"Geothermal pump gives free heat "

[GreenPartyVoter]

Free heat from a geothermal heat pump warms my kitchen as I write this commentary. For every dollar of electrical energy that goes into the heat pump, I get 3.6 dollars of electrical heat. That's 2.6 dollars of free heat. And by purchasing clean green power from hydroelectric dams and wind power, it's possible to heat one's home without burning oil and without generating global warming gases.

The idea of installing a geothermal heat pump began in 2004 when I read about how the polar ice caps are melting at a record pace and how atmospheric carbon dioxide was at record levels and increasing dramatically. The possibility of peak oil production occurring in this decade accompanied by increasing demand for oil in China has made oil prices skyrocket.

I watched as President Bush set up a string of permanent military bases in the oil producing regions of Iraq. I watched as our own Maine National Reserve troops were sent to oil-rich Iraq with the false goals of fighting terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. I watched as oil companies made obscene profits while people suffered. Something had to be done. The freedom we should be fighting for today is freedom from Middle East oil.

So, how does one economically heat one's home without oil and without pollution? Natural gas is a clean-burning fuel but it still increases carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and contributes to global warming. Solar is good, but there just isn't much sunlight available in January in Maine when we need the most heat. Geothermal heating coupled with green power produced from hydroelectric, wind and solar power met the requirements.

http://bangornews.com/news/templates/?a=128739

[Atman]

1. A friend of mine heats his house (in N.E.) with partial geothermal

combined with solar, then wood, with oil as a backup on the worst New England days, or when there has been an extended sunless period. It works very nicely...his house is always toasty warm, even though his very large living room has a three-story high ceiling.

[GreenPartyVoter]

4. I wish so badly I could afford some land so I could build a place like his

[Atman]

18. The guy has a fascinating history...he was blacklisted by McCarthy

He's in his mid-sixties. Fresh out of school with a degree in industrial design, he found he couldn't get a job anywhere. He had registered as a CO, protesting the war. He only found out several years late when he was essentially forced to abandon his career choice and began using his ID skills to build art metal staircases, gates, even homes. He moved to CT from Chicago my closing his eyes and sticking a pin in a map.

First thing he did was buy some cheap land in the then-unihabited Northeast Corner of CT (they still call it "The Quiet Corner), land which had an old farm house on it. He rehabbed it by himself, but it burned to the ground one day shortly after he finished. With nothing left but the old 1700's stone foundation and a few salvagable timbers, he began rebuilding. Instead of using the old stone-line basement as a basement, he sealed all the stone work and made it the living room, with the dining/kitchen/sleeping levels up one story on a mezzanine, and his office and another bedroom way up on what used to be the second floor, now the third floor, with balconies overlooking the three-story open space. With very little money, he had to use salvage materials from the fire, and wood from his land. There is a two-story spiral staircase made out of split logs. His fireplace and bathtub are actually old harbor bouys cut in half. He mixed a resin compound in his studio and poured funky textured floors. The entire back of the house was later updated with three-story-high windows made from the glass which had to removed from Boston's John Hancock tower, purchased as salvage. During construction, he used three 30' trees to hold up the roof while he was working...he liked them so much, he just stripped the bark and shellacked them. All three trees still stand in his livingroom/dining room, holding up the main roof beam.

But by far the coolest part...the entire house is now set slightly into the hillside. Three stories open in the back, but the front entrance is at ground-level, and is a giant circular "stone" slab (another resin compound) which you roll to the side to enter the house. The front looks just like a hobbit house with the round door. It is freakin' awesome.

[AngryAmish]

25. He may have been blacklisted

But the red Scare ended in the mid-50s. Murrow had his show about McCarthy in 1954.

[Atman]

31. Correct. He is in his mid-sixties.

Not sure what you're saying.

[SoCalDem]

35. If he's 65, he would have been 13 in 1954

Why would he have been blacklisted as a child?? What did he do to GET blacklisted:)

[Atman]

38. I obviously need to check up on the facts behind this one!

I'll certainly check with him next time I see him. I know he's told me the story a couple of times, and I didn't question its veracity, because I've known the guy for years, and trust him implicitely. The timeline would seem to indicate his CO status was during Vietnam. Maybe his blacklisting wasn't "McCarthy" related. When he told me the story first, about five years ago, it made sense. I haven't talked to him about it since, so I might not be telling it as he told me. I'll check it out now, though!

