I've copied this to the next post for a little better formating.

I cant offer much help - but I am from South Jersey as well ( Atco ) - I am in the process of installation of (2) Climatemaster units in my home and had the wells drilled last month -

Where are you from in SJ?

I'm in Green Bank. I guess the dirt is pretty much the same. How big is your house? What sizes pumps are you installing? What sizes are your well loops? Who are you working with? You can email me at mail@rstuvDOTcom if you'd like.

Posted By [email protected] on 05 Feb 2013 09:48 AM

...

I am considering this 2 ton Comfortaire (Heat Controller)
geothermal package

HTV SERIES 2-STAGE UPFLOW PREMIUM RESIDENTIAL
PACKAGE
HTV024A1C01JRK 208/230-1-60

Ground Water—BTUH
Cooling @ 59°F EWT* 28,900
Heating @ 50°F EWT* 25,700
Ground Loop BTUH
Cooling @ 77°F EWT* 26,600
Heating @ 32°F EWT* 19,800
electric backup 4.8 or 7.6 or 9.6kW

A local driller suggests 180 foot deep for each ton (260 closed loop foot up and down) for which he will charge $5000. He will also install the loop and purge.

The house has a centrally-located wood stove on the first floor and I plan to create 3 zones (up and down). Does this sound like a reasonable system for comfort? Should I go to a 3 ton system? The price for this system is $14000 plus the $5000 for the drilling.

...

Does that $14,000 include installation or ductwork?  If not, the price seems kinda high to me.  You can get a Climatemaster 3 ton 2 stage geothermal heat pump and all of the vertical loop installation accessories including flow center for ~$8500 on ebay here:  http://www.ebay.com/itm/2-Stage-Geo...589bc3ac53

Unless there's a substantial subsidy available you'll never make up the difference in up-front cost between a mini-split solution and the geo proposal in energy savings. With the competitive NJ pricing and subsidy for photovolatic systems you may even be better off spending the difference with PV on the roof, and turn this place into  NetZeroEnergy house.  

There are MANY examples of houses with that type of construction that can be heated & cooled with one mini-split per floor, in locations colder than S. Jersey.  Just two 3/4 ton mini-splits can usually put out way more than 25KBTU/hr at Trenton's +15F outside design temp.  Most 3/4 ton minisplits are rated for delivering ~12KBTU/hr @ -15C/+5F.

If the raw cost difference is $12K, that's enough to buy a ~3 peak-kilowatt grid-tied array at last year's NJ average (and that's PRIOR to federal state & local subsidies), which enough PV to cover more than half the power used for heating & cooling a place like that with ductless systems.  Pricing on PV has continued to fall, and NJ has more PV contractors per acre than most states, and the bidding is quite competitive. (Apparently more competitive than geothermal contractors in NJ.)  Get out your sharpest pencil, but in you case (unlike many) I suspect the balance tips pretty strongly in favor of ductless + PV rather than geo, due to the very low loads afforded by your high-performance building envelope and the favorable market for PV.

Dana1,

Thanks for your response. The raw cost difference is going to be about $4000 as all costs will be included for around $18000 and the Feds are graciously returning 1/3 of that cost.

For that $4000, I am hoping to get more comfort through zoning, an excellent delivery for fresh air (and possibly cleaned fresh air as we are in a heavy pine pollen area and several family members are bothered by the pollen). We will direct the HRV through the geothermal ductwork. We also get the opportunity to expand the system to heat and cool a future "bonus" room over the garage (should we ever recover from the sticker shock of building a house and finish that room).

We are budgeting for a small PV array and we will probably add to the array in the future if the pollen doesn't cover the array and become a nuisance.

I'm not sure the comfort is worth $4000. But we also will get a 12 year warranty on the equipment vs. the 7 year on the mini-splits. I do think the equipment is slightly more robust. We will also get desuperheated hot water. Hot water costs may exceed the heating costs.

In any case, it is a tough choice. A decision must me made soon since all the duct work will be in the envelope and it must be installed before the drywall -- and the drywall should happen next week.

Posted By [email protected] on 05 Feb 2013 05:50 PM
I'm not sure the comfort is worth $4000. But we also will get a 12 year warranty on the equipment vs. the 7 year on the mini-splits. I do think the equipment is slightly more robust. We will also get desuperheated hot water. Hot water costs may exceed the heating costs.

Also, the ground loop may be able to be reused when it's time for a replacement geothermal unit, further helping to justify the slightly higher initial cost of geothermal.  This may be a consideration if you're planning to stay in the house a long time, like us.

