The LoLee Planet

WOW, everything was in place yesterday and today!!

Monday Feb 25
Gary Porter (Porter’s Refrigeration) showed up with his electrician buddy Joe Lewis this morning, to run a couple lines to the heat pump. It kind of sucks that our service is only 100Amp, but we made it work. We may need to upgrade to 200Amp service down the road, but we’ll see…..

Just as Joe was leaving, Dave Archer (Archer Pumps) called to let me know that he and his guys will show up in about an hour. The pump we’re putting in is this Berkley continuous duty one. We originally got a quote from another plumber in town but the price was a lot higher than what we had expected. That being said, this plumber was quoting me a top of the line variable speed pump that would be much more energy efficient because when the heat pump is not running, you don’t really want to pump water at full speed for domestic use. But we don’t have that much budget for this system, and we unfortunately have to trade-off with lower efficiency. It only took about 2-3 hours to get the old pump out and the new pump in, and the old pump surely looked beat up! The old pump is 19 yrs old, apparently could go anytime. I’m impressed that the well is only 6″ and the flow rate that the water in the well report indicated a 20GPM flow! that seems like a lot of water from the little well!

While the well pump was getting installed, Doug with his bobcat on a trailer showed up. He’s going to dig a trench for us to drain used water from the geothermal system. And the digging wasn’t as easy because we got some limestones inches below the grass! He spent all afternoon, but a part was broken around 4pm and he had to stop. He’s coming back tomorrow to finish it.. He’s a very nice guy, and it’s pretty cool watching him operating the bobcat. i’d want to try it one day! Our backyard looks like it’s in a real bad shape right now, and Laifu’s not allowed to go there as part of the fence was taken out…

Unfortunately we didn’t end up having heat today, and we go back to the space heaters/timers like we’ve been doing for the past 3 weeks. we’re really getting used to that life!

Tuesday Feb 26
Gary showed up around 8:30AM, and he put in the new fancy touch screen thermostat. The old programmable one wouldn’t work because the geothermal has 5 stages fan which is uncommon for typical furnaces. And then, they drilled a hole in the wall, connected the line where the geothermal waste water to the 6″ plastic drain pipe in the backyard. As the duct connecting the geothermal and our original duct still need to be made, we needed a temporary solution. So here it is….. don’t you love the cardboard boxes and duct tape? OK, in this case, it was aluminum tape.

AND YOU KNOW WHAT…. AT AROUND 1:30PM, WE GOT HEAT!!!!!

Now that’s the most exciting thing today, since Canucks didn’t make any crazy trades, and the Government hasn’t released the new budget…. Wow, can you believe it? I almost thought we’d be living by space heaters till the spring! As I’m writing this blog entry, Doug is still working in the backyard, but it won’t look pretty when he’s done. We’ll have to manually move most of the limestone when the weather warms up, and get him out again to help us remove the extra stuff that’s there right now.

I’m grateful that everything worked out and guys working in the cold weather for us…. Next time if I buy a house and knowing that I’m going to get a new heating system, i shall get everything installed BEFORE i move in =P.

Here are a couple pictures…. and more in the Picasa album

Yesterday we walked onto Colin’s Lake, which is the lake that’s real close to where we live. It was frozen solid as there were trucks and minivans parked on it while families were ice fishing. It was actually a really nice day! Sunny and calm. Jason said this was his first time on a frozen lake, and i think it’s also Laifu’s first. We took lots of pictures that you can check out here, but as you can see right here, Laifu needs more socializing…. she’s grown too anti-social since we moved to the country!

Just a little update on our cold lives. It’s been three weeks since I left Winnipeg which was -50oC with wind chill but I got to stay in the warm hotel room most of the time that I wasn’t working. It’s also been three weeks that our furnace stopped working (and 2 weeks+ since it completely stopped working). Now three weeks later, we still have no heat and we’re kept warm by a few ceramic and oil space heaters kindly lent by friends.

How hard is it to put in a new furnace? You’d think that a new furnace can be put in within a few hours! Well, we did not just get a new propane furnace, we decided to go with a ground source geothermal heat pump.