[GreenPartyVoter]

34. I could go for a hobbit house :^)

[LynneSin]

2. It was nice knowing you - enjoy your cell in gitmo

Because damnit, we can't have freethinkers thinking outside of the box when it comes to provide clean energy for your home.

I'm house shopping and that might be something I'll keep in mind when fixing up my new place!

[sui generis]

3. where's the rest of the article?

there wasn't any more detail other than he installed it

[GreenPartyVoter]

6. I dunno... Bet you could email him via the UMaine site if you have ?s

[Selatius]

5. What does a geothermal heat pump look like?

There are no pictures, just this brief description:

"To extract heat from the ground, one must bury a large amount of pipe in the ground. Still geothermal heating is a well-established technology. Ninety-five percent of new homes in Sweden have installed geothermal heating. Five hundred thousand units have been installed in Canada and the United States."

How large or how small is it? Does it require me to rip up my foundation? Or can I bury it in my front/backyard? Regardless, this should be encouraged by the federal government. A program should be set up to teach people how to install these devices if it is relatively easy to do so. Carter wanted something similar with installing solar panels on the roofs of homes. He had one installed on the White House--I heard--but Reagan, so the story goes, tore it down as the first order of business.

[GreenPartyVoter]

7. Not sure but I bet we could find out via google

[Cerridwen]

8. Here ya go

A link to the Geothermal Heat Pump Consortium - illustrations page. Pics of how it works in both residential and commercial and how it looks. I clicked the .jpegs rather than the .eps links. There are links on the homepage about incentives by state and other information.

http://www.geoexchange.org/illustrations/graphics.htm

[GreenPartyVoter]

10. Cool, thanks!

[keith the dem]

15. I'm an HVAC engineer

It looks not much different than the air handling unit in your house, just a slightly bigger box for the compressor and the heat exchanger/condenser. The expensive part is the well or pipe loop that must be installed in the ground.

The geothermal heat pump collects the heat that the ground absorbs from the sun, so essentially it is a form of solar heat. The problem with the solar collectors installed outside in the sun is that they only collect when the sun is out and the deleterious effect of the sun's rays give the collectors a short life. (I often wonder if many collectors collected enough energy to cover the energy used to make them.) The heat pump collects the low grade heat stored in the earth and converts it to usable heat with a little electricity.

[Bozita]

22. Any idea on cost for system and installation?

I've done some earlier reading on geothermal systems and am convinced that it's the best option for me.

None of my reading, though, has been helpful in getting a ballpark figure.

1800sf ranch with large yard.

Help please.

[Bozita]

32. $10-20K Canadian -- link to good sources

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x41179

http://www.geo-exchange.ca/en/whatisgeo/costsavings.htm

[keith the dem]

37. Not Cheap

Large part of the cost is the labor needed for the well or loop piping. The equipment is not otherwise too much different than a good efficient Air to air system. But there is substantial savings on both the heating and cooling side.

[lumberjack_jeff]

53. I considered it for our new house

The HVAC guy said it'd take (I'm doing this from memory) a loop of 1000 lf of pipe buried 4' deep with 4' of separation. That's an area 250'l x 16'w.

For me, an efficient air-source heat pump backed up with a woodstove is a better investment.

[ret5hd]

16. a friend installed this in their new house...

probably aprox. 2200 sq ft.

(i might be wrong on somee details, but you will get the idea)

what the system consisted of:

4 holes bored 260 ft deep in his back yard, each 3-6 inches in dia. (i didnt seee thee holes, he described theem with his hands)

each hole then had a loop of flexible pipe lowered in it, theen the hole was filled with sand.

water flows thru the pipes in each hole. the other end of the pipes is connected to a heat exchanger in the attic. the ground stays at a steady 60 deg. F, heating or cooling the water, depending on the season.

the house has a "heat pump" installed, which may seem underpowered, but since you are not exchanging heat with -20 deg air or +100 deg air, but rather with 60 degree water, it is very adequate.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

20. My neighbor has geothermal heating

What he did was to bury the pipes on the west side of the hill, down from his house. I don't think he had any buried directly beneath his house except for the pipes that brought the heat into the building. It's been a while since I've been to his place, but I think he uses a sort of natural cycling to move the heat around. He has a small wood burning stove for heating water and for the coldest days.

What's neat is that the geothermal stuff also works to cool the house in the summer. It's built in a field, away from all but one small tree, but it stays cool without having to use AC or fans.