I can't imagine specifying a 3 ton system for just 12k cooling / 23k heating. That would be absurd - excessive first cost, poor dehumidification, low efficiency, higher than needed airflow and noise.

$19 kilobucks seems quite reasonable for a 2 ton geo heat pump, ductwork, 3 zones and well. I couldn't do it for that anywhere in Florida, never mind higher cost New Jersey.

Dana makes a highly compelling case for the minisplit solution. I wouldn't worry about warranties. You'd have to accept the limitations of a minisplit solution and pay some attention to appearance and whether small rooms away from minisplit heads would be reasonably conditioned...none of those are insurmountable.

Thanks Curt. The fact that the unit specs Heating @ 32°F EWT* 19,800 is okay then? This EWT would be worst case (or likely not at all) with 2 180' deep vertical loops?

The $4K delta would buy at least another kilowatt of grid tied PV of that small system budgeted, even at full NJ retail right now. That's not going to be enough to hit NetZero, but in a house with such low loads that would still be enough more than offset the efficiency delta between GSHP & inverter-drive ductless in that climate (with lower design risk than a GSHP system), and even the inverter portion of the PV system is good for at least 15-20 years of near-zero maintenance operation- and the rest has a much longer half-life.

As with the first ton of GSHP, the first kilowatt of PV is the most expensive- the installation labor of the inverter is about the same whither it's a 2kw inverter or a 10kw inverter, and the cost of the hardware doesn't scale with size. Panel costs worldwide and in the US are currently at record lows and continuing to drift downward, and no longer dominate system costs. With subsidy it's likely to be the better investment in both the short & longer term.

Desuperheater output will be negligible at your load levels, and isn't worth paying for. A better investment in your case would be a heat pump HW heater, which will decrease your cooling & dehumidification loads more directly by pumping that heat in to the water. If you're a showering family and have the vertical drain space for it, even a $600 drainwater heat recovery heat exchanger would return far more pre-heat than a desuperheater in your situation, and it's a zero-maintenance 40+ year lifecycle piece of hardware. See:

http://www.witrendhome.com/media/watters-efi-powerpipe.pdf

http://oee.nrcan.gc.ca/residential/personal/retrofit/13302

http://www.cmhc.ca/odpub/pdf/65680.pdf

(The return is zero for tub-fills, since the drain has to flow simultaneously with the potable to achieve the heat recovery.)

Even though you're in a heating-dominated climate, your heating/cooling outdoor temperature balance point is probably 10F cooler than your code-min neighbors, so even though the cooling loads are light, your cooling season is longer and your heating season shorter. In the shoulder seasons a heat pump water heater could be handling a sizable fraction of the load, given your peak load is so tiny.

Dana1,

We will be including a drainwater heat recovery heat exchanger and a heat pump HW heater. The drainwater heat recovery heat exchanger will be under the teenagers shower, though we also plan to include a timer. Do you know of a source other than this one http://www.showermanager.com/conservation-store/shower-timer-home.shtml

The heat pump HW heater is on sale at Lowes

http://www.lowes.com/pd_386797-83-GEH50DEEDSR_0__?productId=3664968&&cm_sp=Plumbing-_-WaterHeaters|M1-_-Spcl_Value|Geospring_SV

Not the best but a good price. The desuperheater comes with the ground-source heat pump standard at no extra cost, so we will hook it up to a $200 storage tank and see if it helps.

The ground-source with ducts is ending up to be a comfort thing.

The original floor plan that I drew included minisplits in the design. The downstairs would work with mini-splits, but the teenage bedrooms upstairs are more difficult.

http://rstuv.com/house/new_details/greenbank1&2.pdf

http://rstuv.com/house/images5/upheat.jpg

The second link shows where we originally planned to put a single mini-split upstairs. It would blow directly into the boys front bedrooms. Those bedrooms have large, high-solar-gain windows (shaded by an eave in summer). In winter, they will overheat and the baths and the third bedroom will be cold. We are installing 1000 watt strip heaters in the bath for comfort and I suppose we could add a strip heater to the third bedroom. I did have a plan to close off the small upstairs hall and put the minisplit at the end over the door in hopes that it would circulate better. The trouble with mini-splits stems from the lack of installed base in colder climates. I don't want to be the guinea pig at my age.

I like the idea of a ducted air system to circulate air (including the heat from the woodstove downstairs). I guess I am old and cranky and need uniform heat.

I think I mentioned that, whatever else we do, we will install 5KW (or more) PV. The return on investment is such that it makes it easy to add, especially since the house roof faces southwest. I am concerned with the solar panels accumulating pollen and dirt since we are in a pretty deep woods. The front porch last spring had a half inch of sticky pollen on it. Any thoughts on keeping PV panels clean?

