Thanks, I think the WEL will be interesting after our system is fixed (whatever that means). Right now I don't want to spend money to monitor the system while we know that the SpacePak is only getting 50% of the return air it needs, we know that the control strategy is flawed, we know that there are 3 pumps running in series to overcome deficiencies in the loopfield, and we have the breaker pulled for the high-temp W2W unit.

Posted By tamar on 10 Sep 2013 01:57 PM
Thanks, I think the WEL will be interesting after our system is fixed (whatever that means). Right now I don't want to spend money to monitor the system while we know that the SpacePak is only getting 50% of the return air it needs, we know that the control strategy is flawed, we know that there are 3 pumps running in series to overcome deficiencies in the loopfield, and we have the breaker pulled for the high-temp W2W unit.

That sounds really bad, doesn't it? I can't wait to see what LEED-AP guy (who also has HBDP and CDT certifications) puts in his recommendation for remediation.

A water to water geo and even a geo/spacepak can deliver btus at certain temperatures cheaper than a high efficiency boiler. What those temperatures are depends on energy cost. As everyone necessarily has bumper (low load seasons) Tamars system (when properly controlled) is necessarily less expensive to run than her old boiler. What the balance points are and how much less are unknown to me as I did not design or sell the system.

Just thought I'd share an update for everyone who's been so helpful. The recommendation from the 3rd party is almost ready (next week some time if we are lucky). The suspense is darn near killing me. For the extra wait, we are getting a "from scratch" design of a geothermal system for our house.

The very nice engineer doing the design has the following credentials: LEED AP, HBDP, CDT. I know many on this forum aren't impressed with credentials, but this is WAY better than having the Director of Business Development for the engineering firm manage this work. The engineer's first visit to the house was Sept 5, almost 3 months after we requested remediation--it took that long for our installer to figure out we were very close to legal action and they seem to be stepping up (finally).

Our installer, who hired the third party firm to evaluate our system has said they will share the complete report/recommendation with us. I got a commitment from the engineer not to make any substantial modifications to his recommendation before we see it.

I believe that, all things being equal, the recommendation will leverage existing equipment, but recommend changes or removal/replacement if what's installed cannot be redesigned to be reliable and efficient. The only thing I know for sure is the engineer was not impressed with the system using a water heater (the Phoenix) as a boiler.

Thanks for the up date.
Yes they will try to work with equipment in place . That's ok if they can meet other goals.