[MadHound]

9. Good stuff, geothermal,

But I will be sticking with an external woodstove, equipped with a catalytic convertor. It will provide 100% of my heating needs, and can also be used to replace whichever energy source you are using in your hot water heater. It is low polluting, and I will be able to get all the wood I need for the next twenty years at least from my own eight acres of forest.

[GreenPartyVoter]

11. How often do you have to feed it? Do you have to wade through snowdrifts

in the middle of the night or what?

[MadHound]

14. Well, with global warming and what have you

We've had very few snowdrifts here in Mid Mo the past few years. But you can set the stove up such that it is protected from a lot of the elements and such. And most external woodstoves only have to be fed every twelve hours. Depending on the size of the fire box, you can feed in logs that are 3-5 ft. in length.

And generally it takes between one and a half to three cords of wood to heat a normal house throughout the winter. With a catalytic convertor, this will be less, for not only does the CC filter out a lot of the smoke, it also catches a lot of the heat going up the chimney and redistributes it back to the house.

[Atman]

23. You don't do anything. The heat is always there.

When you dig footings for a new home, you have to go down x-number of feet because past four feet or so, the earth never freezes. Go down far enough and it's actually relatively warm, all the time, unaffected by the outside air temps no matter how cold it gets. The idea is to just draw this warm air up from the ground. You don't do anything else. However, I believe it works best as an adjunct heat source. The air isn't actually "warm," but it is way warmer than the outside air in the winter. Like in the upper fifties, I think. From 58 degrees, it is pretty easy/cheap to heat your space up to more comfortable temperature using another heat source like solar or wood.

I am not an engineer. Any engineers reading, feel free to correct my errors here. But I think I'm pretty close on this one.

[Gormy Cuss]

12. If it works in Sweden, it should be a great way to reduce fuel use in ME

A self-contained system would make sense in a lot of rural Northern areas.

Living in a temperate climate I should be able to use solar for 80-90% of my electrical and heating needs, but even with rebates and tax benefits the payback window is over ten years and the upfront cost would involve getting a home equity loan. Compare that to the payback for installing an energy-efficient furnace and A/C system and it just made no sense. I keep waiting for the payback period to come down to about five years, then it's worth considering.

We do have energy policies that are backward in this country.

[ProfessorGAC]

13. Um. Sorry That's Not Free Heat

His own numbers indicate that he gets $3.60 in heat for a dollar. While that's a terrific discount, it's not free. HE'S PAYING A DOLLAR FOR $3.60 IN HEAT! So, he gets his heat for 27.77% of the cost, but that's not free!

You'd think someone this clever would be better with numbers.
The Professor

[keith the dem]

39. Beg to differ

With a heat pump, you are using a little electricity (not free) to mine free btu's from the earth which come free from the sun.

[ProfessorGAC]

41. Sorry But The Story Contradicts Your Contention

The writer says he pays $1 to get $3.60 of heat. Therefore, the heat COSTS $1. It's a great bargain to be sure, and good for the guy who wrote the piece for being clever enough to do this in his house, but if you pay anything for anything it is, by definition, not free.

If he had a different form of heat, then the GT pump would not be running. He would get no heat from it at all, but it would cost zero. When he turns it on, he's paying to run it. That is the source of the heat. Therefore, the cost of operate the pump is the cost of the heat. IF something has a cost, it isn't free.

I'm not criticizing the guy for doing it, for goodness sake. But he's paying money to get the heat. It's impossible to call that free!

The Professor

[keith the dem]

45. I see your point

It's like those offers where you get something "free" but have to pay for the shipping. I never consider that free. On a GT heat pump, you basically have to pay for the shipping, but the heat is free.

[GreenPartyVoter]

46. That;s a good way to look at it :^)

[rurallib]

17. Using corn myself this year

Not sure of the pollution effect. I think it's less than gas. 1st level of heat = corn. 2nd level = wood. 3rd level = natural gas.
So far it looks like our $ output for the winter will be less than $450. Thank God for global warming. <sarcasm>.
I don't believe a person could run geothermal in a city what with water lines and sewer lines etc. underground, could they?

[benburch]

24. Corn is mostly "green"

Excepting the fuel used to grow and transport it. Burning corn as a solid fuel is much more efficient than burning corn-derived alcohol.

[Skidmore]

19. Why aren't geothermal and solar required for new builds now?

[havocmom]

21. Cuz the same ol people run things

and they like sending out big heating bills.

