Epiphany

This is a hair brained scheme that I thought of. It has no real link to the money site other than being the only place I could think of posting it. Possibly maybe getting someone to help me make this idea come a reality.
If my idea had a real possibility of working, it would save a lot of people a lot of money and it would do a world of good to helping save the environment.

In Canada heating your house in the winter costs a lot of money.

Areas that can help you save some money are:
Radiant heating
Geothermal heating

Radiant heating is where you have an extra water heater pumping warm water though pipes in cement flooring.

Geothermal heating is something I haven’t heard of until recently. Some of you may be saying what is that?
Geothermal heating is where you drill 60 – 100 feet straight down into the ground. Put pipes down into the ground, send water down ( forcing other water back up ). The water that comes back up is heated up from the heat of the core of the earth. You then use the heat from the water coming back up from under ground to heat your house.
With Geothermal heating you heat your house with out using gas. Exactly how it works I am not sure. But I was told it is a special furnace that produces forced air, like everyone is used to.
Problem with Geothermal heating is that the furnace is really costly. From what I was told this furnace cost about $20,000 – 18 to 20 years ago.

Here is my epiphany…..

Take geothermal heating.
Throw out the furnace that costs sooooo much & still uses a lot of power. .
Run it straight into radiant flooring for yet a cheaper way to heat your house.
NOW… with my idea.
All you would have to do is run a water pump to pump water though the pipes with a thermostat to control the heating in your house.

If this idea were to ever catch on it would be much cheaper than it would cost now.
As drilling holes for geothermal heating costs a lot cause not many people do it.
As well as radiant heating costs a lot cause again not a lot of people do it.
Using the example of a car manufacturer. When a car manufacturer manufactures 1 car it costs millions of dollars in set up fees. However as the manufacturer manufactures millions of cars this cost is spread out though all the cars it manufactures. Becoming only hundreds of dollars extra for each car.

Problem with my idea.
The government may not like the idea of people not using natural gas to heat their homes anymore. The Gov’ment. makes too much money on taxes on Natural gas.

Now what I need from you is.
Someone to talk to about combining these ideas.

Then
Someone to figure out if it is possible.

I think a small scale model would prove it is possible, but is it feasible.

If this were to really work any costs of initial set-up would be greatly outweighed but the future heating costs that you are saving.

Is there anyone in the process of thinking of building a new home??

LC epiphanied:
Geothermal heating is where you drill 60 – 100 feet straight down into the ground. Put pipes down into the ground, send water down ( forcing other water back up ). The water that comes back up is heated up from the heat of the core of the earth.

not to throw cold water on your idea but in drilling only that deep you only might find… uh…. cold water. back in the 1980s, dr. laurence vigrass (geology) from the u of r got some obscene amount of money in a research project to see if geothermal heating was viable in regina. he sunk a well just off campus and only hit hot water at 2200m. and then it was only in the order of 50-60C… way too tepid to be of any help. plus it was brinier than all get-out (it'd rot your pipes in no time). i remember this project quite vividly because i was a fresh undergrad at the time and i recall how it taught me how pointless most university research was. :)

so, LC… if you don't mind causing a huge environmental problem by bringing that virgin deep groudwater 2km to the surface, i am sure you could make it fly. let me know how it goes… :)

(and they say al gore's visit here was wasted… :) )

for more info, check out ed willet's blog: Geothermal

How it was explained to me you don't bring that water out of the ground. .. the hole you drill into the ground is filled with a pipe that is like a c at the bottom of the hole. so the cold water you pump down gets heated by the heat of the core, & comes out heated up..
NO pumping out VIRGIN ground water out.
In my example, no heat exchanger would be needed either, cause you are already using fresh water.

I moved a couple into a house that used a goethermal heating. As I said it was 18 - 20 years old so this experiment was used in mind, but bettered by sending down it's piping so you don't pull out the water out of the ground.. Now that I read the article that you posted maybe I can find someone to use the energy power more wisely than trying to make electrical power with it.
Each new persons spin on an idea can make an idea better.

