Alternatives to Oil Heating that aren't Natural Gas.

Erronius_sl said:

Err...that's part of the point? It's like you had the presupposition that heat pumps are integral to any geothermal system (weren't always), then added that in your post (standalone + 'with heat pumps') then seemingly still don't understand that maybe the reason he didn't mention heat pumps (and you did) is that he was thinking of geothermal sans heat pumps? Which is exactly why I said what I did.

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The vast majority of geothermal systems for residential and commercial heating outside of geothermally active areas use heat pumps these days. Otherwise there's little point in doing a geothermal system. "Cool" geothermal systems without heat pumps are pretty much nonexistent. It seemed fairly obvious that Pancreas just didn't really know a lot about what the term "geothermal" is most commonly meant to mean these days:

Pancreas_sl said:

Geo Thermal really doesn't work as a stand alone heating system last I knew.

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He just flat out doesn't know much about current geothermal systems, which is fine. However going back to one of your previous posts makes me wonder what the fuck you were even talking about:

Erronius_sl said:

I think he was considering actual heat pumps to be separate and that a loop + heat pump wouldn't be a "standalone" system. I don't have a horse in this race but /shrug.

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You sure seem to think you have a horse in the race, jumping in here lecturing me on shit that no one ever said. Again, no one mentioned heat pumps till I did. Pancreas simply said that geothermal can't be a standalone system. That is incorrect. End of story.

Erronius_sl said:

Well, let's not even make assumptions that his current ductwork is correct, for all we know it's 50 years old and undersized.

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Yeah, if anything older duct systems tend to be vastly oversized, especially if he has updated the windows, insulation, and sealing. Back in the day no one did heat loss calculations for a house. They used rules of thumb. One I was told about in tradeschool was that you parked across the street from the house, but your hand up at arm's length and however many fingers it took to cover the house was how many multiples of 25,000 btu's you needed for the furnace. That was probably apocryphal, but it's not uncommon for furnaces, boilers and the like in residential systems to be over double what they actually needed to be if a proper heat loss calculation for the house was done.

Erronius_sl said:

And the reason that having properly sized ductwork - and avoiding the heat pump needing to run 'longer' - is that again you're pushing it away from running as efficient as it can.

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Most heating systems are at their most efficient when they run the longest, believe it or not. At design temperatures (coldest 10 days of the year), the heating system should pretty much be running continuously. Otherwise it's a good indication that the system is significantly oversized, which leads to more standby losses, chimney priming if it's combustion, and so on. You actually don't wait a heating system that short cycles continually during the coldest days of the year, because that means on more temperate days it's going to cycle a shit ton. You know as well as I do and probably better that motors starting and stopping continually is hard on them.

Erronius_sl said:

Not to mention the issue with the maintenance on the pumps being one of the cons of that type of an installation...now you'd potentially be forcing those pumps to cycle longer and sustain more wear because it has to sit there and run longer.

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Decent quality small circulators these days run for decades with little or not service required. It's pretty impressive how good they've gotten. Hot water heating systems generally have pumps that run continually the entire heating system, whether or not heat is being input. This isn't a problem.

Erronius_sl said:

I mean, you do plumbing right? Surely this must be somewhat analogous to what you have to deal with on some level.

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Yes, which is why I specifically said "the system has to be designed by a professional" in my first fucking post. All of the above shit would be taken in to account, and depending on the exact design of the existing heating system it may or may not make sense to convert from oil-fired to geothermal. I wasn't suggesting it was some sort of magical perfect solution to his issues. All I was simply doing, going back to the beginning of this post,was pointing out that geothermal is a potential option and that it can function as a standalone heating system under the right circumstances, if properly designed by a professional.Pancreas said something that was flat out incorrect, and I stepped in to correct him, and expanded a bit on some of the advantages and disadvantages as compared to electric and natural gas heating (don't know fuck all about oil systems, they pretty much don't exist in my market). That's it.

What crawled up your ass?

Tuco_sl said:

Yeah I forgot to warn about that. We accidentally sealed up one of our pipes and had to rip off parts of the ceiling when it got cold enough to freeze the pipes. If we didn't notice it right away it might have burst.

