On the 2nd Day of Christmas: A Geothermal Update

Considering this past summer I replaced the old oil furnace with a new geothermal heating and cooling system which I blogged about here, here and here, several people have been asking me how it’s going.

So far, the geothermal heating has been working just fine, thank you, aside from that scare back in November when I woke up with no heat (computer error in thermostat, not the technology).

I’ve just gone over my electric bills to compare them to last year while reminiscing over the fuel-oil bills from last winter.

Now that all of my heat is created through electricity – the water circulating through the pipes that is heated or cooled by the ground in my front yard never needing to be replenished or changed, no fuel to deliver, no additional payments to be made accordingly – I’ve compared this last bill (for November – this month’s will arrive next week or so) to the comparable one from a year ago (still with the oil-furnace) and observed a change. At first, I was thinking, OMG, look how much it’s jumped in average daily kilowatt usage, not to mention the sticker-shock of seeing a bill for $139.64! Yikes.

But wait... let’s think about this: how much of this is additional usage of electricity used to generate the heat that used to be supplied by fuel oil last winter? Let’s compare...

Now, granted, the old furnace with its 50 years of excellent service courtesy of the folks at Service Oil here in Harrisburg, was becoming increasingly inefficient. Plus there was the hope it might be able to make it through another winter. If I had replaced it with a new oil furnace and given the fact the rates are lower so far this winter than last (($3.09/gallon in November ‘07 as opposed to $3.99/gallon in March’08), I’m sure I would not be spending $457.41 in fuel oil this month (that was the lowest bill of the season, by the way: the last one was $670.49). But it would still be pretty high, especially considering much of the time I was keeping the thermostat set between 62° and 65° degrees and freezing. This winter, I’ve been keeping the house between 67° and 69° and feeling quite comfortable.

Looking back at the months since Groff’s installed the geothermal system (including the month before it was installed, just for the usual comparison and giggles), I noticed these changes, compared to last year’s electric bills:

July 2007 = 37 kilowatts/average = $111.49 (w/old central air-conditioning)
July 2008 = 44 kilowatts/average = $143.03 (w/old central a/c - a very hot month)
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August 2007 = 42 kilowatts/average = $120.91 (w/old central a/c - not as hot as July)
August 2008 = 28 kilowatts/average = $90.84 (the Geothermal System, w/its own central a/c technology, fully operational August 1st - the bill, unfortunately, included the last three days of July which made heavy use of the old a/c system)
- - - - -
September 2007 = 31 kwh/ave = $94.04
September 2008 = 22 kwh/ave = $80.14 (very little geothermal a/c use, just a little geothermal heat on some chilly mornings)
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October 2007 = 26 kwh/ave = $84.28
October 2007 = 31 kwh/ave = $98.76 (started using geothermal heat)
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November ‘07 = 30 kwh/ave = $ 92.22
November ‘08 = 49 kwh/ave = $139.64 (constant geothermal heat - interestingly, the average daily temperature was the same for both years)

So in this past month, that means I spent an additional $47.42 this year, much of which would be attributed to the increased use of electricity to fire up the geothermal “furnace” or “heat-transfer pump.”

Compared to the fuel oil bill for the same month last year of $457.51, the increase in my electric bill is 10.37% of what I spent last year on one month of fuel oil alone.

Adding up the savings from August and September and adding that to the increases from October and November, that means basically I’ve paid, for four months of geothermal usage, $19.93.

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During the Presidential campaign, there was a great deal of talk from both candidates about “renewable energy sources,” stressing solar and wind power, talking more about “clean coal” (which seems oxymoronic in so many ways) than about geothermal.

So I read this in the New York Times on-line edition last night about how these Green technologies fare during the long cold winter months.

Aside from less sunlight during the cloudy cold days of winter, it seems you’ll need to get out there and shovel not just your driveway and sidewalks but also your solar panels. They appear not to work if they’re snow covered.

So what are people doing on cold cloudy days when those panels on their roofs are covered with snow? Do they have to get up on their roof to wipe off the snow or is there a defroster that warms the panels and melts the snow which would involve additional electricity or heat which the panels are supposed to be generating?

A bus stalled in the middle of the night last winter while driving down a Colorado highway – the culprit was the biodiesel fuel that congealed in the cold weather. The bus company decided not to use biodiesel fuel between November and March.

Wind turbines can freeze up and spew large chunks of ice in all directions. Technically, they slow down and stop when they ice-up. So that means they don’t operate well during particularly cold, stormy times. This means not only are they not producing energy, workers have to suit up and go out in all manner of bad weather to fix them.

Nowhere does the article mention geothermal technology.

For those of you who might be new to the concept – and one of my neighbors misunderstood it and dismissed it, instead installing a new oil-furnace for a little bit more than it cost me to install the geothermal heat-pump (not including the well-drilling cost) – basically, water circulates through pipes buried four feet below the ground. The ground there is about 55° throughout the year, regardless how hot the summer is or how cold the winter is. This water then circulates through a heat-transfer pump that converts it into heating or cooling for my 1800-square-foot house. It needs no additional fuel and runs solely on electricity. It is quieter and cleaner than my old oil furnace, even when it was in peak condition, and there is no additional soot or greasy film being produced as has happened in apartments I lived in with other forms of oil furnaces.

