Looking for info on Geothermal heating/cooling

[IXLR8]

I didn't want to hijack LD's thread so I thought I would start one of my own. I learned a good deal from his thread, enough to make me reconsider going Geothermal. My house was built in 1975, not sure on how much insulation there is, single pane windows leak a bit of air. I know those need to be addressed/updated. The house is about 1600 sq ft and presently has a 5 ton compressor and a 4 ton coil. It seems to heat and cool okay, but efficiency could be improved, but biggest issue is it is noisy. The previous owners moved the compressor from the other end of the house, next to the garage, to right outside the master bedroom!!??? When the system runs, the compressor is noisy, the blower is noisy, air rushing thru the duct work is noisy and sometimes it rattles the floor grates. My property is heavily wooded so putting in ground loops would be about impossible. The only real spot would be under the driveway, not something I want to tear up. I do have two wells on the property, one for the house and one for the irrigation system. I am thinking about going with an open loop system using the irrigation well. I am a little hesitant as the water is a bit 'hard' here and has enough minerals in it to cause me pause. From reading some comments on LD's thread, I am beginning to think that the duct work in the house is too small. I haven't researched Geothermal in over 10 years. I was thinking about putting it in my last house until I discovered the house was built on a ledge and there was only 2-3 ft of dirt over the rock. The reasons for the upgrade is to make the system more efficient and to make it quieter. Present system needs to go!! Any recommendations on units to research, info on calculating duct sizes would be appreciated. I know one of the first I need to do is to see just how deep the irrigation well is and how much water it can provide. The hard part of installing it will be getting horizontal unit into the crawl space under the house where the present system is. Typical winter lows are upper teens, does hit 0 on a rare occasion here. Typical summer highs are in the low 90's, haven't seen anything about 98. Any quidance and information would be greatly appreciated.

 

[ponytug]

Putting hard water through a heat exchanger is asking for trouble in my mind, as either heating or cooling will precipitate scale, reducing the efficiency of the heat exchanger, requiring maintenance to clean it, and probably fairly frequent replacements.

Your climate is so mild, that I expect you would do fine with a modern air source heat pump- but I wouldn't put mine next to the bedroom!

Good luck!

All the best, Peter

 

[mikester]

Good questions!

Budget yourself $30K

Still interested? Start by calling three geothermal companies and ask them to quote based on their recommendations

 

[IXLR8]

I have 2 companies within 50 miles of me that claim to do geothermal. The more research I do, the more I find they are idiots who don't know what they are doing. There are 5 companies that do geothermal about 70 miles away, of the 3 of those companies I have contacted, none of them want to come this far. It is looking more and more like a DIY project or not at all. I am starting to think about doing what BEF did and take the course to get my geothermal installers license.

 

[ROUSTABOUT]

Just run your pipes down and back up your wells. Closed loop geo thermal ground source. Water temp will be your constant. Just use a little circulator pump just like a motel uses to circulate hot water so that it's available to each room. Put air bleeder at high point. Thus making it a closed loop.

 

[not2old]

My system is open loop, built in 2007. I've owned it since 2009 and have had no problems with scaling. Only real problem was when my well pump quit due to a problem with the pressure switch and the "furnace" froze up. Couldn't get it going for hours and a service call was days away. Looking for sooner service, I talked to a guy who told me to turn it to cooling for ten minutes. That worked and I've had no issues of any type since, at least five years now.

 

[dodge man]

There are two ways to use wells to do geothermal, one is the water from the well, the other is just to have the room for the closed loop piping. The junior high school here did that several years ago because they didn’t have the horizontal space. Basically the loops are vertical instead of horizontal. If you have shallow rock that’s going to kill a normal closed loop system because you can’t get it deep enough.