So about that geothermal heating system…

Those of you who have been with me through the winter around here know that it gets crazy cold.  The temperature drops, and it can take days for the thermometer to work its way back up to zero degrees Fahrenheit.

(Peek in some winter journal pages here if you’re about to pass out from the heat right now.)

It’s a little hard to be thinking about heating systems right now, but it’s actually our #1 priority.  If we do not have heat, we cannot live in the hangar. We cannot work in it.

But when you have a space this huge, what is the most economical heating system?

Or what happens when you open the door to let out a plane?

Whooosh.  The place is ice cold.

The hangar has always been heated by a waste oil burning system. The temperatures could constantly remain about 55 degrees with this system.  It was a seemily perfect strategy while it worked. Used airplane oil had a place to go.

Yes. Scrubbing the walls is on the mental to-do list!

Unfortunately, the system is really old; it needs serious, serious maintenance or an entire replacement with something else. As Martin’s intense I’m-a-German-engineer research found, burning waste oil is undesirable from an environmental and logistical perspective.  There isn’t enough airplane oil in the area.  The hangar’s previous owner had to rely on local businesses for used auto oil… something that’s getting harder and harder to get.

So Martin started researching other options and picking brains of all sorts of experts.

Well except not in this picture… he’s listening to his cooing nephew back on the other side of the ocean. But you get the idea.

And you know us. We’ve got three major requirements:

1. We want something cost effective.
2. We want something environmentally friendly.
3. We want an overall system that can heat two different zones: our home to a comfortable living temperature and hangar warmed to a functioning temperature.

Martin came up with geothermal open loop heating.  What is it?

Geothermal open loop heating kind of reminds me of donating plasma.  Are you familiar with how that works?  How they take the blood out of your body, remove the plasma, and put everything else back into your veins?

Okay.  That sounds really creepy!

But basically that’s what geothermal heating is. But instead of plasma, we’re snagging the heat. There’s one well that brings the warm water up to us, and another one returns the chilled water back to the ground.

Not to totally shock you or anything, but lately we’re hearing about a lot of new construction in Germany that’s incorporating this technology.

Even in March while it was still crazy cold outside, our ground water was about 55 degrees.

In the summer, the loop can extract the cool temperature from the water to cool the house.  (We will not be cooling the hangar.)  It will be the very first time I’ve ever lived somewhere with air conditioning.

When I start talking about technical matters, I start using the sophisticated language of “doo-dad” and “thingy”.  Drive Martin CRAZY! So if you want to know more about geothermal heating, this wikipeida link is pretty thorough.

The system obviously needs electricity to operate. It’s so insanely low impact otherwise. And the amount of electricity? So much less than anything else out there.

Our state offers several grant and loan programs for installing renewable energy systems in homes and small businesses. So when we’re not decluttering, we’re filling out grant forms and Martin is sketching out plans and calculations.

Our original hope was to hire subcontractors to help with a lot of the work. Everything in our plan is coming together so well except this part. We just cannot afford the labor estimates we’re getting. Hey, we’re DIYers after all, so what the heck!  It looks like it’ll be Martin, his muscles, and me.

The goal is to have the system operational by October.

You know.  Before THAT WHITE STUFF takes over the valley.

(Geothermal drawing from here.)