By the way, a “heat-transfer pump” in a geothermal system works differently than one that takes its source from the outside air: if the air outside is below freezing, it’s not a very efficient way to keep your house at a reasonably comfortable temperature. Most of the people who groused “Bah, Heat-Pumps” were talking about air-transfer heat pumps: one website describes them as “often used in moderate climates, [they] use the difference between outdoor air temperatures and indoor air temperatures to cool and heat your home.” A geothermal heat-pump is taking it from water heated or cooled in the ground where the temperature is more or less constant.

Granted, it may not be cost-efficient to just go wild and replace that recent oil furnace, though some people are doing that in order to install a gas furnace, trading one fossil fuel for another. If you find yourself needing to replace an old system with something new, then sure, consider Geothermal! If you are a brave soul and building a new house in this economy, you ought to consider as much Green Technology in the process as you can: it may cost more up-front, but in the long run, you will save more, not to mention helping the Earth.

You don’t get it from a centralized energy-producing company delivered to your house, you don’t need to be built on top of a hot spring, you don’t need a pond in your backyard. All you need is enough ground to sink a few wells into the earth for the water pipes - my front yard has a patch less than 5 feet by 10 feet for two wells (yeah, they’re 250 feet deep, but it's still your ground) plus the trench dug up to the basement wall.

As I said before, basically I am using my own dirt to heat and cool my house.

Aside from the slight increase in electricity this is generating, my house is not producing, say, all that coal ash that needed to be hauled away (I remember the furnace of the house I spent my first 10 years in with its coal-furnace - a technology that appears to be making a comeback) or putting all the stuff you get from burning fossil fuels into the atmosphere.

I am not at the mercy of foreign oil-producing nations or of oil companies who jack up the price of gas, post huge profits, then give CEOs vast bonuses.

The only thing I’m at the mercy of is the electric company which, according to plans, is set to charge up to 40% more once the “rate caps” are lifted here in Pennsylvania. I doubt it will go up as high as fuel-oil expenses had been or might still, but of course there are still numerous ways the tax-paying citizens will be screwed, regardless.

(Don’t you love hearing at Christmastime how the big Wall Street banks, limping along on their share of the 700 BILLION dollar bailout given them by the government were still paying out hefty bonuses to their executives flying around in corporate jets? Yeah, that would test even Mrs. Cratchet’s Christmas spirit, don’t you think? But I digress...)

So I was reading the New York Times article just like I was doing during all those campaign ads and the debates, shouting back “GEOTHERMAL, you guys, TALK ABOUT GEOTHERMAL!” Jeez...

You can read the New York Times blog, Green Inc, to find out a little more about it, too. Only two posts labeled geothermal? Neither of them, actually, refer to the kind of system I have installed in my house! Hmmm... (By the way, here is another New York Times article about a highly efficient form of design, a “passive house” built in Germany.)

So, Merry Christmas – and whatever technology you use, I hope you are staying warm and healthy and happy.

- Dr. Dick

First Snow: Not Ready to Go All Piblokto on You Just Yet

Every winter, at the first snow, I remember my mother telling me how her father always told her “the date of the first measurable snowfall is the number of major snows you’ll have during that winter.” He was an engineer: he was very precise.

It doesn’t sound like a terribly scientific argument, especially considering both my mother and my grandfather were inveterate list-makers. Any lists of snowfalls during a given winter might rarely rack up to the date of the first snow. At least, in my experience.

One year (sometime between 2001 and 2006), the first snow – not the first siting of snow flurries, but the first snowfall you could actually go out and measure – was on December 3rd. We had something like ten snowfalls before the month was over, nothing really serious but all measurable. Another year, the first snowfall wasn’t until the week after Christmas but we only had three or four snowfalls the rest of the season, one or two of those being over a foot.

So this morning we had between a half-inch to an inch of snow across Central Pennsylvania, probably enough to snarl traffic, make people wonder if school would be delayed some, and think maybe they should’ve rushed out to stockpile bread and milk after they heard the forecast last night.

I never understood this Bread-and-Milk phenomenon. One night, I had to go to the store anyway and stopped on may home from work. It was after 1:00am and the store was as busy as it would normally be at 8:00pm. There was a woman with one of the large carts full of bottled water, egg cartons, several gallon jugs of milk and maybe a half-dozen loaves of bread. Maybe she was having a French Toast Block Party. And we were only supposed to get 6-8" of snow!

A chat acquaintance (not a friend, just a chattance) grew up in upstate New York (generally meaning anything north of the Bronx) but waaaaay north along the end of Lake Ontario and the Canadian Border. He said a foot of snow there is called a dusting.

When I woke up around 5:15 this morning and looked out, I wrote down on the calendar “1st Snow” and will probably keep track, if I remember and don’t get bored with it, of each measurable snowfall from now until the arrival of Spring. Will there be 20 more snows? How many of them, like this one, may be gone before noontime?