What is a geothermal heat pump? There’re lots of good articles to read about, such as this one from the Office of Energy Efficiency of Natural Resources Canada (NRCan). The bottom line is that it is much more energy efficient to heat/cool one’s house with the help from the earth, which is a great heat insulator and thus has a constant temperature throughout the season. In the winter time, this temperature is about 10oC in Kingston Ontario. Due to the dullness of the earth not changing it’s temperature just a few metres below grade, it would be great to use this energy. So how do we get that 10oC “heat” from the earth? There’re several methods detailed in the above link. What we do is using our well water and pumping that water into a heat pump, which is at a similar size and outputs hot air magically like a furnace. This is the physics behind it: the heat from the well water is transferred into some refrigerant through a heat exchanger, causing the refrigerant to boil (at a very low temperature). Then, this vapour is compressed and becomes hot due to compression. Now the “hot” refrigerant vapour goes through a condensing coil and heats up air passing through which then goes into the duct work like a typical furnace. Now the refrigerant releases most of the heat it has, and becomes a liquid again. The well water we pumped into the heat pump is discharged. This cycle continues and that’s how we heat up our home. In the summer time, the process reverses and we get air conditioning.

Back to reality, it’s been more than two weeks since we ordered this Water Furnace heat pump from a local geothermal heating company in Kingston. Along with the furnace, we also need to do a few things: upgrade the well pump to supply enough water for both geothermal and domestic water usage, extend the electrical lines to the geothermal unit as it runs on electricity, and dig a trench where the used water from the heat pump is discharged. The heat pump finally showed up last Friday (yes, 7 days ago), but the coordination with the electrician, plumber, and digger seem to have taken longer than expected. Most recently, we were blown away by a plumber who wants to charge us almost $3,000 for a new well pump. You know $3000 can almost buy me a new normal furnace!! Anyway, I think i’ll get the pump installed this weekend by a friend’s friends, and the digger and electrician will show up next Monday. So next week I should be real happy.

At the mean time, the heat pump is in the house and the old furnace is out, and we have grown much thicker skins to fight the winter.

It always strikes me how I love to complain! When life is good and all that, there’s nothing to blog about….

Jason and I moved to the country close to Kingston (yes Kingston is NOT considered country) on January 4th, 2008, and have been enjoying the dark nights with absolutely no street lights, every square centimeter of the one acre land, and of course, the million dollar view of the lake. Life is so calm and peaceful that even Lai-fu is learning to appreciate all these!

After the initial joy ride, we are now in a bit of unlucky stretch. First the furnace broke (in the winter, yes), and Jason and I have been trying to fix it. We are engineers, we can do it! Results? we’ve been having very limited heat from the furnace in the last few days, and it’s completely not working at this moment (though I’d like to believe that I’ve just figured out yet another solution!). Currently we have three space heaters running, and we have at least once gone to bed with hoodies. Luckily it hasn’t been too cold, just lots of snow =p. With the snow storms, it’s been more difficult to drive. Tonight, when I was coming home from dinner at friends’ house, I was being extra careful as the blowing snow condition made it hard to see and slippery to drive. Everything was fine until I got to my 40m drive way… I tried turning into the drive way and the car totally went out of control and slammed into a one of the 1m tall snow banks that were like the gate posts before I was in it! I swear tonight is the night that I swore the most in my entire life….. I tried digging the car out, but no movement after 45min. I called Jason, who’s working overtime, to come home to help. This was about 9pm. By 10:50pm, we finally got the car out… we used sand, old carpet, lots of shoveling and snow-angeling beside the front wheels (with our feet underneath the car, of course)… This is the one day that I really wish I had a rear wheel drive. or even an AWD! After all the hard work, we did get warmer so that we can sleep well tonight, maybe without the hoodies!
I wish i had some pictures to share but i really wasn’t in the mood to take any. For consolation, here’s a picture of Jason using the snowblower we have (we also have a ride-on lawn mower and a chain saw, beware!).

Finally, Happy Chinese New Year!