[Selatius]

26. He who has money, has politicians.

That's the unfortunate nature of our election system where corporate special interest money is considered free speech as per SCOTUS ruling.

[GreenPartyVoter]

29. Dang, I like the way you turn a phrase. I'm gonna steal that. :^)

[orwell]

27. We use...

...a regular electric "air" heat pump on our new house. It is not geothermal but the cost savings over an electric heater are dramatic. As long as the outside temperature stays above about 40 degrees, the electric heater is not used at all.

The house stays as warm as we want it, but we usually set our thermostat at 66 to 67 degrees.

We love it. Remember, in summer the heat pump serves as your air conditioning as well.

The most important thing you can do to keep energy use down is to super-insulate your house. It has the most payoff for the least investment. In many areas, the government or power companies have programs to help offset the costs.

Our total power bill in the dead of winter was about $75.

[AngryAmish]

28. Crawford ranch uses geothermal

Hate to rain on your parade but it is true.

[blueknight]

30. its a shame

that people have to talk about, or use alternative heating methods for their homes.we should be provided affordable heating by our utility companies

[Lisa]

43. yes -- and why isn't Bush making it easier for others to get one?

We aren't all millionaires from wealthy families (who also made a big profit from a stadium deal).

[GreenPartyVoter]

44. Because his buddies who make a profit off of us not going green come first

[Gormy Cuss]

48. That's great news! I can't wait to haul that out in a debate

The Texas oilman has so little faith in that commodity that he had his pig farm outfitted with a green energy source. B-)

[AngryAmish]

54. The technology makes sense

If one can afford the up-front cost it is the smart way to go, cost-wise. If you have seen me around here there are many parts of the enviromental movement with whom I disagree. This goes includes for the alternative-energy crowd because I think many of them do not understand how much power a first world country requires. Any enviromental benefit is a plus. (I for one welcome global warming. It will only expand the golf season.)

[Gormy Cuss]

56. Oh I'm not arguing against it. I just find it amusing that Mr. Oil has it.

The problem I have with most alternative energy systems is that they remain expensive as long as there's little demand. I could take my house off grid for 80% of current electric needs with solar or geothermal but the payback window would be ridiculously long because I don't use much electricity now. I run the numbers, and it never makes sense. I wish it did. Perhaps if we installed a pool or some other energy hogs like teenagers it would make the numbers work.

[SidDithers]

33. A similar system is used by the City of Toronto...

for summertime cooling. It uses cold, deep lake water, instead of warm, deep earth, but the idea is the same.

http://www.toronto.ca/water/deep_lake/

Sid

[jpak]

36. Here's a 100% solar home in Maine

http://www.solarhouse.com/

It cost $300k to build - 15% of the total cost went into the solar thermal and electric systems...

[GreenPartyVoter]

40. That's one of my fave links. :^)

[Gormy Cuss]

49. Do you know where the house is?

I'm guessing around Portland somewhere. 300K is not that high now for Cumberland county but for that sort of money in most of Maine eleven years ago you could build a real mansion.

[GreenPartyVoter]

55. Yeah it's down that way. I have not been there, though. $300K was the

going price for a 70s modular ranch on 2 scrubby acres near a swamp not long ago. *sigh* The only places I see affordable houses are up in the County and way downeast, but that's only because their economies have collapsed so their $86,000 house feels like a $300K one anyway.

[triguy46]

42. Is this the same as a ground source heat pump? I'm confused.

they are very efficient when compared to air-air heat pumps, and do give free hot water in the summer. But a ground source heat pump uses energy, does not create it. Isn't thsi different from 'geothermal' which to me implies hot springs being tapped or chunks of molten lava.

Our local university serves as the home for the national ground source heat pump industry, for more information go to: http://www.igshpa.okstate.edu/

But again, these things run off electricity, its just that they are more efficient because the interface is air to water, with the water being a constant temp, about 57 degress I believe. They can use large fields or drill straight down, but regardless need hundreds of feet of tubing.

[iconoclastNYC]

47. Hyrdroelectic is not "Green Power"

A major study revealed that Hydro contributes to global warming. Sad but true.

[Mr.Green93]

50. If geothermal is widely adopted

doesn't it have the potential to disrupt ground temperatures?

[Greyhound]

52. No, but it does have the potential to disrupt Energy Company profits

so look for the coming Lieberman - Spectre Act outlawing the use of "communistic" energy sources.

[rucky]

51. Why do you hate America? n/t

[GreenPartyVoter]

57. *lol*