That word in my title, by the way – piblokto – is an Inuit word which means a kind of hysteria that might include “uncontrolled wild behavior,” screaming, depression, senseless repetition of overheard words and running around naked in the snow but which may not necessarily be an overreaction to the ubiquitousness of snow itself.

Tuesday night was the coldest it’s been here since last winter which was more of a shock having had temperatures in the 70s last week. It was 25° on my porch when I woke up around 5am Wednesday morning to discover that in fact my house was about double that. 55° is a tad chilly for a household temperature and I wasn’t sure, given the new Geothermal Technology that was installed in the house in August, whether the problem was the technology or something mechanical. Several people (who don’t have geothermal systems) warned me that when it got really cold out, these heat-transfer pumps can’t keep the house as warm as an old-fashioned, dinosaur-devouring furnace. But that’s a heat-pump that takes it heat from the outside air which seems a rather foolish thing to do in wintertime, considering if it’s 25° outside, there’s not much heat to transfer into the house. “Back up” or “auxiliary” heating would be more expensive and less effective. But then, my heat-transfer pump is taking its source from the pipes of water that circulate through the two 250' deep wells in my front yard where the dirt, once you get four feet below the surface, is a uniform 55° all year ‘round. Ah – did I say 55°? Does that mean on really cold days when my heat-pump fails, that’s all I can muster is 55freakin’°???

Groff’s Heating & Plumbing who’d installed the system for me called me back by 7:30am and had a guy on his way in minutes. It’s an hour’s drive from their place to mine. I had already figured out how to activate the “Emergency Heat” and in three hours got the house all the way up to 59° by the time he got here at 8:30. There was no easy explanation for what happened. It certainly wasn’t the technology nor did there seem to be anything wrong mechanically. There were no “error faults” in the system’s memory and somehow the thermostat had shut off and defaulted to a pre-programmed setting that dropped the thermostat down after 8am to 62° (huh??) and then kicked it back on at 5pm to 72°. I remembered changing that the first day it was running: I didn’t think it necessary to cool my house off in August down to 62°... So, something strange happened which the technician was kindly trying not to blame on me hitting the wrong sequence of three or four consecutive buttons accidentally and which I was trying not to blame on the cats jumping five feet up the wall and doing the same thing on purpose... Anyway, within a few hours, all was toasty warm in the Land of Dr. Dick, thus staving off the first attack of piblokto-ness of the season.

Meanwhile, I have to get back to work on the novel. Passing the 83% mark toward the goal, I managed 2,425 words this morning by 8:30, then took a break to write 942 more before continuing with the next “writing assignment.” The cats have already tired of watching the snow – especially now that the sun is out and most of it has already melted down a good bit – with three of them stretching out on the chair behind me, covered with an old sunflower afghan.

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Photos: My yard this morning - Floyd the Flamingo, not generally considered a snow bird, who is ready to come inside for the winter; the garden bench under the Japanese Maple; the dogwood outside my back door. Inside, Freddy, Abel and Blanche share the Sunflower Chair.

Going Green: The Geothermal Installation, Complete

This past week, there have been so many things I wanted to sit down and blog about, not that I was so busy (or so successfully busy) composing or, for that matter, doing much of anything. In addition to some progress on the new violin and piano piece which almost seems to be writing itself if it weren’t that I’m spending so much time working on it, I’m also closing in on the last quarter of Tolstoy’s War & Peace, having read the chapters on the Battle of Boródino a couple nights ago. The 196th Anniversary of that decisive battle is coming up a month from now (18 days, by the Old Calendar): I wonder if the town will be besieged by re-enactors – actually, the do have Boródino Re-enactors!.

Tonight, it’s off to Mt. Gretna for an 8:00 recital by violinist Maria Bachmann and pianist Natalie Zhu which will include the dramatic 3rd Violin Sonata by Brahms and the violin-and-piano version of the Chaconne John Corigliano composed out of material he used in the film score for The Red Violin, originally for violin and orchestra. John Clare, friend and fellow WITF Castaway, is flying in from San Antonio to give the 7:00 pre-concert talk!

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A week ago, it became official: the geothermal system installation is now complete!

The guys from G. & R. Westbrook came back the week before and dug the trench connecting the wells they’d dug the previous week – you can read that post, here – to the house.

The path they’d chosen would go across the front yard to the lower end of the basement in an open space long vacated by some shrubs my folks had planted 49 years ago. Not long after we had moved in, a groundhog decided this would be a good spot for a burrow. After several summers of us filling it in and him digging it out again, the groundhog (or some descendant) finally won. There’s an equally cavernous hole off the back porch with a similar history, leading us to assume that, underneath our basement floor, there was a vast warren of groundhog dens and burrows complete with front and back entrances into which, somehow, the entire house might one day sink.

The day Westbrook came to dig the wells, we were standing out front, reconnoitering the location when someone noticed a groundhog sticking his head out of the hole wondering, no doubt, what all the noise was as they brought the well-drilling machinery up onto the lawn. Curiously, in the past year I have seen a groundhog out back only three times and one out front for the first time only the day before, so I’m assuming this hole had not exactly been in the same family for whatever passes for however many groundhog generations.

