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Geothermal heating


BIG MAC
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No one can explain satisfactorily, when asked, why it is so "efficient" or cost effective when compared to other forms of heating. It really does seem like a smoke and mirrors scam.

I do understand the theory behind the systems. But how can an investment of around €20000.00 + maintenance plus all the complications of installation, for heating in France, be justified when other forms of heating systems are less expensive.

It's not as if when you have installed it that you wont have to replace systems after so many years of operation.

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I have afriend in the UK who has started his ground source heating installation company in the last year.

He was knowledgeable of it in Sweden as his wife is Swedish, he explained to me that over there, there are many properties that cannot have mains gas (and also perhaps bottled due to the temperature) and most people use oil fired boilers.

The  real crunch is that they have to pay road fuel rates of tax on heating oil!

That coupled with the huge geothermal activity going on under their feet shows why they have a very advanced geothermal heating market.

He imports Swedish made heat pumps.

isoenergy.co.uk

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Geothermal is very common in Sweden and Canada, for example.  I'm not aware of any particularly high levels of geothermal activity in Sweden - just thought they were more environmentally conscious, have more land to install the systems and are more willing to adopt new technologies than many.  Personally I think it is more of a punt to rely on a continued supply of reasonably priced hydrocarbons.

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There are a couple of different types of source that have been tagged as "geothermal". The first is where there there are eg hot springs etc, which can be found in certain countries but is not terribly widespread, but where it is available can be used to drive eg a turbine because you're dealing with something which is essentially HOT.

The second and more widely available possibility concerns using the ground as a source of heat to drive what is in effect a refrigerator in reverse - ie a heat pump. This uses the relatively constant temperature that is to be found a couple of metres below ground (of the order of 10 deg C) - either via a trench into which coils of water-carrying pipe are laid or via a deep vertical borehole.  If you have a virually inexhaustible supply of water at 10 deg C, then you can in effect cool this via a refrigeration system, which extracts the heat which you can then use to either heat up the water in your house, or heat the house, or both. If you think about how a fridge works, what it does is to transfer the heat energy from the air inside the fridge and dumps it into your kitchen via the radiator of the back of the fridge. This is how a heat pump works. So we can convert the heat energy from a lot of water at 10 deg C into a much smaller quantity of water at 60-80 deg C. The only energy that you need to put into the system is that needed to circulate the water and that needed to drive the heat pump. I am told that commercially-available systems can get 4KW of heat energy out for 1KW input (which would come from your electricity supply).

Regards

Pickles

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Very interesting Pickles  - I'm very interested in the coil

description you mentioned. Do you know of any links or sites which

would indicate cost of installment, and land needed to 'run'  a

typical 4 bedded house??

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Have a look at this article

http://www.invisibleheating.co.uk/installheat.pdf

Also

http://www.est.org.uk/myhome/generating/types/groundsource/

http://www.nef.org.uk/gshp/gshp.htm

http://www.actionrenewables.org/techgshp.htm

http://www.iceenergy.co.uk/heatpumps.asp

http://www.heatpumpnet.org.uk/

http://www.ecoheatpumps.co.uk/

http://www.feta.co.uk/hpa/

As to costs, I've seen numbers in the range of £6-15K quoted, but this will depend on who digs the holes, etc.

Regards

Pickles
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