I love GSHP. You can see this in previous comments on HN. I've had it done many times, and am friendly with a lot of drillers. I've even had this kind of rig d

I love GSHP. You can see this in previous comments on HN. I've had it done many times, and am friendly with a lot of drillers. I've even had this kind of rig drill for me before. It will not change anything. On the the mess: The majority of the mess is geology. Water/Sediment control (you hit 100 gallons/minute of water and need to control it) or cuttings. It's possible to be cleaner about cuttings in the ideal case, but it would be a lot more expensive. If you dig a 500 ft hole with a 6 inch bore, that's 100 cubic feet of messy stuff to put somewhere. You are often drilling 3 or 4 of these holes. Using vacuums and other rig would dramatically increase costs (if you are driving a dump truck into the yard, you are going to destroy the yard as much as it would to just bulldoze the cuttings into your soil :P) Sediment control is similar. On the economics - these rigs change nothing about the economics. Most drill rigs are already drilling about as fast as it can reasonably be done. They churn through granite quite quickly. The real issue i that they can only do a house a day for a random single family home because they have to go, set up, etc. The kind of rig you are seeing here doesn't change that. The economics only get good when they do entire developments that are under construction, because they can just drill, move, drill, move, drill, move much easier. They also often can locate the bores in a single area and extend the piping to the entire development.