They pointed directly at the curious groundhog and said “Well, I guess we’ll be taking the trench right through that groundhog hole, if you don’t mind.” It may seem like an expensive way of getting rid of a groundhog, but hey...

So on the second Thursday, they began digging the trench out front, starting at the groundhog hole, and then drilling holes from the inside of my basement wall to the outside: if you look carefully at the photo, it may look like just two round holes in a wall, but that’s light and dirt on the outside, there. (These will, no doubt, not qualify for that exciting new TV game show, “Hole in the Wall,” where, to quote an article from the New York Times, “contestants contort themselves into awkward positions to squeeze through a wall that approaches them on a conveyor belt.” Mmmm, now doesn’t that sound riveting?)

The rest of the trench digging was fairly unadventuresome, unlike the well-drilling itself with its various stages and different visuals. This was, after all, just digging a four-foot deep trench from Point A to Point B, laying in the tubing (since they’re flexible, “pipes” doesn’t seem to be the right word) and taking them through the wall into the basement where they’ll later be connected to what will, the following week, replace the old furnace.

By late afternoon, the guys had filled in the trench and leveled off the yard (as level as my yard is, in the first place), the only visible indication something had been done becoming a large brown patch of dirt in the middle of my otherwise green but not entirely grass lawn. Of course, August will not be the best time of year to be planting grass seed, so I apologize to my neighbors who will have to look at this scar for several more weeks.

Any day now, I expect the groundhog to return and reclaim his burrow.

Incidentally, the owner’s son Wes told me about one way to get rid of a groundhog. (There is even one way? It seemed nothing ever works – even if you cage them and transport them to some new habitat miles and miles away, there will always be new groundhogs in the market for new places to build.) You take an onion and throw it in the hole.

And then...?

Well, it seems they hate onions and so they’ll just abandon the hole.

That’s it? As luck would have it, I happened to have two over-ripe onions waiting to be disposed of in my fridge – where things were going “green” long before it became ecologically fashionable – and so I tossed them, bomb-like, down the two entrances off the back porch. Since I’d only seen a groundhog there a few times earlier in the spring, who knows how successful it is or when the effect of the onion will have worn off, but anyway, I “composted” the onions and presumably used nothing as lethal or longer lasting as a chemical spray or “varmint bomb.” Or a rifle...

Now we were ready for the last phase of the installation: the removal of the old technology and the installation of the new.

This had been scheduled for the last day of July and the first day of August (continuing, if necessary, the next Monday). During this time, I was not looking forward to a day or two without air conditioning. Considering I was only going to have the furnace for a few more months, I opted not to take the annual maintenance package ($200 for the furnace and $100 for the a/c, btw, an additional saving considering several people, now, have told me once they’ve converted to geothermal, instead of spending thousands on oil and on additional electricity for a/c, they’re spending maybe $400-500 for their heating and cooling all year).

You can see where this is going, can’t you?

On Saturday morning, wouldn’t you know, as it approached 90 outside, the motor that runs the central fan for the furnace and air-conditioning conked out. It wasn’t until later that I figured it was probably just a fan-belt but probably not worth a couple hundred dollars for a weekend emergency house call. Fortunately for me (and the cats), my friend N was able to figure out it was, in fact, not just a fan belt but a pulley on the motor that had come loose. While it was too late to find the right-sized fan belt that evening, I managed to track one down Sunday morning (cost: $11.99) which N was able to replace, tighten the pulley and restore the old furnace to its usual air-conditioning capabilities. And just in time for us to leave for SummerMusic at the Glen Allen Mill to hear Mozart and Beethoven!

It occurred to me, then, that not only was the furnace going to be 49 or 50 years old this fall (I can't recall when it was actually installed: the house was ready to move into in the Fall of 1959 but the roof was on by the previous fall, so...), the central air system had been installed in August of 1980. What are the odds a 28-year-old a/c compressor would soon need to be replaced, too?

Then Thursday, the 31st, arrived and with it the guys from Groff’s. I was told they’d arrive between 7:30 and 8:00 – this is a.m., a time of day previously unknown to Dr. Dick except on sleepless nights but now, having gotten used to this retirement thing, finds it completely comfortable, after going to bed when he feels tired and waking up when he feels like it. I am occasionally at the piano, now, by 7am! It is just one of many things, if you'd told me a few months ago, I would not have believed...

But I noticed this white, unmarked panel truck parked across the street from me at 7:15. With a dog in the truck’s cab. Wondering if they’d gotten here way early and what they were going to do with the dog during this process, I walked down to see what was going on. This, it turned out, was the guy who was delivering “the unit” (as it would be called, in place of “furnace” or “heat pump”) who had not one but two dogs navigating for him. He was just waiting for the installer-guys who were, apparently, running late. Well, later than he was. He had two more deliveries to make for installations further to the east.

By 8:00, apologizing for having gotten stuck in traffic, the two installer-guys arrived and wheeled the new “unit” down over my back yard (less hilly) to the lower end where the basement opens out onto the side yard. There, it was discovered the skid it was on was too wide to get through the door. Well, a chain saw and a few slices later, the skid was now reformatted to make it with 1/4" to spare...