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Where was that pipe running? Nothing within your building envelope should ever freeze. Nor should there be plumbing run in an attic (which is outside your building envelope) or any other space that has the possibility of freezing.

What is Geothermal without a Heat Pump? Utilizing underground air currents? Magma floes?

The Ancient_sl said:

What is Geothermal without a Heat Pump? Utilizing underground air currents? Magma floes?

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There's "hot" geothermal, which is common in Japan, Iceland and a few other seismically active places. Otherwise, yeah, geothermal without a heat pump is virtually pointless. When anyone refers to "geothermal" these days, it's with the use of a water to water or water to air heat pump and a geothermal borehole, field, or pond.

This is what you are missing Erronius.

Eh? No one even mentioned heat pumps until I did, I don't think. Pancreas specifically said that he didn't think geothermal can warm your house up past the ambient temperature of the geothermal well.That's false.

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Either Pancreas meant Geothermal Heatpumps(he probably did) and he's incorrect or he didn't and it's a strange thing to even discuss.

Eyashusa_sl said:

Drafts are the biggest issue we are dealing with in our house right now. All the upstairs windows are new(er) but the rest of the house has the original windows from when the house was built in 1966. I bought one of those kits for 10 bucks that's basically double sided tape and saran wrap to seal the windows with... hopefully it works.

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We bought some of that seran-wrap looking stuff last winter to put over our basement windows. Rest of the house has new-ish windows, but the basement windows are old as hell. The stuff didn't really do a whole lot. Obviously thin plastic wrap isn't much of an insulator. If the windows are SO bad that you can physically feel a cold breeze coming through them, it'll stop that for sure, but it doesn't really keep things much warmer, it just stops physical air flow.

On a side note, we rented a place in college that was so drafty, we wrapped theentireexterior of the house in Saran wrap. One of my roommates Dad had a couple huge rolls that they use to wrap groceries on pallets.

We left at the end of the semester, and the house got torn down. Wish I had a picture.

I have two heat pumps on my house in N. AZ. I never turn them on because they suck electricity and when it gets colder than 40 outside, they don't work as heat pumps anyway, only as large resistance-type electric heaters. $600+ electric bills in the dead of winter are possible. No gas or propane.

Instead, I use a pellet stove. I use 3 tons/year, about $700 to heat my house from Nov to almost April. In addition, I use space heaters like an electric fireplace in my den where the TV is. Pellets are relatively cheap, clean to store (no bugs), very clean burning (no smoke) and usually made from waste wood, if that environmental angle is important to you. I will also add that the flame has the ambiance of a blowtorch and the unit is noisy (two fans) so it's OK that it's in a room away from where I am when it's on. Mine is a fireplace insert.

Eric

lurker_sl said:

I have two heat pumps on my house in N. AZ. I never turn them on because they suck electricity and when it gets colder than 40 outside, they don't work as heat pumps anyway, only as large resistance-type electric heaters. $600+ electric bills in the dead of winter are possible. No gas or propane.

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Those would be air to air heat pumps. As has been discussed, they're generally not very good for heating in colder climates. They've improved recently though, some of them do have a COP of around 2 even at -20C, so they'd still be better than straight electric heat utility cost wise. But those are pretty recent.

Here's an interesting report that compares the utility costs of various fuels. I only briefly looked at it, but could make for interesting reading if you want to take the time:http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56393.pdf

The ground source (geothermal) heat pump has by far the lowest utility cost. A 90% efficient natural gas furnace was roughly tied with the high efficient, new fangled air to air heat pump, which I found surprising (an older, less efficient one cost 60% more). Electric heat was ridiculously expensive, and fuel oil fell somewhere in the middle. Of course all of those comparisons will be significantly impacted if the utility cost assumptions differ from your reality.

Set fire to the curtains.

Erronius_sl said:

I didn't miss it. And I never said he was "correct", people need to stop making retarded assumptions. I was trying to point out EXACTLY WHAT YOU JUST SAID HERE, except I didn't feel like splitting hairs a la Eomer and trying to drag Pancreas through the mud when it's possible this is what he meant. Hell, I even left the door open for a debate over "standalone" versus "heat pump + loops".