Ground-mounted PV is easier to clean, if you're in a sticky-pine-pollen kind of area where simply hosing it off won't do.

Unless you used the crummiest windows still legal in NJ a bathroom adjacent to a conditioned-controlled bedroom isn't going to be cold, especially if you use a low-cfm continuous exhaust fan in the bathroom pulling in conditioned air from the rest of the space. Yes there is a delta-T, but at your R-values and U-values, it isn't going to be much. Designing the HRV/ERV ducting to only exhaust from the rooms doored off from the rooms with mini-split heads, and only supply ventilation into the spaces with the the mini-split heads (with door cuts or jump ducts to pressure-by-pass doored off spaces), evens up temperatures by quite a bit if the room-loads of the remote doored-off rooms are low.

Most homes will see room-to-room delta-Ts of 5F or greater even WITH ducted HVAC, and high-R houses don't need nearly as much balancing to hit that mark. Using the ERV to balance temps for the doored off bedrooms and bath hasworked out fine in the heating season for the deep energy retrofit I was helping manage in a Worcester MA location last year. The R-values were comparable to yours, and the 99% outside design temp is about ten degrees lower than yours. (It even hit -2F a couple weeks back, fully 7 degrees below the 99% design temp.) During the cooling season there are still some comfort issues on the east facing bedrooms for late-sleepers who keep the doors closed, but there's no issues at all for the early risers. This was a 3 floor building, one mini-split per floor.

BTW: Unless you have a lot of thermal mass to the building (concrete slabs, maybe even some concrete walls) size the woodstove carefully or you'll be forced to run it in smolder mode for higher air pollution and lower efficiency. Most non-catalytic EPA rated woodstoves need to average at least ~1/2 the max firing rate to hit the efficiency and grams/hr emissions numbers, so oversizing it by more than 2x the design heat load become problematic. Even at 1.5x oversizing it's more comfortable & efficient if it's a higher-mass ceramic or soapstone stove rather than a cast-iron or steel, since the peak temps and peak output on the surface of the stove are lower, for less of a sauna effect, and you can let the stove coast along and die out to embers before re-loading rather than throttling it back to smolder. Ceramic & soapstone stoves aren't so great for quick-fire warm-ups, but in most other aspects they're preferable.

I'm not convinced that even a $200 tank DIY-installed for the desuperheater would even pay for itself during the ~12 year lifecycle of the tank, if you're heating water with a heat pump water heater and using drainwater heat recovery. If you actually had a cooling load worth sneezing at it might, but even at 3 tons peak cooling and an 8-month cooling season pre-heating for a standard electric hot water heater it's often not worth it. At 1 ton peak cooling loads your average is going to be practically nil except maybe for the hottest week in July. The rest of the year it's just more plumbing for the water to run through ahead of the hot water heater. How much hot water do you use in July, (or over the next 12 Julys)? With a heat pump water heater and drainwater heat recovery in place cutting the total power use for summertime hot water by more than half already, do you think the savings from the desuperheater would even add up to the cost of a $200 tank? (I'm thinkin' it's not even close!)

2 ton is fine you want aux. coil for extreme conditions. 3 ton would be way over kill.
We don't try to size geo for 100% of the load as a larger compressor in use all the time to save a little expense on auxiliary often costs more.
Is nat gas not available to you there?

Dana,

With 2 teenage boys, we go through enough hot water (no pun intended). Is there a down side to the 2 tank setup aside from cost. I would still use the $999 heat pump water heater.

We did settle on a soapstone woodstove. It's small with a 30k output. Still too big maybe but we wanted the ambiance. There were smaller stoves but they would not allow a decent size piece of wood.

I guess as I get older and my internal furnace burns a little lower, a 5 degree difference in temps becomes important. I need my warmth. 72 is great. 70 is tolerable. 68 in the bathroom naked is not okay.

We just did a blower door test on the shell. 20ach. Hope this bodes well for the final test. We are doing a belt and suspender air sealing on both the shell and the drywall.

Joe,

Thank you for chiming in. We will have the auxiliary heat to rely on and the woodstove. Given the specs on the furnace and the house, is there a way to tell how often we will use the coils?

thanks again,

Mike

Yes with geo design software.
I'm sorry no time to run it now

No matter how many teenagers you have taking endless showers (or at least wanting to), the annual BTU output of a desuperheater at your space conditioning loads won't even make up the cost of the tank. The bigger you hot water load, the tinier the fraction of the load that would be supported by the desuperheater.

