Geothermal Heating and Cooling

A geothermal heat pump doesn’t use fossil fuel or refrigerant to heat and cool your home.  In the simplest terms, in the summer it extracts the heat and humidity from your home and in the winter it pumps the heat from the underground geothermal loop into your home.

According to US EPA, “geoexchange is the most energy-efficient, environmentally clean, and cost-effective space conditioning system available”. With operating efficiencies of 350% to 550%, geothermal will out perform any fossil fuel heating system.  With geothermal heating and cooling, you not only save money, but also protect our environment.  Each geothermal system installed is equal to planting one acre of trees or taking ten cars off the road.  The typical cost of installation 2000 sf home with dual control zones is approximately $20,000.  If you spend $2000 less on heating/cooling per year, this equals a 10 year 100% payback.  That doesn’t even take into account the 30% tax credit on the total cost of installation,
which makes the payback closer to 7 years.

For more on how geothermal works, the link below gives a detailed description.

http://www.consumerenergycenter.org/home/heating_cooling/geothermal.html

The largest part of the cost for a geothermal system is the drilling of the wells.  The geothermal contractor will do a model to calculate how many wells your home will require.  Our house, which is less than 2000 sf, required (3) 300 foot deep wells or a one 3 ton unit with dual zones.  Our second floor will be controlled separately from the first floor using a programmable wifi enabled thermostat.  The benefit of using this type of thermostat is being able to log-on from anywhere and adjust the temperature of your home.

Geothermal Air Conditioning Service, LLC is the contractor we used for our system.  The photos below show the beginning of the geothermal process.

The drilling rig starting on the first well.  The orange flagged stake is marking the North side of our property.

The orange flagged stake in this picture is marking the South side our property, which is 40 feet wide and 125 feet deep.

We had some rain in the midst of the drilling which added to the mess.

Geothermal was the first part of construction, so the tubes were left out of the holes until they have something to connect too.  This process would be slightly different on an existing home.

The 300 foot deep wells were placed 20 feet apart along the length of our property.