<p>The air isn’t cold but it’s colder than you’d expect.</p>
<p>For example, say your house is 68 degrees. The air that comes out of the vent might be 75 degrees. It’ll heat your house to 70 degrees but the air coming out of the register won’t feel very warm.</p>
<p>In your case, since you don’t have ducts, the hot water will move the heat throughout your house. But again, the water temperature will be colder than you are used to. Right now it is probably 120 degree water. With the heat pump, it will be about 75-90 degree water.</p>
<p>After years of research my brother, who lives in the midwest, installed a geothermal system on his house last year and he LOVES it. I believe he went with 9 closed loops in his yard. I haven’t seen it yet, but will be visiting next week, and can ask him any specific questions that you might have. Knowing him, he probably overbuilt the system. He is very happy with it, and willing to discuss the details at any given opportunity, I just haven’t been that interested so as to pay attention to the details. I don’t recall him ever mentioning that heated air in the winter would blow colder than a regular furnace, as mentioned above.</p>
<p>I live in the southwest so I went with solar panels on my roof, and couldn’t be happier. My bills are lower, and the meter actually does run backwards in the afternoon! A combination of both geothermal and solar would be ideal, but very expensive upfront.</p>
<p>My house was built with a geothermal system and it’s pretty popular in my neighborhood. Unfortunately it was torn our before we moved in Apparently according to the place who installed we have too much iron in our well water and it clogged so much that it had to be torn out.</p>
<p>I do not know if this is common but I have heard that some of my neighbors have had the same problem.</p>
<p>We really wish they had not torn it out completely so that we could have tried to make it work for us. They installed a high efficient gas forced air furnace and we have never had a bill over $200.</p>
<p>We have tinkered with our thermostat and I think we finally figured it out but we have always wondered why this house was so warm. I thought it was my midlife change!</p>
<p>deb, I had to smile with you mentioning about tinkering with your thermostat. My house is a giant loop for heating… bedroom is the first radiator on my line and my living room is the last one. So any heat put out, gets to my room first, then it proceeds to go to each other room in the house and ends up in the living room. Naturally, my thermostat itself is set out towards the living room which is the last room to get heat. So if I set my thermostat to 70, my bedroom will be up to 75 or so by the time the living room area reaches 70, lol. Unless I leave the bedroom door open. If I set it to 65, my bedroom will get to 70 and my living room will be 65. It’s a fine balance finding where it needs to be!</p>
<p>The sill of the house, not the window sills. The chases are basically anyplace where warm air obviously rises up from the cellar to the first floor: mostly openings with pipes. The goal is to stop the chimney effect, which accounts for a lot of heat loss in a house.</p>
<p>In addition to installing new storms, we also had the window weights removed and the pockets stuffed with insulation. We wanted to keep the original windows, but not be able to feel a breeze coming from them in the winter! The walls already had blown-in insulation.</p>
<p>Some of the heatpump problems you hear about are probably with air-source heat pumps, which require a fair amount of electricity, and are old tech. Ground-source, or geothermal, has high upfront costs but extremely low operating costs. I understand that in Canada, there are companies that provide geothermal heat pumps like a typical utility - they install and own the system, and homeowners pay a monthly fee. It’s apparently a lucrative investment for these semi-utilities. In the US, though, it can be difficult to find the right installer, and dense urban lots can be difficult if drilling is infeasible for any reason.</p>
<p>Geothermal energy is a huge energy saver and greatly reduces energy bills. I’m a big fan of geothermal energy. But I’ve never seen anybody get a 10 year payback period. It’s longer than that - typical 20 - 30 years if you assume no changes in the cost of electricity or oil. Some salesmen might have quoted a 10 year backpack based on an estimated increase in oil prices, but I don’t like to throw predicted cost increases in the future because we don’t know what the various fuels/energy will do.</p>
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<p>Generally people say that a/c is free because there is no additional upfront installation cost over the installation of the heating part. So to most consumers, it’s no extra charge.</p>
<p>While they are more efficient than traditional air conditioners, they do require energy to cool a house (typically about 1/2 to 3/4 the energy), and every kilowatt used to cool a house that wasn’t cooled before is an extra kilowatt of energy used, which negates some of the energy effiency gains.</p>