Of course, the first thing they had to do was dismantle the air-conditioner. Of course. Now, I had run the thing, sort of like offering it a last meal, all night long, something I never do because it’s just too expensive. The object of this extravagance was to build up as much cool air inside the house as possible: if they weren’t finished until Monday, it was going to be a long, hot weekend.

Then the furnace went. Odd, when I was taking these “before” pictures that morning, I felt sad as if I’m losing an old friend who’s done nothing worse than becoming outdated by new technology. He’d worked hard and well all those decades, keeping my folks’ house warm or cool, but there was no reason to wait until he could retire gracefully before bringing in a replacement.

As they unceremoniously escorted him from the building – oh wait, maybe I don’t want to continue this analogy... hmm...

As they took out the old unit, I snapped some photographs for the scrap-book (scrap-folder?) while they complained how heavy and cumbersome it was to remove (they apparently don’t build furnaces like they used to). Perhaps they’d originally built the house around it? Could be... And maybe they had more than two guys dragging it off their truck? It took an immense effort to roll it end-over-end, clanking and banging all the way, to get it onto the trailer behind their truck.

I was able also to get a shot of the “new” fan-belt as the motor hung gracelessly out through the opening like a disemboweled liver. Since the belt was only four days old, it occurred to me maybe I should retrieve it, then wondered what I would ever need a 44" fan-belt for again?

The rest of the day was fairly routine: into the now empty corner, they began setting up the New Unit and by early afternoon they were finished for the day, coming back Friday to, hopefully, finish the job. I was concerned but also knew there was nothing that could be done about it if they couldn’t finish up by Monday.

They returned at 7:30 the next morning and resumed work in the basement. By 10:30, they were working on replacing the thermostat which took a while longer because, it turned out, the unit was supposed to be pre-programmed at the shop before they sent it out but this turned out not to be the case. Time-consuming more than anything else, by noon, they had various cables, wires, vents and tubing all connected and ready to go. Within minutes, cool air was wafting up through the air vents.

It worked!

Now, as the one guy explained to me how it works, we set the thermostat for 74 just to get it cooled down: it may take a while, he warned, since it had gotten up to 80 (it had been 84 the weekend of the fan belt).

By 12:45, they were done and cleaned up, driving the truck away.

The air was already feeling cooler than what 80° should feel like. I went down to take pictures of the New Unit which occupied maybe 2/3s of the furnace’s space. Tubing from the former holes-in-the-wall now snaked up and across the rafters, over the old ductwork, and down into the unit itself. The water in these tubes, kept at a moderate 55° by the earth’s steady temperature, will then interact with the pump mechanism in the unit (since it’s not really a ‘furnace’ by definition) to either heat or cool the air circulated through the house. This is much more efficient than transferring it from the air, as most people imagine when they hear the term “heat pump” – if it’s freezing outside, there’s not a lot of heat in the air to transfer, meaning it either works extra hard to keep you warm or it just doesn’t work at all. Likewise if you’re in the midst of a 100° heat-wave: it’s not going to cool you off very well. Unlike dealing with solar panels and lots of cloudy days, the ground temperature is steady and the water-flow is constant for this enclosed indoor unit. It just seems like such a logical choice.

Obviously, if you’re going to spend about $16,000 on it, you may not want to replace an oil or gas furnace just to put in newer, greener technology. If you’re building a new home or, like me, having to replace an old furnace with something, this is a good time to look into the possibility.

For me, the real proof, financially, will come when I get the next electric bill which could be $75-100 higher than a standard non-a/c bill (depending on the number of heat waves) and, of course, comparing next summer’s bills to the past two years’.

But the important thing is, I am no longer dependent on “foreign oil” or on a disappearing fuel that is depleting the planet’s natural resources. I am using my own dirt to heat and cool my house!

Now if I could use that to run my car...

Speaking of which, it’s time to run down to the airport to pick up John Clare! Looking forward to his talk tonight, and to catching up with him since he moved to KPAC in San Antonio – and then to some great music making! I’ll be blogging about that, later!

Going Green: The Drilling of the Wells

Yesterday was the start of the first phase of the Geothermal Installation Project at my house. The guys from G & R Westbrook Drilling had stopped by on Tuesday to look things over one more time, figuring about where things might work, getting ready to drill the two 250'-deep wells at “the lower end” of the house (what we always called the side where the basement opens out and the otherwise one-storey ranch house becomes a two-storey house: that’s how steep the grade is from the front door to the east-side property line). They confirmed they could start the process on Thursday: Groff’s would be here on the 31st, then, to do the internal installation. Westbrook’s job was to dig the wells and get the piping into ground, dig a trench from the wells to the house and then get them inside, ready to be hooked up to the heat-transfer pump (the new “furnace”).

They arrived Thursday morning to begin the job, three vehicles pulling up across the front of the yard: a pick-up truck with bales of hay and other “incidentals,” a long flat-bed with piles of drill-pipes, an odd-looking red cement-mixer kind of thing on the back, and “the driller,” the mega-truck with its tower laid horizontal over it that, when raised, would dig (as my mother would’ve said) “half-way to China” (my back-yard pass to the Summer Olympics, perhaps).