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I wasn't trying to drag him through the mud. I was pointing out that he was wrong. He doesn't need you to white knight him. And once again, "standalone" geothermal systems as you seem to suggest basically don't exist, so why talk about them?

Erronius_sl said:

Bullshit, LOL. If you're a plumber then you should be aware of the use of direct thermal, and that doesn't...need...heatpumps. I remember running into a couple direct systems during remodels up around Niagara Falls in the '90s. That or you've just never ran into it yourself. Of course heat pumps are more common NOW, but that's really a recent development and part of why there's been a surge in interest and popularity in the last decade or a bit more. Pretty sure what I've seen were just for summer cooling and not heat, and they weren't even tied to ductwork at all (radiant). I also vaguely remember there being boilers as well but I can't really remember for sure because there were FUCKING PLUMBERS IN EVERYONE'S WAY.

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Maybe such systems exist in extremely small numbers for cooling only. It would make no sense for heating, because the ground temperature is generally around 50F give or take a few degrees, in most locales. You simply can't heat with that, but sure it would work great for cooling. We were talking about heating though.

And no, I haven't ever run across any geothermal system without heat pumps, for either heating or cooling. Most likely because the climate here has very high heating and cooling loads, and such a system would be useless for it.

Erronius_sl said:

Emphasis on "most", but the problem with any sort of heat pump + oversized ducts is that you're going to get fuck all out, even if it runs 100% of the time. It would be like asking an asthmatic to inflate a hot air balloon with his lungs. ESPECIALLY when we're talking the much lower heat from most heat pumps. And then you get the phenomenon of homeowners trying to fuck around with changing the thermostat when it gets too cold and it doesn't seem to be getting warmer...they turn it up a little..then a little bit more...then when it gets too hot they get pissed because "this system sucks and doesn't work for shit, I want my old furnace back". I mean sure, you don't want a heat pump short cycling, but you don't want it to run 24/7 either.

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Not really sure what you're getting at here. If the ductwork is oversized, all that's likely to happen is that the air velocity in the duct will be lower. The volume of air delivered probably won't change appreciably. It would have little or no effect on the overall performance of the forced air heating system.

Erronius_sl said:

You need to go back and read what my very first comment was. I wasn't ever arguing right/wrong, but you couldn't let it go and now here we are.

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My initial response to your post was quite short, I agreed that I was off on the COP's (I must have been thinking SEER ratings or something), said that it was quite possible that his existing ductwork would be fine and was not snarky at all. Your second response got all cunty, which is what pissed me off.

Let's make out and call it good.

Bottle hot air over the summer and release it when it gets cold out.

Seal up each room nice and tight, put on sweats and light the pet on fire. If you have a goldfish sucks to be you.

Oh you were serious. We use natural gas, it is great. Then the power goes out and you have heat and no way to get it around the rest of the house. Each of the plans has advantages and disadvantages. You just have to find the one that fits what you want the most. Geo is a cool idea and very green. But it costs a lot. Pellets are cool, then you need to get rid of the ash. Oil is wonderful til you get the bill, and of course black lung. (Kidding) Cutting wood and such is cheap, then you die of a heart attack on some logging trail somewhere.

Good luck!

I have a buddy who basically designs geothermal systems up here in WA. We discussed this in depth, but it was during a drunken camping trip last summer so I don't remember a lot of specifics/details. But the tl;dr version is that he designs a lot of systems for rich Microsoft/Amazon/Boeing people who put them because the technology is cool and it is green and whatever, but the cost efficiency isn't nearly good enough for mainstream replacement of traditional sources as of yet. IIRC it is mainly the installation costs (digging the wells or whatever the fuck you have to do) that washes out any savings you might get on operating the system.

He just bought a new house and could have designed the system then gotten all the equipment and installation done at cost and he said he mathed it out and it still would end up costing way more over the lifetime of the system than just using natural gas (at today's prices obviously). Right now the technology is a neat option for the rich, but to pricey for your average pleb.