<p>An easier example to think about is the tankless hot water heaters. The theory is that by not having the hot water sit in a tank all day, they waste less energy. True. Until you discover your teenage daughter used to stop taking showers when the hot water supply ran out, and now that it never runs out, her showers are twice as long!</p>
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<p>It depends on the climate…in Seattle our climate is well suited for air source heat pumps. They stop working well when the temperature drops below about 30 degrees, which isn’t too often here. So many new buildings are built with air source heat pumps. They are noisy, ugly, not as efficient, and I don’t like them, but the eliminate half or three fourths of the upfront cost and are much more cost effective.</p>
<p>I’m actually a big fan of geothermal heat pumps, but feel people should recognize the drawbacks. They are best used in large instuitions that are going to be around forever, schools, hospitals, dorms, libraries, etc are the best examples because they rarely move or shut down. </p>
<p>The downside for residential is the large upfront costs. Because of the time value of money, it’s much more difficult to make a business case of spending a lot of money upfront as opposed to a little bit more each month over a 25 year period.</p>
<p>From an environmental perspective, they are unmatched and unbeatable because of their extreme efficiency.</p>
<p>The best way to justify them is when a person first buys a house. Add the mortgage + utility cost of owning the home without the geothermal and the mortgage + utility of owning the home with the geothermal unit if the geothermal cost is added to the mortgage. If you come out ahead and you decide that geothermal is the right heat source, go for the geothermal.</p>
<p>baby, I live in a large, old house in Maine. I don’t think you appreciate how much oil a house like mine can use, even when fairly well insulated and the thermostat set at 60 or 62. We were not relying on the promises of “some salesmen” in our financial calculations. My H is a financial analyst. He can do the math. You are correct in saying that it is difficult to make such a decision based on predicted oil costs. He also knows quite a bit more than most people about that, since his specialty for years was oil and gas, mostly small cap. The payback term varies wildly depending on oil prices. A $60K geothermal system starts looking awfully good if your annual oil costs start hitting $10K.</p>
<p>In any event, we decided not to do it and take our chances. If I had the money, I would do it now anyway. As large scale wind generation of electricity here comes closer and closer to being a reality, it is enormously attractive.</p>
<p>We do have a geothermal heat pump system. Our home is 4000 sq feet…so we have one large pump and 2 ‘furnaces’. One for the upstairs and one for the downstairs. </p>
<p>Ours was not installed properly. Turned out when they built the house, the man they hired was a ‘fly by night’ kind of guy & cut corners. Not necessarly to save budget, but because he didn’t know how to do it or didn’t think certain things were really necessary.</p>
<p>Our unit was new in 1993. We moved here in 1998. They have never worked properly. Always in ‘shut out’, blowing cold air in winter…warm air in summer, or the auxillary electric was always coming on.</p>
<p>First, we installed a new pump - $2000. This helped considerably. Next we had to replace the upstairs unit - $7000. We’re still using the original main unit, but it is in ‘Lock out’ NOW. The compressor won’t kick in, so to warm it up in the morning, I have to turn the thermostat up enough that the auxillary kicks in - meaning I’m heating the house this morning with electricity & not the geothermal part. Repairman is scheduled to arrive Friday.</p>
<p>I am use to gas heat and a forced air furnace. Our house is always cold - even when the unit is working properly. We have a lot of insulation and tripple pained windows. </p>
<p>We have 3 friends locally also with heat pumps. One built their house new - same man installed their heat pump and they had it ripped out and redone by someone else. Now works fine. Of the other two…one likes theirs and the other says their house is always cold and supplement with wood heat.</p>
<p>As far as the price to operate it…we had a energy effeciency audit done by the electric company before we replaced the pump & smaller unit. We were willing to unhook the heat pump portion, and install an electric forced air system if it would be more effecient. (One month our electric bill was $480) It turned out, the geothermal was still the most effecient.</p>
<p>Once the upstairs unit was replaced, it has worked very well. The thermostat is digital also and we’ve had no more problems with it.</p>
<p>We may have just got a ‘lemon’…but I don’t recommend them at all.</p>
Apparently according to the place who installed we have too much iron in our well water and it clogged so much that it had to be torn out.</p>
The chases are basically anyplace where warm air obviously rises up from the cellar to the first floor: mostly openings with pipes. The goal is to stop the chimney effect, which accounts for a lot of heat loss in a house.</p>