We reconnoitered on the lawn: I pointed out where the sewer connection and the septic tank are, where in relation to all this my neighbor’s well is. New concerns were needing to get closer to the house (under the shade of an old Norway Maple) which would place the second well closer to the property line and my neighbor’s well. They said it shouldn’t cause any disturbance: my concern was the vibrations rattling not just the house but the underground aquifers. With the kind of drill they use and the kind of shale this is, Ryan and his dad assured my neighbor and me this should not be a concern.

The younger brother, Wes, was walking around with a bent metal rod in his hand that looked like nothing more than a straightened-out old-fashioned wire coat hanger. Pacing along slowly, he’d come to a spot where the wire would turn in his hand to face a different angle. He would mark the grass, then, with a can of orange spray paint: this was an underground pipe. That way, they could locate the connection to the old septic tank as well.

When he tried bringing the truck up over the lawn at the lower end, the bank (which had toppled a few of us off our riding mowers over the past 48 years) proved to be just a tad too steep: the back of the driller kept digging into the grass. So the decision was made to bring it up over the front of the yard from the other, more level end at the driveway. And given the limits around the lower end, what about drilling right in the middle of the yard? Was it too steep?

I pointed out where my well was, they found a spot further down from that and another spot the requisite 12-15 feet away toward the road, moving off to an angle, for the second well. They could dig the connecting trench up to the front of the basement wall, though I was hoping to avoid drilling through this double-thick cinder block foundation wall. He assured me this would not be an issue. I was calculating how much junk was being stored on the other side of that wall, though... Well, a project for the weekend, then.

The major inconvenience, however, was going to be to the groundhog. The holes there have been in his family for generations, however long a groundhog generation may last. I rarely saw him but there he was, popping his head out the hole looking at us as if he were saying “you talkin’ about me?!” He probably was wondering what the rumbling truck was all about... Well, so he may be evicted. There is, however, another sizeable hole in the back yard, whether he’s using that one or not, I don’t know: we had joked, years ago, that there’s a whole city of groundhogs burrowing under the basement, connecting the front and back yards with a series of dens and tunnels.

So now they were ready to go. They got the truck in place, set a bunch of blocks and boards up to level the truck on the sloping lawn – and then up went the tower.

I have no idea how tall that tower actually is – it just looked freakin’ tall standing out there in the middle of my yard, next to the “Crimson King Maple” we’d planted in the fall of 1959. And 250 feet down was freakin’ deep. I remember when my folks were having their water well drilled then, it seemed like they were never going to reach water. How long would it take them to reach water now, I wondered?

They had set up a silt fence to contain any mud that would come up, backed up with a dam made by bales of hay. (For another view of this, taken afterward from the road, see below.) Any excess water would run off down to the slope and along the road, eventually just soaking into the ground.

And so it began.

With my sensitive hearing, I was prepared for one hellacious day, but considering several of my cats were spooked during recent thunderstorms and the fireworks display from one of my neighbors across the street this past 4th of July, I was more concerned how they’d react to this constant assault that could last five or six hours. Would the house vibrate so much things inside would rattle? Would my grandmother’s delicate glassware in the one curio cabinet dance off the shelves and break? Would the cats run around and bounce off the walls until everything else would break?
It was amazing that it wasn’t that annoying after all: no shaking, no rattling. Yes, it was loud, but it wasn’t as annoying as the White Noise “Noise Masking System” many office spaces use to cut down on ambience from a room full of cubicles. Some days at work, I would have a headache in 10-15 minutes, even though it wasn’t the decibel level of the “white [sic] noise” but its frequency that irritated my hearing. And yet I didn’t need to sit in my house wearing my big blue “ear protector” headset (in fact, I was able to sit in my study and even get some composing done!) - more amazingly, the cats seemed genuinely unfazed by the noise. Several of them took turns watching out the dining room window.

In 2½ hours, the guys had finished drilling the first well. They had reached water, but nothing serious: while there was a good bit of mud, there wasn’t the stream of water I’d expected to see flowing off down the hill.

Meanwhile, the guys were getting the “pipe” ready to be inserted into the well. This would be the flexible tubing the water would be flowing through, a closed system that would circulate back and forth between these holes in the ground and the heat transfer pump in the basement. It doesn’t use water from the well: these wells are just meant to keep the tubing in the ground. These tubes, then, will be connected to more tubing that will be dug into a trench, taking it up to the side of the house (by way of the groundhog hole) and into the basement.

It was in the low-90s that afternoon. I was glad to discover I could take most of these pictures from my dining room window without having to go outside and deal with the heat and noise myself. Ryan and Wes were glad to have a little bit of shade from the two trees, something they don’t always have on their jobs. By the time they were doing the second well, moving the truck further down toward the road, the sun had shifted enough that Ryan could stand in the maple’s shade while maneuvering the drill.


These are the “pipes” coming out of the first well: Wes continued unwinding them and stretching them across the yard. The excess tubing will be cut back before being joined to the lines that will be trenched in, later.

