Gladwell on Geothermal Heating
Malcolm Gladwell’s father has installed geothermal heating and cooling at his Ontario residence, to great effect:
For an investment of $25,000, my father saves, conservatively, $2000 a year (remember; he wasn’t running air conditioning in the summer before this, so the financial benefits of his system are substantially understated.
My favorite bit of explanation from his father on how the system works:
A heat exchanger is rather like two clasped hands, with the fingers of one hand interleaved with the fingers of the other. One set of fingers carries the warm water, the other carries the air to be heated.
Eat your heart out, Rich Trethewey!
I now expect that Jonathan just wishes that we’d gotten out the backhoe a few weeks ago when their A/C was out. [Memo to me: reclaim your fans!]
Oh yeah, nothing like dropping $25,000 to make my day
I am pretty sure that a geothermal heating and cooling setup would not save quite that much here in the South. By the way, we will bring your fans to movie night tonight.
August 8th, 2006 at 12:32[Excellent! My Jedi mind trick worked!]
I wonder, though, if it might not work. The question to be raised is how big of an HX you’d need to dump that much thermal gain into the ground. Also, complicating it in the Huntsville area area all the caverns…
August 8th, 2006 at 12:34