Midweek

[altivo]

Splitting Wednesday's shift seems to have made the bad middle of the week stretch over into Tuesday and Thursday as well.

Big hay wagon still sitting in the arena, I don't think we'll get to it until Thursday at the earliest.

Flax still waiting to be put in water. Cold rainy weather makes it seem pointless, since warm sunny time is needed to accelerate the retting process. But I'd like to get that part done before winter sets in for real, so the retted stalks can dry out over the winter and be completely dry in preparation for hackling and scutching.

Heat pump still on the fritz, waiting for a replacement relay board. Cold enough tonight to need the woodstove for comfort. Rain continues, but is supposed to finally end tomorrow afternoon. Maybe.

OK, back to a spot closer to the stove. It's chilly in here.

Comments

[frith]

It sounds like you're spending a lot of money on that heat pump. Have you or will you see a net reduction in your energy cost?

[altivo]

Sure. The pump has been in place for ten years. Over that period, it has saved a huge amount on summer air conditioning and a noticeable amount on winter heating. There have been five service calls, and the current problem is the first one that involved failure of an actual part of the pump itself.

Total amount spent on service over ten years is under $600 so far. For ten years, that seems not bad to me.

[frith]

$60 a year is a good deal, assuming you didn't spend $10,000 getting it installed. 8^)

[altivo]

It cost $9000 to install, what with drilling the wells and everything. But we needed to replace a 20 year old unit that was dead, and the conventional unit would have been $5000. So the actual extra cost of the geothermal was about $4000. We saved that much on electricity in the first 3-4 years, and have continued to save at the same rate since. So it did pay off.

[frith]

Since I don't use electricity to cool my house in the summer, it would probably take me at least 16 years to break even with geothermal, assuming that I could heat my house at least 90% via geothermal. Reliable, cheap, Quebec hydroelectricity is hard to beat.

[altivo]

Unless you live over a hot spring, you probably wouldn't get a good deal on geothermal in a Quebec winter either. We are just marginal here. The very cheap air conditioning in the summer (which is mostly useful because it removes humidity) is extremely useful here, though.

We have a woodstove as well to provide auxiliary heat when it gets really cold. Our house is smallish and the stove can usually raise the temperature enough so that the geothermal doesn't run much.

[frith]

This makes me wonder just how much hot air we are made to swallow with the numerous (government funded) geothermal units we have on site at work. I don't remember ever seeing hard figures, but these units are supposedly heating the hippo pool and neighbouring buildings as well as other newer buildings here and there, and this for, like, "free". I wonder if we'll be told in ten/fifteen years that building X is getting torn down and by the way, the heating bill was in the 100's of thousands despite the geothermal wells, so rejoice because we're going to save money. >8^(

[altivo]

I can't guess without a lot more detail on the design of the systems. "Geothermal" is a very broad term and can mean a lot of things. What you have there could be quite different from what we have. Our system is certainly an improvement on the conventional air-to-air heat pump that is widely used in milder climates in the US, but it isn't as advanced as some systems can be.

"There's no such thing as a free lunch" is generally true though. Unless you are blessed by a particularly lucky location, geothermal heating or cooling is only a reduction in costs, not an elimination. It can't possibly be "free." It uses electricity to operate a compressor, and fans to circulate air or pumps to move water, for instance.

On the other hoof, if you are looking for a high tech way to go completely "off-line" from the power grid, it's a good building block. Combined with wind or solar power sources, it can do that. Installation costs are larger, though, and all mechanical systems require maintenance and repair at intervals.

[merik]

Heat pump still on the fritz,

When I first read that, I thought it said heart pump, which made me wonder if there was something going on that I'd missed reading about. I guess I need glasses, sleep, a good dinner, or some combination of the three. *chuckle*.

[altivo]

Um, no, thank goodness. Nothing like that here.

Our geothermal system has a failed relay board and we're waiting for the replacement to come in. Meanwhile, the woodstove serves nicely at night.