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Anecdotally, I looked into this when building our house, and can confirm - the bulk of costs was drilling, and it was expensive. When I did the math at the tim
by shireboy 5y ago
Anecdotally, I looked into this when building our house, and can confirm - the bulk of costs was drilling, and it was expensive. When I did the math at the time, the cost of ground source heat pump over air source heat pump was several times more. Energy bills would be much less, but the payoff was around 20 years, assuming the unit lasted that long.
- kragen 5y agoThis is totally irrelevant to anything in the article, except in the sense that both pertain to thermal energy and the earth. They have nothing else in common. You can't run a factory, a computer, or a car off a ground-source heat pump, because heat pumps consume energy; they don't produce it.
- shireboy 5y agoBoth require drilling that is a major factor in their cost and inhibit adoption was my point. Ground source heat pumps are called “geothermal” systems even though they don’t generate electricity.
- kragen 5y agoYou can build ground-source heat pumps by laying pipe in trenches in your yard, which is almost, but not quite, completely unlike drilling through kilometers of rock. It's true that they're sometimes called "geothermal", but they're still totally irrelevant to this article.