At 30K stove for a house with a 23K design condition heat load isn't overkill- the stove can still hit it's efficiency numbers throttled back to an average of 15KBTU, and even when it's putting out 5-10K more than the whole house heat load the thermal mass of the house keeps the room from hitting sauna-like temps unless you burn all day. Odds are you'd stoke the fire at sunset, maybe reload before you go to bed and throttle back, and the house could coast until sunset the next day on an average winter day, with some amount of solar gain. Even a 50-55K soapstone stove could still work due to it's thermal mass, but that's about the limit of what's comfortable and efficient.

20 ACH/50 is about 7x code-max under IRC2012, not a great number at ALL. A shell that tested at the code-max of 3 ACH/50 in the bare uninsulated shell would still need tightening to be able to meet code after. If that's a typo and it's actuall 2, rather than 20 ACH, then it's a pretty good starting point.

You may be surprised at just how comfortable 68F (even dripping wet) is when the temp of the exterior wall is 66F, and the the window's surface temp is 60F (and low-E, reflecting your body heat back atcha). The average radiant temperature of a room counts for a LOT. When it's 20F outdoors, 68F indoors typical 2x4 wall homes with double panes will have wall temps in the high 50s window surface temps in the 40s. At your insulation values it's not quite PassiveHouse comfortable, but it's close, and WAY better than you're probably used to.

You may in fact find it hard to tell if it's cold outside just by feeling a wall or window with your hand, which is very different from a 1980/90s code min. house. There is never be a surface cold enough to generate a convection draft that you'd be able to feel, and the radiant temp of the exterior walls is very close to that of the interior walls & ceiling. Selling high-R houses from a COMFORT aspect is an easier argument since it's more immediately manifest than the financial & environmental benefits, which are long-term & theoretical.

Dana1,

Thanks again for your advice. You are fighting the good fight.

  Most of what we are discussing is new to me and every contractor I've talked with in NJ (they all think I'm a little crazy). I am hoping the comfort part is true since the choice was between this house and a winter snow bird condo in Florida. I chose the house and hope to keep it cozy enough that I can enjoy the winter scenery out the windows.

I thought we were doing pretty well with 20 ACH/50 on the shell. We did forget to close off the bath & kitchen sink vents. And the attic hatch is not completely sealed. We plan to employ air tight drywall as well. I'm hoping for 3 ACH/50 on completion. I'm looking for pretty good not passive house. Do you think I can get to 3 ACH from 20 ACH. The low hanging fruit is disappearing fast.

I think you have convinced me on the extra tank for the desuperheater. Is it worth it to pipe it to the bottom of the heat pump water heater without the extra tank? The desuperheater comes standard.

thanks again for all your thoughtful advice,

Mike

At 20ACH/50 you have some truly BIG holes to fix, most of which will be obvious, like open flues or vents, and yes, open kitchen & sink vents would make HUGE difference.

At 7ACH/50 or less it might not be as easy to see. A common big long skinny hole newbies often overlook is foundation sill & band joist caulking/foaming. (A foamy sill gasket doesn't air seal very well.) Caulking all the stud plates and studs to the sheathing and the seams between doubled-up stud plates, and bottom plates to the subfloor, etc. can also be a much larger overall leakage factor than you might think. (A powered caulk gun that takes the big tube, and a case of acoustic sealant are called for if it wasn't all done when the sheathing went up. Caulk or can-foam every seam & joint you can think of, then start looking at just how tight the weatherstripping is on the doors and attic hatch. (You DID caulk under the door thresholds, and foam seal the window & door framing, right?)

A 2000' house would have a volume in the order of ~20,000 cubic feet give or take, so 3 ACH is about 60,000 cubic feet per hour. With 60 minutes in an hour your your raw cfm number has to be under 1000to meet spec. At 500cfm it would be considered pretty damned tight, but a 500 cfm/50 number is still a cumulative ~10 square inches of hole. But 10 square inches of leakage is pretty hard to find if it's hundreds of individual leaks scattered randomly over the outer surface of the house. (Theatrical smoke machines can probably locate most of them, but they're hardly worth chasing unless you're going for PassiveHouse certification.) At 1500cfm on the shell you may have a few random larger holes left courtesy of an electrician or a plumber to fix, and maybe some weatherstripping to rework, but you're pretty much there if you keep sealing stuff up as you go.

I am from NJ too (cherryhill), and am starting my search for geothermal as well.
Who are you guys using and recommend that cover the area? I am not DIY friendly and neither is my husband.
Mail- ??? Who are using for your install of heat pump and/or loops?
DJV- ??? Who are you using for your install too? Who deep are your wells?
Should i figure $5000 for the ground loops acceptable?