The gas company wanted a commitment of $15000 each from at minimum ten houses on our street (about a quarter of the total) to run the gas line down the street. We’d need to put down $5,000 up front, the other $10,000 to connect from the street to the house. Another $15,000 to convert the furnace. The payback at the time was over ten years just for the pipe.
Now the price differential between oil and gas is much smaller, so we are talking about a 20+ year payback. They were trying to convince us that our home values would rise to make up most of the initial cost. Our real estate agent told us that was rubbish.
If 75% of houses in the market have gas available, the ones that don’t might be worth less. But if 5% of houses have it no one really is bidding up the prices of those houses unless you happen to have two gourmet cooks both trying to buy the house. Currently our town is at 0%.
And the OP is starting a discussion on how to solve it. Don’t give me that pap about societal problems solving themselves. Untenable situations are resolved by human decisions, and not always in the optimal or peaceful way.
My new gas furnace cost $5k (with some minor govt incentives). Our oil furnace was costing us a shitload more to heat even though this first year with the gas was during a record breaking cold winter.
Weird. I suppose that’s an artifact of the neighborhood being developed in the 1890s or something like that.
Around here (Texas), residential gas service to all houses has been the norm since the 1940s or 1950s, I’m assuming, since my grandparents’ houses came with it standard.
Heating oil isn’t a significant problem. It’s essentially unused outside of the Northeast now, and the last time I bothered to do research on it virtually no one installs new heating oil systems, it’s all old systems that will eventually be replaced. When they are replaced it will almost certainly not be with a new heating oil furnace. Problem is already solved, there’s just a slower execution period than OP would like.
We’ve never gone to war to secure a supply of oil by the way. Even our most hated enemy that sells oil on the world markets does so for economic reasons that mean even their oil is not closed to us. The only times oil is truly shut out of the market is when oil infrastructure is destroyed/disabled by war/natural disasters or deliberate sanctions (typically spearheaded by the United States) make it nigh-impossible for a producer to move oil onto the world markets. This was the case for much of Iraq’s oil production during the 1990s/early 2000s and was almost the case for a lot of Iranian oil (it was still being sold, in exchange for gold, at cut throat rates to China, but Iran was closed off from adequate demand to move its oil and thus much of its supply was sidelined.)
Indeed not only have we not gone to war to secure a supply of oil ever, we’ve actually taken actions that guarantee the global supply of oil will be lower than it would otherwise be.
I think it might be helpful to emphasize again that the term “geothermal” has been causing some confusion because unfortunately it has two distinct and different meanings. One meaning, in the sense of “geothermal energy”, refers to extracting net thermal energy from the heat of the earth’s interior to do useful work. But when the term is used in the context of home heating and cooling, it usually refers to a geothermal heat pump which is something completely different and, as Fuzzy Dunlop points out, is more properly called a ground source heat pump.
A ground source heat pump is really nothing more than an ordinary heat pump that exploits the fact that the soil is at a relatively constant temperature just a few feet below the surface. Those of us in northern climates are familiar with the concept of a “frost line”, below which the soil never freezes, which is important in construction. So the idea in a ground source heat pump is based on a loop of pipes around this depth which are used to circulate water. In the summer, the heat pump is essentially nothing more than a type of water-cooled air conditioner, where the heat is ultimately exhausted into the soil instead of (less efficiently) into the hot air. In the winter, the reverse happens, and heat is taken from the relatively warm soil instead of the winter air, and pumped into the house. In both cases, it involves a refrigeration cycle, like any A/C or refrigerator that creates heat in one place and cold in another. So in winter the “heating up” that you refer to is mostly (or entirely) from the refrigeration cycle operating in reverse and not from electrical resistive heat, which is only used as a backup.
One of my Mother’s husbands was also an engineer who built among other things, car washes. He became interested in ground source heat pumps, and tried to talk me into going in with him.
He visited some guys who did it, and I was surprised to learn that the outside pipe did not go into a trench, but into a well. He wanted me to get into well drilling, but he lost it before I graduated and had time for another job.
