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Somewhat related, I used to think that residential geothermal heating was basically harvesting the steaming heat from the soil to your house. I figured that wou
by charles_f 5y ago
Somewhat related, I used to think that residential geothermal heating was basically harvesting the steaming heat from the soil to your house. I figured that would require seating on a volcano.
In fact it's using a heat pump, and liquid circulating in pipes burried a few feet underground to act as a thermal sink, to either heat or cool down a house. This works well because the temperature in the ground doesn't fluctuate much past 3ft. Pretty neat, and does not require to go down miles (though it's moving energy to/from ground rather than harvesting it and you still need an energy source for the pump)
- thescriptkiddie 5y agoA ground-source heat pump is technically not geothermal, because the bulk of the heat comes not from the earth but from the sun. You are basically using the soil as an enormous thermal battery which charges up in the summer and stays warm (relative to the air) through the winter. Real geothermal power plants are actually indirectly harvesting heat from the molten inner layers of the earth, which is mostly leftover from the the formation of the planet.