After having taken only a 20 minute break, eating their lunch under the maple tree while talking to me about how much of this they do these days. Not many people really know about geothermal yet even though his grandfather had been digging wells for systems as far back as 1985. One of their jobs is working with a developer out along Jonestown Road who’s putting in town houses, each one having its own geothermal well connected to a heat-transfer pump rather than relying on non-renewable fossil fuels to provide both winter heating and summer cooling.

Another 20 minutes to reposition the truck, and then another 2½ hours to drill the second well and soon they were inserting the tubing down into the second well. For some reason, even though this one was only about 12-15 feet away and just a little lower than the first well, they ran into water a lot sooner than they had with the first one. There was more mud but still not the flow of water I was anticipating. Like watching a cartoon, I was half-hoping they’d strike oil – then I wouldn’t have to worry about my next job, would I?

The last phase of this part of the project was something I hadn’t been expecting. They moved the flat-bed around, Wes got up and connected a water hose to the red concrete-mixer-like thing then started opening what appeared to be 50-pound sacks of... concrete, maybe? I had no idea. Schlogging through the mud, Ryan connected a larger hose from the flat-bed – looking like something a fireman would drag up from a hydrant – and stuffed it down into the first well.

This wasn’t concrete after all, Ryan explained as he held out a glob of stuff that could only be described as badly cooked oatmeal. This was Bentonite Clay, a special kind of clay that was only mined in places like Wyoming.

When mixed with water, it actually works better as an agent to transfer the heat from the ground into the tubing, making it a more efficient way to heat or cool the water in the tubes than concrete. This stuff will not solidify but keeps this yucky-looking glompy texture, giving it a greater conductability as well as flexibility if the ground should for any reason shift around a little.

After both wells were then filled with this heavy oatmeal... I mean, gel-like clay, it was a matter of sorting out the hoses and tubes, mounding some of the excess mud up around the well-tops (since this will sink down a bit as it settles), and doing what clean-up is possible after such a messy job. I kept wondering what it is about something like this that makes guys want to say “oh yeah, I wanna be a well-driller when I grow up.” But they did a great job with it and I feel much more reassured about the decision to “go green” with the geothermal technology.

The next phase is the trench-digging which Westbrook Drilling will do sometime next week and then, the following week, Groff’s comes in to take out the old dinosaur-devouring furnace and replace it with a smaller, more efficient and earth-friendly heat transfer pump.

People have told me how much they hated heat-transfer pumps, but this one works differently. Rather than taking it from the air outside – which is not an efficient source of heat in the winter time – it takes it from the water circulating in these tubes, kept at a fairly steady temperature of 55° winter or summer by the ground temperature. From there, it should heat my house in the winter and keep it cool in the summer with a minimum drain on the electricity. I can reduce my “carbon footprint” considerably not to mention my out-going utility bills.

I’ll report back here during the coming weeks as the process continues and let you know how August works out in terms of cool-air comfort and how my electric bill will compare with last year’s when I was trying to run the a/c as little as possible and not feeling terribly comfortable.

Meanwhile, if you have any questions about the geothermal technology, do some googling and find some contractors in your area. You can check a few of these links - here and here (a good one) - there is even a video on YouTube (I have to admit, since I have no audio on this computer, not yet having replaced the two sets of speakers the cats disabled in their quest for really tasty wires, I'm not sure about the Chinese subtitles, but pictures can still be worth a few thousand words...).

If the spectre of Global Warming and swimming polar bears doesn't impress you to do anything about it, think about your pocket book and the price of oil. If you're in the market to build a new home, consider including geothermal technology in the process now; if you're looking at the idea of replacing an existing furnace system, consider the options but don't discount geothermal without really looking into it. If the cost can equal a replacement oil furnace and a couple of years' oil, it sounds like a pretty good investment. Something to think about...

Going Green: The Geothermal Installation, Part 1

Like Kermit the Frog says, it’s not easy going green.

This was going to be the summer to replace the furnace in my house. It was installed in 1958 or early 1959 when the house was being built, so it’s basically 50-years old. For years, we’d hope it would limp along through yet another winter. It never failed but it was becoming increasingly inefficient. Getting replacement parts for it might involve looking for a museum, not a distributor. The time had come to say good-bye.

And replace it with what?

Between everybody talking about “global warming,” “reducing your carbon footprint” and the price of oil only likely to keep going up, I decided there was no time like the present to look into alternative energy sources. I was told a new oil furnace might cost $8-10,000, and since I was paying about $3200 to heat my house this past winter (and still only keeping it at a chilly 64° – it’s a big house), I thought it was time to look into something that would also reduce my dependence on fossil fuels, doing one small bit for the environment. Using a few compact fluorescent bulbs around the house is one thing but there has to be more to it than that.

On the one hand, I didn’t like the idea of putting solar panels on my roof – I’ve been through too many weeks of spring and winter here in Central Pennsylvania where we barely see the sun, anyway – but I figured if geothermal heating was going to work, you’d either have to be built over a hot spring (like Reykjavik) or you’d have to have lots of ground with a deep pond on it.

