I know what you’re thinking, “Dan has convinced Wendy that they can make money by drilling for oil”. Although that's plausible, we haven't gone that crazy yet. We're actually installing a geothermal heat pump. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, a geothermal heat pump generates heat from the ground in the winter and uses the ground to remove the heat in the summer. In order for it to work, we drilled three 400 ft deep holes in our front yard which we will run glycol through. The lines in the ground connect to the house through our basement wall. Eventually we'll hook them directly to the geothermal heat pump in the basement, but we're still in process of making that happen.
The drilling rig arrived on Friday and then sat in our front yard all weekend before finishing up on Monday. This obviously had the whole neighborhood asking questions and several random people actually pulled into our driveway to get a closer look. The drilling process was also really noisy and there were several times when we'd look outside into the yard and there was so much dust that you couldn't see anything. After the truck left we had a muddy torn up yard and a pile of leftover cementitious material/dust that took us a month to haul off. I'm pretty sure if our neighbors didn't already dislike us, they do now.
The drilling rig arrived on Friday and then sat in our front yard all weekend before finishing up on Monday. This obviously had the whole neighborhood asking questions and several random people actually pulled into our driveway to get a closer look. The drilling process was also really noisy and there were several times when we'd look outside into the yard and there was so much dust that you couldn't see anything. After the truck left we had a muddy torn up yard and a pile of leftover cementitious material/dust that took us a month to haul off. I'm pretty sure if our neighbors didn't already dislike us, they do now.
There are a couple of reasons we chose to install a geothermal heat pump:
1. Our house currently only has air conditioning on the second floor, so adding an additional unit and ductwork was inevitable.
2. The savings are pretty nice. If you include the tax incentives associated with installation of the geothermal heat pump we expect to recoup our costs in less than 10 years. Since this is our "forever" house it will make sense in the long run. The costs have also been offset by my thrifty husband finding the unit on sale at Cargo Largo.
Now that the lines have been installed, we need to have ductwork ran through the house and the unit hooked up. This will be taking place in the next month, hopefully before the heat sets in!
The drilling process surely got a lot of interest from the neighbors. It's not everyday that they would see a drilling rig that close. Well, it also takes quite some time to clean up the mess, but it should be okay once you guys get everything up and running. A geothermal heat pump makes a lot of sense, and you'd even save on money in the long run. Good luck on this project!
ReplyDeleteJermaine Ryan @ Load Craft