I used to have a pond in Taiwan, very industrial looking as it was a ceramic tiled cement box with the size of 6′ x 6′ x 2′. We had a Brazilian turtle “Red Stripe”, who preyed on dog kibbles, half dead cockroaches, and gold fish. Well most of the time he just ate dog kibbles and did the 360 degree turning trick when I fed him. I also had to assist on getting his other food source: I remember trying to not-kill cockroaches with my slipper so that my favorite turtle can enjoy it. I also remember biking to this little aquarium in town, buying a bag full of gold fish, and then watch the turtle chasing the them. I regularly rearrange rocks that I stole from the river bank in the middle and at the corners of this pond so that the fish have places to hide. I don’t remember ever seeing Red Stripe getting any fish, but I do have to buy new fish periodically.Now 15 year later, I have a new pond! It comes in an irregular but man made plastic box that gets inserted into the ground in our front yard. It’s besides a few trees and it even comes with a small fountain (or a cheap pump that will move the water). Sadly since we’ve acquired the house, it’s been ignored and has become home for millions of mosquito babies. So I did my research, and thought to myself that I’d buy a few “mosquito fish” to eat those larvae. But I never come across to cleaning the pond. Finally this weekend, I went out to purchase mosquito fish only to find out they don’t exist in Kingston. I also found out that gold fish would do the same. It’s been two days, I haven’t observed any dead fish and I can still see moving larvae in the pond…….     And I was just thinking….. 15 years later, another engineered pond, another bag of gold fish, maybe with some half dead cockroaches and a turtle, I would be back to my childhood….    Back to reality. I’ve also included some pictures of my veggie garden. Things are doing really well, as you can see it’s very green =p. Dill and Cilantro look like they’re growing like weed, and what’s up with the four head of Nappa Cabbage?! They look nothing like what I buy in stores…. But they taste pretty good - more like bok choy than nappa, that’s for sure. Oh yeah, I also have zucchinis, cucumbers, and strawberries for this arbour. More pictures are on the Picasa page.

 Oh yeah, we also bought a canoe… so here it is…

You remember how we almost moved to Hawaii last year! Well, if we weren’t ready, certainly Laifu was. And all of you who want to visit us only because we’re in Hawaii =p. And believe me we’d love to have you visit us in Honolulu too!

If you don’t know why I’m still in Kingston, the story went like this:
Flora contacts Craig
Craig offers exciting opportunities in Hawaii
Flora gets excited
Flora gets Jason excited
Flora and Jason look into real estate and surfing classes (exciting!!)
Flora and Craig exchange emails and phone calls madly
Flora gets Laifu ready for immigrating to an island (needs to get blood tested at least 3 months before moving and the test must be done in one specific lab in the US)
Craig disappears and Flora/Jason/Laifu stay in Kingston

So, a little more than one year later (now), Craig and I got in touch again!

This time, Craig offers an exciting opportunity (yes this sounds familiar, doesn’t it!)! But one has to be aware of the fact that things may just fall through the exact same way. Either I’m too stupid, or I just REALLY want to visit Hawaii! I am still pumped about the potential opportunity, but I know I should not be too optimistic until I get to meet Craig face to face and get some actions on paper. So I will update if there’s any exciting news, or i’ll update next year this time when I talk to Craig again ;=D

We finally got all the bills a week and a half ago for the geothermal heat pump and related work done. It took a while for the job to be done, but it also looks like they’re not in a rush for the money! It’s funny how things work in a smaller city/town. No one asked us to pay ahead of time, and most of them did not even give me a bill right after the job is done. You could say they know where I live so they can always find me… well, almost! At least for the well pump, he had to call and ask where to mail the bill because he’s lost my address!

And you ask if it’s worth it (financially) to put in the geothermal heat pump? Let me break down the cost first and provide a very rough estimated pay-back time for you. A more thorough analysis will follow after I take some actual data of my energy usage at home. This study is under a few assumptions:

1. The compared system to my WaterFurnace Envision geothermal heat pump is a 93% high efficiency propane furnace. It would be the furnace that qualifies for the same EcoAction grant that I’m getting, and I’ve actually got one or two quotes on it.

2. The cost of propane is 81cents/L as stated on my receipt that I have recently got from my propane supplier.

3. Estimated propane usage per year is about 2000L, which is based on the usage of the previous owner, and also from the Ontario Ministry of Energy website. I took the high efficiency propane furnace there for an average sized home. The estimated geothermal heating cost is $500 instead of $810 from the website because our heat pump is rated with a 5COP instead of 2.8 listed there, so I thought that would be a fair estimate.

4. AC cost is also based on the MOE website for an average home with a conventional electric AC for an average sized home. Our heat pump is rated to have 30EER, so I also think $100 is probably reasonable.

5. Hot water cost is also based on the MOE website, and we’re going to put a 50% saving for this table.

6. It should be noted that for this calculation, we’re assuming both electricity and propane price don’t change in the time to come =p.

So here you have it. We’ll give you a much more detailed and realistic study in the future, but I think a 4.21 years pay back time is not too shabby at all! And, we really think we can beat it!

This Tuesday Gary and Larry came to complete the last two pieces of the geothermal system puzzle - the “real” duct work and a desuperheater. Now “desuperheater” sounds like a funny word, what does it do? In short, it is another heat exchanger that pre-heats the domestic hot water. It re-routes the cold water intake from the source and pre-heats that cold water when the geothermal unit is running. It works the best in the summer time when the geothermal unit works as an air conditioner. Most systems can provide 100% free hot water in the summer time! This is because the heat removed from the house would otherwise be lost into the ground if not used to heat up water. In the wintertime, the desuperheater pre-heats water by using a portion of the heat that would otherwise be used for space heating, which means it’s not free. But this process is significantly more efficient than using an electric hot water tank (which is what we have). Although a desuperheater may not be sufficient to provide enough hot water to a family of 5 in the winter time, Jason and I have actually unplugged our electric hot water tank and we’ve been having enough hot water for shower, dishes, and other uses just from the desuperheater. We’re pretty amazed!

Now an important note is that the desuperheater does NOT work when the geothermal unit is not running, therefore we still have to heat our hot water tank with our hot water tank in those seasons. Overall, heat pump desuperheaters can save up to 50-60% hot water heating bill. For comparison, a high efficiency electric resistance water heaters can reduce heating bills by only 10 - 20% over a minimum efficiency one. You can read more about them on NRCan website.

Alright, enough boring stuff, here’s our sleek new geothermal, completed in style! You can also find them in the Picasa Album.

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

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.