Ground Source Heat Pump Maintenance

[Martin Brown]

The ground behaves pretty much like an ideal infinite heat sink at roughly 50F or 10C if you prefer once you go deep enough to avoid transient weather conditions. Go 1200m straight down and the ambient temperature is more like 35C. A few places with natural hot springs in the UK like Bath & Harrogate there is scope to do even better.

I would worry about the maintenance regime that ground source heating will require. The only people I know who have it have complained bitterly that it costs much more to run than their old oil fired CH and involved a lot of disruption to install the ugly bulky low temperature difference radiators and pipework.

Someone else I know with modern airsource CH is very pleased with it but they haven't encountered a cold winter yet.

[alan_m]

Probably why it is always recommended that the bulky radiators are built into the floor!

[The Natural Philosopher]

I cannot work out why we dont run pipework behind plasterboard walls

Rather than underfloor

[Dave Liquorice]

heating

temperature

Or have a two stage heat pump and "normal" radiators.

[Andy Burns]

people don't tend to nail pictures and shelves to the floor ...

[ZakJames]

It?s a lot harder to do, even with new builds which are a tiny subset of all houses and flats.

[newshound]

With a heat flux of only 0.1 watt per square metre it's not really infinite, if you keep sucking heat out for long enough. Obviously you can do much better if you can tap into flowing water from hot springs.

[Andrew]

They do in new houses.

[alan_m]

I doubt if they would drill that many holes through the wood or metal stud wall frame to run the same amount of pipe required for underfloor heating.

[Chris J Dixon]

I have worked in offices with such a system as the only heat source. It appeared to operate quite well through the winter. There are defrost cycles, during which the mode reverses, in order to melt frost on the external heat exchanger. This means that the internal kit blows cool for a while, but not to the extent that it compromised overall heating performance.

Chris