[Yamaha_R6]

Is your avitar a SHADOW ship? Maybe I'll get an avitar to, a white star. Gotta love Babylon5 BEST SHOW EVER! (Behind DS9 that is)

[Whitecrab]

Is your avitar a SHADOW ship? Maybe I'll get an avitar to, a white star. Gotta love Babylon5 BEST SHOW EVER! (Behind DS9 that is)

Yes, which makes my username an oblique pun.

[Whitecrab]

Water working as a lubricant???? I don't think so. Ever tried doing it in a hot tub? Water does anything but lube. Or so I have heard...........

I'm quite serious. The army was dumping some water down a fault at some town, and very quickly an earthquake was caused. I forget the details, sorry, I may be able to find my notes in September. But it is a real concern of scientists.
In fact, a few people floated up the idea maybe you'd want to do it intentionally. Maybe if you lubricated the faults, instead of one gigantic earthquake, you'd get several small ones. But, who are you to say which is better? And what if you make it worse? And even if you succeed, who's going to take responsibility for intentionally causing an earthquake?

[PhilBiker]

Yamaha your assumptions about solar energy and guessing about its hiostory are incorrect.
link
link
Do a google search on "History of Solar Energy" for more information.

[Crazy_Cabin_Coach]

Hi Peak Members, Kimberley, BC use to have the largest lead zinc mine in the world. It produced about 20 billion dollars before it closed. That said, there has been much controversy over a sister vein that from what I understand is found.

From what I understand it may be too deep and hot to mine for now. I know that from outfitting cabins with geothermal units that the techology is quite robust. I wonder if geothermal units are being used in the oil industry in a larger scale and with what success. This topic may be of interst to engineers, miners or investors...

[BabyPeanut]

A standard heat pump tries to work like an airconditioner in reverse. As the air temperature gets too low the performance of the unit degrades. Since below the frost line the temperature of the earth is consistantly in the 50's a heat pump using that as a source of heat will be able to function when a stander heat pump fails.
There is a group in Columbia, MD USA promoting them: link
Has anyone had any experience having one installed or using one?

[BabyPeanut]

link

[Devil]

I can possibly help. Ideally, a heatpump should have its cold end in running water or a large water body. For example, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne is heated via a heatpump (or rather several) and its cold end is in Lac Léman (Lake of Geneva).

Whether a pump would work from a buried heat exchanger depends on the strata. In most cases, you will be disappointed. You must have a source of heat energy at the cold end. The ideal would be where there was good heat conduction from a geothermal source, such as underlying magma or water heated therefrom. This is much exploited in Iceland, for example. However, the chances of finding such heat at a reasonable depth are negligible in most places. The only other hope is to find an inclined stratum of very porous rock through which there is an important water flow, so that your cold end is at constant temperature, no matter how much heat you extract from it.

The worst-case scenario is that your cold end becomes colder, in which case you may set up a snowball effect until the efficiency drops to near-zero, with no heating. This happened to a householder I know of (I have never met the guy). He bought a hectare of land and built his house thereon. He buried kilometres of water pipes over the whole land surface at about 1 m depth (at great expense!). Come the first winter, he started basking in the heat from his installation, working at 300% efficiency. By December, he started wondering why he was having problems keeping the house up to comfort level and by February he could not heat it above 15 deg C. The manufacturers came in, and found the water going into his cold end heat exchanger was at 4 deg C instead of 14 deg C, as it had been. Effectively, he had cooled down the ground over his hectare at 1 m depth by 10 deg C by heating his house up by a similar amount. There was no water flow through the land at that depth. It transpired later, when this became well-known in the local press, that the heat pump manufacturer had advised the guy not to do it that way, but he didn't listen.

[BabyPeanut]

How very interesting. It just so happens that my house is situated right across the street from a creek. I wonder if the temperature of the surrounding land on the other side of the street from the creek will be affected enough to be a useful source of heat?

[Devil]

Can you put the pipework in the creek itself? That would be ideal.

