Although I don’t know if it is that inexpensive, because you are using electricity to pump the solution through the entire piping inside and outside the house, it does help keep the temperature of your home at a steady temperature year round.
Although I don’t know if it is that inexpensive, because you are using electricity to pump the solution through the entire piping inside and outside the house, it does help keep the temperature of your home at a steady temperature year round.
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what they want to do is drive water to a hotspot so it’ll come up as hot water or steam and then use the heat to drive a turbine to make electricity.
Much of the cost of doing this is in the drilling. If the drillers will suddenly charge half as much as they did for oil drilling — then the economics of this energy source look a lot better.
It’s less expensive because it delivers more energy than it uses. Heat pumps have been around since the 1970s but only drawing heat from outside air, so they’re less efficient when it’s colder outside. Putting them underground solves that problem and a lot of homes have had them installed that way over the past decade.
I’m currently living in a house purportedly heated with geothermal energy. Installation was very costly indeed. It doesn’t run by itself; it burns through a lot of electricity. It doesn’t cost much less to run than the natural gas heat I had in the last house, which was of comparable size. (Obviously part of the expense is for the electricity to power system fans that distribute the heat through ductwork.) If we have to shut down the well, as has happened several times in the past few weeks when extreme cold caused pipes to break, the geothermal heating system doesn’t work. With natural gas heat, you don’t lose heat in the entire house while you’re waiting for the plumber to show up after a pipe bursts. I’ve had to supplement the geothermal system with electric space heaters. No, I’m not impressed.