PS. the house I am speaking of uses about $30 - $50 more of electricity than a regular house, but saves the $200- $400 / cold month in the extereme cold winter.
Then you BURN less natural gas. causing less emitions

LC it is not the furnace that is expensive, it is the dig and the piping. Putting it on an infloor system is more expensive because you can only use this system for heating, you would still need to buy an air conditioner. (I can live without a/c is not the point because geothermal can do both with a forced air system)

How it works. Put pipe in ground. Winter: Run water through pipe to take heat out of the ground and warm the water. Summer: Run water through the pipe to put heat back in the ground, cooling the water.

The cost: Think how many solar cells or computing power you could purchase 20 years ago with $20,000 compared to now. Same thing, new technology is always more expensive.

Urban or rural: It would be closer to $20,000 to put this type of system on an urban lot, because you have to go down to get the length of piping needed. In the country I believe the cost is closer to $10 - $15,000 because you need only go down so far then you can go vertical.

Would I do it. In a minute, on two conditions. 1, I won the lottery. 2, I found a company that has been installing these systems problem free in my area for at least 5 years. They can go to all the school and have a wall full of certificates, but they need experience in your ground type. That is what affects how efficiently the heat transfers to or away from your pipe. How large a loop or how many loops you may need because of your ground type.

Here is a link to a Regina company. Regina geothermal

Here is a link to a newsletter that does little company profiles if someone wants a company local to them newsletter It also discusses new systems.

With the money I save when I build my straw bale house, I will install one of these systems.

You really need a lawyer and a politician for this…

But I would suspect that there is one area of future conflict: Land Titles. Now there are differences between urban and rural titles. I am not familiar with the history, but I remember that at one time a land title said 'Minerals in the Crown'. How this works for water, we need a rural resident to let us know. Now it's something about 'surface rights' as opposed to minerals rights.

So you want to pump water into the ground and use a heat exchanger? I imagine that the government will want to know what you're pumping and how you're doing it.

BUT… if geothermal heating becomes feasible here (used in Iceland for decades) how long do you think that it would be before the Feds, provincial AND municipal governments started taxing that heat to make up for shortfalls elsewhere? After all, you're taking the heat from THEIR ground!

As for rural property rights the government still retains mineral rights on all properties unless the homeowner requests to purchase them from the government. Geothermal heating does not require any deed to mineral rights as you are not extracting anything from the ground. simply put, all your doing is pumping water through a pipe in the ground.
Next issue is combining geothermal and the infloor heating systems is also expense. Here in Ontario a typical infloor heat system costs around 20 000 per floor for an average 2000 sq ft house. that cost is for the double plates on all the walls at the floor, the installation of the 8 miles of pipe required, the special concrete mix required, all the valves for adjusting flow and pressure, the antifreeze compound needed to pump through the pipes, and the heat pump.
Now compound the cost with the cost of drilling to accomadate the geothermal pipes and your cost almost doubles. You still need the heat pump to keep the water heated to a constant temp too because by the time the water goes through the pipes in the ground and then through all the piping in the floors it will have cooled to a temp too low to do any good.
Sorry to put a damper on your idea but cost effectively speaking it would take about 25 to 30 yrs to break even and the average homeowner is not able to account for that much extra cost with their mortgage company. Now if the cost could somehow be lowered and or compensated for by the government through some sort of natural energy savings commission rebate then it could possibly be feasable to combine the two and make it energy efficient enough to work because the heat pump would only have to work at about 1/4 to 1/3 as much as it would without the geothermal help. Also the heat pump can be used in reverse and can double as a cooler in the summer. The new heat pumps are about the size of a medium sized suitcase and are capable of pumping a great deal of water very rapidly. I am not positive about the amount of water per minute but if memory serves then according to a friend of mine who is a heating specialist and installs the infloor heating systems around here, I am sure he said they pump the entire water reservoir through the system every minute or every two minutes. Now even with the increased reservoir size to accomadate for the underground pipes as well, the amount of water would approximately just better than double so the pump would completely circulate all the water in the system every 5 to 6 minutes. I could discuss this idea with a few of the heating contractors I deal with and they would better be able to tell you if it would be a plausible idea.

