Wouldn’t an actual underground home be even better than geothermal?
In the 1950’s there were a bunch of ‘21st Century’ houses built around SF Bay Area.
Glass walls, dramatic ceilings, etc.
They used copper for in-slab heating. Gorgeous while it lasted, but concrete will eat copper.
I wonder if the current love affair with PEX will result in another try at that technology.
But - for OP: find a granite mountain and hollow it out.
Yes, modern radiant heat uses pex designed for the purpose.
Hobbit hole!
Underground - stolen from a different thread on the dope.
Super-insulated is a great idea along with shades and solar treatment to the windows. If there is an upstairs in your dream home (re-reading three floors), consider having a guest room or several with AC units on the top floor. Use a system with on wall mount head units feeding from a single outside compressor. The individual head units all have their own controls. With all that insulation, running the AC upstairs in a room should cool the downstairs without a strong sensation of moving air.
You’ll have solar for power of course with soon to be developed (and made cheaper) battery storage.
For heat, bake lots of goodies. The insulation will keep the whole house warm with good smells. I’ve had in-floor heating when I lived in Italy - it was great. Delay from no heat to warm room was significant if I’d been away for a while with no heat on.
There’s a reason it’s called air conditioning and not air chilling, air cooling or air comfytizing. You’ve got to circulate the air somehow to dehumidify it and extract that water, so with current tech, air conditioning without moving air is impossible.
Happily, moving air without blowing drafts on people is possible. It just takes a modicum of intelligence and care in designing and installing the system.
I am not. Although the word “geothermal” is commonly misused, it means pumping out the heat from the earth and, with a few exceptions (Iceland, for example), you have to go down thousands of feet to find it. What I am talking about is a long pipe that is used as a heat exchanger. The ones I’ve heard about are loops of about 500 feet and can either go horizontally (if you have a large enough property) or vertically. But in any case, you are pumping heat out of the ground in the winter (from cooler to warmer) and into the ground (ditto) during the summer. It is just a large, essentially constant temperature, reservoir and does not differ, in principle, from an air conditioner. These are advertised as geothermal, but they’re not.
I’m in a house with in floor heating via geothermal right now. One problem that’s come up is that there’s a hard limit on how hot the heating water in the floor can be, it’s much lower than what you would get on an old timey metal radiator. That means that 1) the rate at which you can heat the space is necessarily limited, so to raise or the lower the room temperature can take hours at least, and 2) the space will need to be well insulated, lest on cold days the rate at which the room loses heat could surpass the slow rate at which the floor heating radiates heat.
Another problem is that a heat pump can only be powered with electricity, and while they are efficient you are at the mercy of electricity prices and grid reliability. My family is going to be building a house on Vancouver Island soon and I’m toying with the idea of somehow integrating a furnace into the heating system that can run on firewood, and also solar furnaces.
Another thing I’m toying with is the idea of integrating the hot water taps with the heat/cool system too, so maybe in the summer the AC can dump heat into a water reservoir that can then be used for showers, and in the winter, you can shower with the same hot water put out by the geo thermals, or something like that. Would be a nightmare to implement though I suppose.
We actually have this in our circa 1993 house. A pipe is teed off the hot water heater and circulates to the ground source heat pump. Probably reduces our power bill a bit, but no easy way to know how much.