The most exciting part of any guide to geothermal heating systems is understanding that this form of heating and cooling a home has a couple of impressive “savings.” The system saves money, over time, by saving on energy costs much better than conventional, normal systems. It also helps to save the environment by relying on renewable energy from below the surface of the ground, in order to work.

While conventional systems rely on the air outside, which can vary drastically in temperature throughout the year, geothermal heating systems rely on the temperature a few feet below the surface of the earth. At just a few feet underground, the temperature never varies between 45 and 75 degrees, no matter how hot or cold outside.

Imagine caves. If you visit a cave in the summer, you have to wear a light jacket because the temperature is much cooler than outside on the surface. The reverse is true in the winter, as the underground temperature stays about the same, and is warmer than the wintry chills above.

Geothermal heat pumps take advantage of this fact of nature to allow the heat of the earth to heat and cool a home year-round.

That’s the idea guiding geothermal heat pumps. They transport the earth’s heat into your home during the winter. In the summer, they remove the heat from your home and discharge it into the ground.

Let me show you how they work:

• A loop, nothing more than a series of pipes, is buried underground or can be installed in a pond or lake.
• Fluid moves throughout the loop, and carries heat into the house
• A compressor in the home, along with a heat exchanger, release the concentrate energy from the Earth through a system of ductwork throughout the house
• The opposite happens in the summer, when the underground loop removes the heat from the house and back into the earth.

A geothermal heating system, admittedly, is not cheap to install.

Be ready to pay about $2,500 per ton of heating and cooling capacity. That would be $7,500 for a normal home, and most likely twice the cost of conventional heating and cooling systems. And there are still more costs – installing the loop in the ground outside. Drilling may sometimes cost about an extra $10,000 depending on the particular conditions to be found outside your home.

However, expert studies and analysis have proven that the system saves 30-40 percent overall on heating and cooling costs, paying for the initial setup investment in less than 5 years. Another option of the system, called a desuperheater, can be added to take some of the burden off your water heater and save additional money.

The desuperheater uses the excess heat created from the system during the winter to circulate to the regular water heater tank. But the absolutely fabulous thing about the desuperheater is that a free renewable energy source is being used to heat the water. During the times when there is not enough heat produced by the system, like during the spring and the fall, the normal water heater is sufficient to do the job alone. Going the geothermal route also saves on maintenance cost, since the most expensive part of the system is the most durable – the underground loop – and it is protected several feet under the Earth.

Finally, studies have shown that about 70 percent of the energy use by a geothermal heating system comes from the ground, and therefore, is renewable energy.

If you do not like using geothermal energy, or you think it is too expensive, you could do yourself a favor and get a solar energy system installed cheaply.

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