Geo Thermal Heating

Have you ever heard of Geo Thermal Heating/Air Conditioning for your house? Well as I mentioned in my last blog I am building a house and along with it comes all those many decisions. So when it came to heating/air conditioning it was no different. Everything from the standard forced air systems to air exchange to hot water in floor which pumps on your hot water tank to circulate and so on and on. After researching several options via online research talking with the various trades and attending a couple of one day educational courses in Vancouver I was able to narrow it down to 2 choices; either air exchange or geo thermal. Both systems are more efficient than the other choices and use less energy as well which was a major factor to us given the continuously escalating costs. The geo thermal was of course the most efficient with educated claims of up to 60-70% savings on your energy costs. You would think this fact would make this a no brainer!... Not so fast…. The systems cost is about $12-15 000 more than the next choice. This means the number crunching has to get a bit more intense. To figure out how long it would take to see a payback on the difference and how much value the systems would add to your house value should you decide to resell. So I got busy finding data from real estate info I was able to find out that there has been data showing a $6-8 000 premium being paid for homes with geo thermal and on the other side it looked like about and 8-10 year payback on the energy savings. And that’s at current energy costs. So we decided that because we plan on staying in this house for the long run which doesn’t mean much we said the same thing in the past 3 homes which we lived in for less than 3 years each. But this time it will be different… Yeah right! I have included some photos of the geo thermal installation. Geo thermal heating lines Geo thermal heating lines Geo thermal heating lines Geo thermal heating lines