I now have a reply for all users.
Thanks CJ for the link to Regina Goethermal.
they could set up a almost cost free house if you used all their products.
One of their systems is used for Geothermal Radiant heating already.
Both Geotheremal heating & Radiant heating are healthier than a regular furnace.
Radiant heating is closer to an ideal heating gragh than any other heating source. Forced air which 95 % of all people use.
Now to add on another feature which would make a house more energy efficient.. Solar panels to save on power bills. Even will all these features installed it would add .. say 40 G ..my bills added up are 300- 400 / month.
400 * 12 = 4800 / year.
40 000 / 4800 . less than 10 years for it to pay off.
plus these are an investment which increase the value of your house. according to an energy efficiency rating you receive when you have any these features installed.
An energy efficiency rating tells you what percentage of a regular power / energy bill you would save.

I also read you can get goverenment grants to help pay for all of these features you get installed.
I do not remember the exact web page but it was something like next geothermal. http://www.nextenergysolutions.com/
I clicked on it from the google ads on the left.

Thanks CJ & DaRoofa. the 2 of you brough my thoughs into this Decade & Century. Unfortunately I wasn't the first to think of such an idea.

Only problem is.. we need more people to start doing all this to make the costs drop.

Pooga.. only question I have is how can the govenrment tax you on something they have no idea on how much you are using?
I guess they would find a way!

Rudy.. The research wasn't a complete waste. Just the person who conducted the research was a waste.
People use Geothermal heating in Regina already.

Now if I could find a contractor to start building Geothermal Radiant homes, the costs of building such a house would drop immensely.

LC belaboured:
Rudy.. The research wasn't a complete waste. Just the person who conducted the research was a waste. People use Geothermal heating in Regina already.

i think the basic problem here is nomenclature. it is actually quite ludicrous to call the "ground-coupled heat pump" technology, "geothermal" because what i and pooga were talking about is the accurate description of that term. when you are simply using the near-temperature-neutral layer in the surficial material it is misleading to call it "geothermal". so no… people have not been using what is truly "geothermal" in regina.

and i would suggest that you consider the sources in all the "research" that you have done. people have been making a killing selling snake oil for years.

as for making your house more energy efficient… if you really are spending anywhere close to $400/month, i would suggest that the problem ain't in your heating system. maybe try a bit of insulation, new windows or a new thermostat – i doubt i spend a third of that to heat my house.

or failing that… pray that global warming IS real … there would be no better way of reducing your heating costs! (although it will still likely be cold on Epiphany (Jan 6th!))

if you really are spending anywhere close to $400/month, i would suggest that the problem ain't in your heating system. maybe try a bit of insulation, new windows or a new thermostat – i doubt i spend a third of that to heat my house

Or less… I just checked my heating bills for last year, and it averaged out to $85 a month. To take it down further, it worked out to about 5 cents per square foot per month. (on a 17 year old home - newer ones are better yet)

when you are simply using the near-temperature-neutral layer in the surficial material it is misleading to call it "geothermal"

And would that ambient heat be sufficient to warm a home in mid-January? Power goes out - no pump. Unless you have honkin big batteries for your solar panels!

I'm not saying that it's a silly idea, just that you need to carefully research everything. For example, is the technology advanced enough, and reliable enough, to do what you require?

PS - Don't worry about the the government, they can find a way to tax anything. A meter on your circulation pump????

PPS - And if people start sucking all that heat out of the earth, maybe we'll experience Global Cooling! Speaking of which, rudyk… I seem to remember something from the 70s about scientists warning the world about Global Cooling and that we were headed for an Ice Age. Pretty short Ice Age I guess!

My house was built in 1969 so it is considerably older.
The $400 / month isn't just Gas. It was Power & Gas.
Just Gas was about $175 / month.
Since I moved in we have slowly been installing the energy effient light bulbs. I would say each light installed saves about $5.00 / month.
But I also guess power wasn't $225. month more like $150.
If you could save 3/4 of the power bill & cut the gas bill to 0 but using both Solor powr & Geothermal heating you would save enuff money to make it worth your while.
Then with the government grants set up to help make these things possible it would really be worth while.

Poog wrote :
And would that ambient heat be sufficient to warm a home in mid-January? Power goes out - no pump. Unless you have honkin big batteries for your solar panels!

Well with no power a regular gas furnace doesn't work either!! Atleast with solar power you could still hat your house with the power you save from solar power.
From Regina Geothermal they say the solar power saves you up to 85 % in power.