[Grasshopper]

I wonder about the riparian rights ramifications of all creekside residents taking a few calories a day through the winter from a creek. Would enough heat be taken that the water would stop flowing? Would all the heat-exchangers have to be rationed?
Seriously, I think it's a good space heating solution, which will eventually replace a lot of fuel oil and natural gas systems as the cost of fossil fuels rise. Being able to exchange heat from a large body of water, or flowing water is the most efficient approach, but if there is an aquifer (water-filled porous rock, as Devil mentioned) that you can get heat from, you are well off, too. A network of deeply trenched (more than 1 metre) piping on your own property will work, especially if there is an aquifer present (you don't have to pump the water out, just exchange heat through a loop).
You should get quotes from more than one contractor on the length of pipe and volume of system that you would need. I think I would only go this way (and I have been thinking about it) if I could install extra capacity so an especially cold or long winter would not result in the problems encountered by the bad example mentioned by Devil.

[JackBob]

I wonder about the riparian rights ramifications of all creekside residents taking a few calories a day through the winter from a creek. Would enough heat be taken that the water would stop flowing? Would all the heat-exchangers have to be rationed?
Seriously, I think it's a good space heating solution, which will eventually replace a lot of fuel oil and natural gas systems as the cost of fossil fuels rise. Being able to exchange heat from a large body of water, or flowing water is the most efficient approach, but if there is an aquifer (water-filled porous rock, as Devil mentioned) that you can get heat from, you are well off, too. A network of deeply trenched (more than 1 metre) piping on your own property will work, especially if there is an aquifer present (you don't have to pump the water out, just exchange heat through a loop).
You should get quotes from more than one contractor on the length of pipe and volume of system that you would need. I think I would only go this way (and I have been thinking about it) if I could install extra capacity so an especially cold or long winter would not result in the problems encountered by the bad example mentioned by Devil.

As I recall some of the older houses in Boise Idaho were/are heated this way. The city actually owned a geothermal "plant."

[BabyPeanut]

link

Power from the depths By Alma Gaul
The Beiderbecke Inn in Davenport's historic Gold Coast neighborhood is a 5,000-square-foot, Gothic-style mansion with high ceilings and lots of windows, built in the 1880s before anyone gave a thought to insulation.
Winter heat bills were, as you might imagine, sky high.
Then 3½ years ago, owners Dennis and Pam LaRoque had the home retrofitted, installing a geothermal heating and cooling system. Although this system was quite expensive upfront at least two times a conventional natural gas furnace their heating bills are less than half of what they once paid. We couldn't believe it, Pam LaRouque says. We love it. It was really a good deal.

link

My favorite system, the geothermal heat pump, is simply the very best there is. Most geothermal heating systems operate at close to 400 percent energy efficiency! Wow!
That's five times the efficiency of the 80 percent gas furnace. As this heat pump is extracting heat from Mother Earth, which is a constant 57 degrees, it is operating on minimal stress and using a very small amount of electricity to move the heat from the earth into the house.

With a geothermal system, you buy one unit of electricity (one unit of heat) and Mother Earth will give you three more units of heat for free. (That three units of heat is solar energy that Mr. Sunshine gave us over millions of years.) In future columns, we'll talk more about how air-to-air and geothermal heat pumps work

link

The furnace room in the new addition of West Twin Grove Christian Church west of Bloomington looks like any other. Two, shiny silver heat units purr steadily along one wall.
A series of black pipes attached to the opposite wall provide the only clues that this heating system may be a bit different from traditional natural gas or propane systems.
Standing in the new entryway of the church addition, trustee Mary Jane Miller attested to tangible differences. The temperature stays pretty constant, so Miller never feels cold.
She's also seen the first month's bill for the new, 6,000-square-foot addition -- $130 for heat and lights. Bills for the older portion of the church typically amount to $500 per month.

link

The Ithaca Green Building Alliance, Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County, and Sustainable Tompkins will present "Geothermal and Solar HVAC Strategies," where Robb Jetty of Renovus Energy, Inc. will explain geo-exchange heating and cooling systems, as well as solar hot water systems. The class will be 7-8:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 1 at the Social Services Building, 320 W. State St., Ithaca.
Geo-exchange systems use refrigeration technology and the earth's constant year-round temperature as either a source for heat or a place for heat absorption depending on the heating or cooling demand of a building. The EPA considers geo-exchange systems to be the most energy efficient and environmentally friendly way to heat and/or cool buildings. Recent advances in the solar thermal industry make these systems more efficient in "cloudy" Ithaca.

[savethehumans]

Nice to see so many "see the light," or the heat, in this case!

[Backpacker]

I work as an HVAC technician. There is one development we service that has geothermal. They work very nicely. Knowing Americans, though, they will wait until peak oil hits before they decide to go geothermal and then, of course, they will all want it done right now.