Geothermal Heating & Cooling Systems:
- Use NO natural gas. Our natural gas pipe is capped off.
- Are considered to be around 400% efficient. The top natural gas units are around 95% efficient. Geothermal systems are much less expensive to operate.
- Work best if you do not set the thermostat back at night or while you are gone during the day. There is very little fluctuation in the temperature of the house all winter or all summer.
- Provide a more comfortable indoor environment.
- Do not dry the air in the house out as much in the winter.
- Do not produce any carbon monoxide gas.
- Are quiet.
- Do not have an outside unit for air conditioning. (Our deck is SO much more pleasant to use now that we don't have a noisy air conditioning unit beside it.)
We are extremely satisfied with our geothermal heating and cooling system. Now that we've had one for two years, I would not want to live in a house without one. I'm really surprised that geothermal systems aren't WAY more common than they are.
2 comments:
Hi Steve,
We are building a new house in Chelsea, Quebec. We are having a Waterfurnace Envision unit installed (3 tons). I was just wondering what you meant by "Work best if you do not set the thermostat back at night or while you are gone during the day".
Thank you,
Mathieu
Hi Mathieu,
Our unit is a 3 ton as well. Maybe I should have said they "are the most efficient if you don't set them back at night. . ."
This is because for heating, the systems come with an backup electrical heating unit (in northern climates anyway,) which kicks in if the heat generated from the geothermal process cannot keep up.
Now that we have geothermal, we keep our house right at 71 degrees in the winter. In the two years we have had the system, our backup heat has only kicked on one time under normal circumstances that I know of (which was an especially cold night.) (You can tell when the backup kicks on because since it hardly ever runs it generates that dust-on-the-heating-coil smell.) Our house is pretty well insulated and I honestly do not think the backup heat would have been necessary.
You do not want the backup kicking on, as this is not economical like the geothermal process.
Also, the system has phases. It's most efficient to keep the system running at the lowest phase. Turning the thermostat up and down will force it to run at higher stages and even force the backup to turn on.
For example, we went away for three days in January. I did turn the thermostat down while we were gone. When we got home I turned the thermostat back up. This caused the backup system to come on.
Our system came with an electronic thermostat, but it is not even programmable because there is no need for programming. Just set it at a comfortable temperature and forget it.
We do adjust the thermostat up or down a degree at a time from time to time depending on what's going on at our house.
I hope this information helps you out.
Steve
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