Geothermal Heating and Cooling
What is Geothermal Heating and Cooling?
It is basically an air conditioner that can run backwards, and that uses the ground as its transfer medium instead of the air like a traditional air conditioner. Because the ground is much denser than the air, it is much more efficient as a medium. Just like your fridge, a compressor moves heat from inside the box to outside, where the refrigerant condenses and transfers the heat to the stuff surrounding it. But instead of mounting the coils on the back of the fridge, they are buried in the ground. It is that simple.
It is very efficient, often delivering 300% efficiency on the electricity put into it to run the pumps. When used for cooling, it eliminates the noisy and inefficient condensers that conventional air conditioners have. When used for heating, it is essentially using solar power, transferring the energy that the ground has absorbed from the sun to your home.
An air conditioner or air cooled heat pump tries to pump heat into warm air, or squeeze it out of cool air. A ground source heat pump (GSHP) uses water or a glycol solution, with the ground as an exchange medium. There is a lot of capacity to absorb heat in the cooling season, and a lot of heat to move in the heating season.
It is basically an air conditioner that can run backwards, and that uses the ground as its transfer medium instead of the air like a traditional air conditioner. Because the ground is much denser than the air, it is much more efficient as a medium. Just like your fridge, a compressor moves heat from inside the box to outside, where the refrigerant condenses and transfers the heat to the stuff surrounding it. But instead of mounting the coils on the back of the fridge, they are buried in the ground. It is that simple.
It is very efficient, often delivering 300% efficiency on the electricity put into it to run the pumps. When used for cooling, it eliminates the noisy and inefficient condensers that conventional air conditioners have. When used for heating, it is essentially using solar power, transferring the energy that the ground has absorbed from the sun to your home.
An air conditioner or air cooled heat pump tries to pump heat into warm air, or squeeze it out of cool air. A ground source heat pump (GSHP) uses water or a glycol solution, with the ground as an exchange medium. There is a lot of capacity to absorb heat in the cooling season, and a lot of heat to move in the heating season.