Then one evening I stumbled on an article at the New York Times about a recently renovated row home with a tiny postage stamp of a yard that was putting in state-of-the-art geothermal heating and cooling. An hour and much googling later, I realized, if it could work for a city home on a tiny patch of land, it might actually be a very applicable form of energy for me, since I’m sitting on 3/4s of a suburban acre. And I wouldn’t need to harness a geyser in my basement.

The principle is very simple: once you get beneath the surface, the ground is a constant temperature, year round – basically 55° – no matter what the air temperature is. So in the winter, it’s probably warmer than the air; and in the summer, cooler. There are several ways you can make use of this: you can dig trenches and lay out an array of closed-circuit pipes with water circulating through them; you can dig wells with pipes connected by u-bends that the water would circulate through; if you have a pond, you can run the pipes out into the water, but since I don’t have access to a pond, I didn’t spend too much time thinking about this one.

These pipes then enter your basement and connect to a heat transfer pump which takes the given temperature from that water (warmer in winter, cooler in summer) and transfers it into heat or air-conditioning that can then be distributed through your house. Since I already have “forced hot-air” and the ducts for central air-conditioning (installed in 1980), it seemed a natural, here, assuming the rest of it was feasible.

There were actually a few companies in the mid-state that installed geothermal heating and cooling systems. None in Harrisburg that I could find, but I contacted a couple, had them come up for interviews and give me estimates. I went with Groff’s Heating, Air Conditioning & Plumbing in Willow Street. Their sales guy explained how it would work and told me, rather than trying a series of trenches, it would be better with two 250'-deep wells but I would need to contact my own well-driller for that: then they’ll do the internal installation - we scheduled it for later this month.

Since my mother kept everything and in this case I could even put my hand on it within five minutes, I found who drilled our original well in 1958. They are, not surprisingly, no longer in business. My friend N’s father had worked for a time with Kohl Brothers as a well-driller back in the ‘40s but not surprisingly they no longer do any residential drilling. However, they did recommend a company in Boiling Springs that had been started by a guy who used to work with them – G & R Westbrook. So I gave them a call.

I talked with Mr. Westbrook’s grandson, Ryan, who said they were working on a number of projects in the Lower Paxton and Linglestown area, so he’d stop by and check out the lay of the land. This, actually, is very important to a well-driller, more crucial to him considering the size of the truck and the fact it has to be kept level. The bane of my existence when I mowed it for my folks during the early-‘80s through mid-’90s, long after I hoped to be done with yard-work (this, I said, was why I rented in the first place) this lawn has nothing that could be described as level. Two wells at the lower end of the house, by the basement entrance, would work – otherwise hemmed in by an old maple tree, the property line, the sewer line that had been installed in the ‘80s (as I recall) and the remains of the old septic tank, but relatively level.

Groff’s estimate for the internal workings was around $9700. Westbrook’s estimate for the two wells was $6000. That’s a lot of money – not to mention the fact the day after I agreed to go ahead with this, I was terminated at my job and now found myself unemployed.

But I kept thinking:

Geothermal installation = $9,700 + $6,000
New Oil Furnace installation = c.$8-10,000 + $6,000/two years’ worth of oil (at least)

So in two years’ time, basically, it would pay for itself. Right? And I have to install a new furnace now, anyway, right? So...? This IS going to work, right!?!

So far, I really hadn’t talked to anyone who’d actually installed the system in their homes. Most of what I read was either from environmentalists or were endorsements posted by companies that installed the technology.

Then Ryan told me his grandfather started installing geothermal systems in 1985 and put it in his farmhouse. It took a little tweeking then but it’s fine and he’s been very happy with it ever since – and he spends about $400 a year in heating and cooling costs. Let me repeat that – $400 a year! As opposed to the $600+ a month I was paying for fuel oil for half a year? Not to mention the spike in my electricity usage during the summer for the a/c...

Since they were going to be drilling near the property line, Ryan wanted to know where my neighbor’s well was. Now, I hadn’t actually met my neighbors yet, despite the fact I’d moved back in here in April of last year (okay, so I’m not very sociable and tend to be something of a loner – which partly explains how I survived 18 years working the evening shift on the radio). So I introduced myself and found out their well was closer to the property line than I had guessed (mine is in the front of the house; theirs was off to the one side). There was some concern that the drilling might agitate the underground water aquifers and muddy his well-water. Since he’d recently put in a new pump, this was more than just dealing with cloudy water that might take a day or two to settle. I was also concerned about the noise and how much the house might actually vibrate: my cats would probably freak out; how would his dog handle the noise?

We then talked about geothermal: ironically, just a week before, they had just replaced an oil furnace and air-conditioning unit. He had thought about geothermal but what he found didn’t seem practical. Like me, he assumed it wouldn’t really work. I’m sorry I hadn’t gone to talk to him about it in May when the guy from Groff’s had come up to check out my place. He might have decided to go green, too.

The well-drillers showed up Thursday morning to begin the first phase of the installation. Tomorrow, I’ll post a series of pictures about it and describe what it was like.

To Be Continued...