The LoLee Planet

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.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 3:39 pm and is filed under Geothermal Heating and Cooling, Our lives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.