Funny how terms like “geothermal” and “ground source” get bandied about as marketing terms and mean different things. I can only guess what he was actually building, but your description sounds like it was an open loop type of ground source system. Meaning that instead of using recirculating water, it used well water and then dumped it into some type of drain. Those kinds of systems exist, though I have no idea how common they are. For that matter, air conditioning systems were built for awhile that were cooled by municipal running water (the did have active refrigeration systems, but the compressor coils were cooled by running water).
He wasn’t building, he observed other guys building it.
It was a closed loop, but they were drilling wells and running the loops twenty feet or so in the ground.
I thought of the open loop at my house in the woods, but never implemented it. One of my teachers in undergraduate school used municipal water in air conditioner coils when his A/C failed before a dinner party. His house was cool, but I have no idea what it cost him to get refrigerant back into the system.
In the heat pump, yes, it would be some Rxxx Freon-like refrigerant. But the ground source heat exchange system itself, the thing that replaces the outdoor fan-driven unit on an ordinary A/C or heat pump, is an underground pipe system that is usually a closed loop circulating water that might be treated with antifreeze – this is a typical schematic: http://www.saveenergygroup.co.uk/files/Ground_Source_Heat_Pumps_1354642854.png
So the heat pump works more like an A/C and a heater, depending on which direction the heat’s being pumped (with the ground as a huge constant-temp reservoir to draw heat from, or push heat into).
But the ground source heat-exchanger with water/antifreeze sounds like it would mostly be useful as an A/C system, but not really so much for heating a house.
The difference between a heat pump that cools and heats your house, and a central AC system pretty much comes down to a reversing valve. I’m sure there’s some other design considerations, but the refrigeration cycle is exactly the same but reversed.
I think one of the most appealing parts of heat pumps is that you can get yourself/upgrade your AC and heat in one swoop. Nation wide I don’t know how many people that really benefits, but if you imagine someone with inefficient oil heat, and an old inefficient central air system, you can replace both with a heat pump.
I suppose, but why not just plain water if there’s no risk of freezing? The freezing concern, BTW, isn’t just about the ground temperature falling below freezing, which it wouldn’t do below the frost line. In order to gain heat in winter, the system would have to circulate water that was substantially colder than the ground.
Regarding the heating cycle, it depends on the climate. Ground source heat pumps can have much higher coefficients of performance than air source systems, and obviously maintain it through much colder temperatures since the ground temp is relatively constant and approximates the average annual temperature. Around here that would be about 50 degrees, as opposed to highs of 95 or more in the summer and deep freezes in the winter, so you can appreciate the efficiencies. An air source heat pump’s CoP falls off rapidly as the temperature falls below some critical level, which is why a backup system like electrical resistive heat or a gas furnace is needed in cold climates.
Yeah, in my neck of the woods, you need a Title V (septic) inspection when selling a house which usually leads to installation of a new septic system with lots of digging and piling of dirt. If I’d known then what I know now, I would have taken the opportunity to bury some lines for geothermal heat pump at the same time. (I guess you can go vertical for geothermal, but I’m guessing that if you lay enough pipe below the frost line, you should be OK.) Assuming that it actually is as feasible as I think it is, maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea for the state to mandate or subsidize installations along with the Title V work.
Oil heat does indeed suck, especially when oil starts flirting with the $3.00 and $4.00/gallon marks.
I’d imagine the fact that most home heating/cooling systems recirculate a lot of the house’s air (not all, but most) has something to do with it. If you’re trying to heat your inside air from 67 to 70, having a ready supply of 50 degree water isn’t terribly helpful, unlike if you were trying to cool it from 73 to 70.
It depends on the design of the heat pump – it’s not the house air that is exchanging heat with the water, it’s the hot or cold refrigerant coils. This chart suggests that a ground source heat pump is typically about twice as efficient for heating as an air source heat pump (though it would very much depend on the outdoor temperature) but only marginally more efficient than an ordinary high-efficiency A/C for cooling. It’s interesting data. The even better performance labeled “Waterfurnace Envision” is the brand name for a specific high-efficiency ground source heat pump technology from Waterfurnace Inc.
