and feel a bit chilly. Just before you get up to raise the temp., you hear the thermostat click and furnace come on. So you stay in your seat. A few minutes later, you feel warmer. Forced Hot air (we call it scorched air) is mixing with the cooler air and now warming the home. Now that you're starting to feel warm, the thermostat says, "I've had enough!" It's warm enough to satisfy the thermostat. The flame shuts off, and the blower blows for another minute to cool the heat exchanger down.

As soon as the blower shuts off, what do you feel? Most people experience a cold draft. Why? Because the furnace didn't run long enough to mix the air completely. With unmixed air, it stratifies more readily. That means that the warm air rises, and the cold air falls. There's your draft right there. How comfortable is that? It's NOT AT ALL comfortable.

Now let's look at the GHP. The thermostat turns it on. You don't hear a flame ignite (potential explosion/fire/carbon monoxide source). The GHP is now extracting energy from the earth and converting it into heat to gently warm the home. It takes much longer for a GHP to raise temp. than it does for a scorched air system. It's going to run longer. That means it will mix the air more completely before it shuts off.

When the GHP does shut off, what do you feel? Still warm. It didn't overheat the air to such a high temp. that it rises and doesn't easily mix. Instead, it took the necessary time to thoroughly mix it so that you could be comfortable. There is no draft, because the air is all the same temp. There's no difference for a stratification to occur.

Now take into account that most GHP installers care about comfort. They most likely will size their duct correctly, and install return air connections to every bedroom, along with the common area returns. They'll make sure the right amount of conditioned air is delivered to each individual room, based on each individual room's load.

My whole point on this is that you shouldn't just give up on forced air. GHP forced air systems can be more comfortable than radiant systems because of their constant, even temps.

As far as geo making sense for your home, ABSOLUTELY YES. What's the price of propane and electricity there? I'm not sure what runtal type heating is, but geo works with well designed and installed radiant floors. Keep in mind that you typically will only see 115-120 deg. water at the highest. Sure, some claim to get hotter water, but the capacity goes down tremendously (then requiring twice as much GHP). With these lower temps, you can't do a radiator or baseboard radiant heat.

After all this, I'd recommend you contact an EarthLinked DX dealer to do your system. I should be able to get you contact info for the sales rep of your area who could then tell you which dealer you should contact. I'll get that on here soon for you.

Just wanted to chime in from the comfort standpoint. We installed closed loop geothermal in our northern minnesota home in March of this year. We had forced air oil heat and retrofitted that system. There is definitly a difference! You are right on with your description of the comfort. I used to experience pretty severe drafts when the old furnace would turn off. I usually spent my evenings under a blanket (had the furnace at 68 degrees) and I'd feel warm then cold warm then cold. With the geo system we have a very even sense of warmth. Even though the air coming out of the ducts feels cool, for the first time our floors are warm! We have very cold winters here, but last month we paid only $44 to heat our 1400sf home at a constant 70 degrees. Being near Lake Superior we didn't much care about the air in the summer, but that's an added benefit that I'll relish on those few hot sweaty summer nights.

Thanks Kelly.  PLease clarify one thing...you said that the air coming out is cool but your floors are warm.  Did you put radiant heat in the floors?

What you're saying about the differences in how each system delivers hot air makes sense to me.  Runtals are hot water radiators but are different from our standard baseboard.  Their configuration (they can be customized for each room - can be stacked horizontally or vertically - more options than baseboard to "fit" the design of the home...and, from what i understand they are more efficient - requiring a smaller boiler.

To your quesiton about our insulation - we will be using icenene (?sp) blown in.

We do not want radiant floors - we have looked in to that and have been told by a number of different sources that if we go that route we will not be able to put down carpet - only thin area rugs - or we will compromise the efficiency of the radiant heat (even before we consider geothermal)  We do have the option of installing the radiant piping directly on top of  the cement floor, essetially creating this additional floor to house the radiant.....but now we are talking big bucks by the time we are done - so it looks like we have to decide on whether or not we want to deal with the forced air.

One other question....we typically turn the heat down in our bedroom during the night....but my understanding is that the way to live with a geothermal system is to set it and forget it - yes? 

Thanks again.

Generally you do just "set it and forget it". But you can have it setback at night a couple of degrees and be just fine. It starts to defeat the purpose of efficiency when the setback is very large (more than 2 or 3 deg. F.).

Baseboard heat does have its own angle of comfort. However, I would urge you to do the GHP for the cost benefits along with the comfort. With a properly designed and installed forced air GHP system, you'll absolutely love it. Kelly is just one of thousands of examples of that.

Hi Roxanne,

No, we don't have in floor heat, just the forced air geothermal. We don't heat our basement and our kitchen floor is a formica laminate, it's very pretty but it was always quite cold on the bare feet. We still don't directly heat the basement, but we keep the door open to the basement and it has warmed up some. We have linoleum on the floor in our upstairs loft, that too was very cold all the time. You did NOT want to walk around on it barefooted, but now it's quite comfortable. I think it's because we have the constant warmth, the floors stay warm too. I just love being able to be in my house, with the wind and snow howling outside and I'm sitting around without socks or slippers on! We used to have a programmable thermostat, and turned the heat down to 62 at night and 58 when we weren't home. We just keep it at 70 all the time, I tried 72 as that's the temp all of our energy estimates used...but it was too warm!