ground source heating

My son will soon be building a new house and intends to install a ground source heat pump, hopefully as a main source of hear in conjunction with solar panels. He will be location the underground pipework in a pond beside the house. The pond may be about 150 metres by 50 metres by 1.5 metres deep; it is in Perthshire. Does amyone have experience of ground source heating? How effective is it? Can it ever act even for a short while as the primary heat source? Is there an independant body that would give professional advice? Thank you.

Reply to
Stewart
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that sounds more like "water source heat pump"? try a google?

Cheers JimK

Reply to
JimK

Good idea, except teh solar panels

Definitely forget the solar panels.

I doubt the pond will be good enough..may need to use soil. Any fish will suffer. A lot of ours are dead in a 1.5m pond anyway after these frosts.

Yes and no. Did teh calc and decided it would have been a good original install, but would cost too much to retrofit.

Very.

All the time. No need for anything else.Only problem is cracking out heat much above 45C. You will need large radiators or dense UFH to use heat that low grade, and hot water will need an immersion top or a two stage heat pump.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Really ? mine are all OK here in a smaller pond (just been out to check... )

Reply to
geoff

It sounds like you can get useful heat from that size of lake, i have just installed a GSHP on my place which is 170sqm of floor space. Its a 2kw/12kw Heat Pump, but we use 600m of ground loop, some of it in a well.

Steve

Reply to
Mr Sandman

That's a big pond. The pipe will be on the bottom where the water temperature cannot fall below 4deg.C. (fishes lifeline) unless frozen down to 1.5m.

What about ducted air?

There was a thread on this. Gentleman from Ireland AIR.

regards

Reply to
Tim Lamb

In message , Mr Sandman writes

I'm close to the River Lea which is quite warm near the main source at East Hyde sewage works.

My bright idea was to pump water from a shallow well, through a heat exchanger supplying the heat pump and then back to a second well further down the valley.

When I put this to the EA they batted it back with a reference to their abstraction and discharge limits and a pointer to their charges. Somebody here kindly calculated how much heat could be recovered from the 20cu.m allowed abstraction. From memory this was only a few kWh.

regards

Reply to
Tim Lamb

What normally does for the fish is lack of oxygen rather than cold. If you had a solid layer of ice covering the whole surface area the oxygen levels could easily have dropped too low. Many pond owners have a small heater which keeps just a tiny patch clear, we have a fountain which does the same although in the last big freeze-up it only managed to preserve a very small patch.

The other problem can be frogs. They have a nasty habit of dying in the cold and decomposing in the water which poisons it.

Reply to
Calvin Sambrook

Why the open loop?

Just store enough water-propanol mix for the circuit and pump it up and down the river bed.

AJH

Reply to
andrew

But probably from suffocation from ice cover or gases from decompostion in the pond base rather than the cold.

Naturally yes the bottom of a pond stays about 4C as that is the temp that water is the densist but you will be pumping heat out of the bottom of the pond thus setting up a circulation...

New build these days with good to high insulation levels a GSHP system is almost a no brainer. High capital cost but *much* lower fuel bills.

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

I calculated the break even price was about at 45p a liter for oil.

It doesn't do a lot unless you are using nuclear electric though, cos otherwise electricity steps up along with the gas and oil that produce it.

capital cost £10-£15k probably.

New build its a no brainer. Retrofitting it - its a bugger. everything up to and including hot water tanks has to change really. Larger bore pipework, bigger heat exchangers in the tanks, bigger rads or UFH..

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Don;t know about that.... We retro-fitted a GSHP here a couple of years back - original boiler was a conventional oil-fired boiler. We did have to replace the hot water cylinder because the coil was too small (wasn't transferring the heat from the heat pump fast enough) - but we retained the existing radiators and all's fine in that department.

Water from the heat-pump is circulating at about 45c - we've recently started using the electric immersion for an hour each night just to top off the hot water as the two of us like a bath in quick succession, and the unassistaed tank wasn't quite hot enough - but, apart from that, it's all fine.

Installation of the collector coils was made easier as we had a large dip in the garden that needed to be infilled anyway - so we just dug trenches in it and then dumped tonnes of soil on top !

All-in costs about 12k euro - less a 30% grant from the Irish Government.

Adrian

Reply to
Adrian Brentnall

I doubt the fisheries dept. would allow anything to be installed in the river itself. The most convenient bit has a flow rate of 4 knots or so anyway.

At the moment I don't have a project requiring heat but, come the day I finish the current barn rebuild, the old dairy/woodwork shop is redundant and available for conversion. I would like to be able to offer the planners something green by way of heating.

There are two alternatives. The old Cress ditch could be deepened, about

70m x 7m so small compared with the OP. There is also the grass strip between that and the river which is 100m x 20m (assuming the EA allows slinkies within 8m of the actual bank).

regards

Reply to
Tim Lamb

If you don't mind me asking, how have your gas / electric bills varied since it was fitted ?

Reply to
Colin Wilson

HI Colin

Well - the original boiler was oil-fired (out here the only gas comes in bottles!) - so I guess a fairer comparison would be CH oil + other electric Vs all-electric....

I'll see if I can find out - haven't actually done the sums... but if I can find the bills then I'll let you know

Adrian

Reply to
Adrian Brentnall

I wonder if the filter has frozen? Plays havoc with small ponds if you don't have a good filter 24x7. Mine hasn't frozen yet even in these cold spells.

Reply to
dennis

what filetr?

This is just a hole in the ground full of water mate.

about 3x5 meters and about 2 meters deep. at its deepest.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Ah, a natural fish killer. A lot will die every so often, some will probably survive to restock it. A pump and a reed bed filter will work wonders.

Reply to
dennis

He is now thinking of a large area of solar panels coupled with as much insulation as it is possible to incorporate in the walls. Might use a high energy wood pellet furnace as back up source of heating the house and swimming pool.

Reply to
Stewart

It's more efficient to design for passive solar than to try and use roof mounted solar panels for heating. It's quite a tall order though!

There will need to be a lot of emphasis place on the details of insulation and air-tightness to make it work properly - and most builders aren't experienced in this yet.

Reply to
Jim

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