Cheap Geo Thermal Air Conditioning

let's do something interesting today today we're going to talk about geothermal air conditioning specifically simple geothermal air conditioning because when most people talk about geothermal heating and cooling they talk about the systems that we install in our homes that cost fifteen thousand or twenty thousand or thirty thirty five thousand dollars and those are great but that's not what we're talking about here today we're talking about a system that's under a thousand dollars that can heat well i guess we got to put this in btus that we're looking at 15 000 btus or better and it's a system that's going to cost under a thousand bucks now i don't include everything in that number the one thing that's not included is the excavator i have access to excavators so i don't really include that as a mean cost but if you have to rent one you're going to add another 300 bucks to this so today we're going to talk about an air conditioning system if you have some land that you can dig up that will cool your greenhouse or your garage or your house or your building and it's only going to need about 100 watts stay tuned simple tech that's the name of this channel and we have piles of other videos on greenhouses and growing and heating systems in our archives on our channel if you subscribe so that's actually why you'd want to subscribe just to see the stuff we got not that we're gonna have cool stuff coming of course we are but there's tons of stuff that you could check out now on our channel if you hit subscribe so do it and hit like too if you got a chance okay so after running this channel for a little while the number one question i get regarding cooling is how to cool a greenhouse or other structure of course in a high humidity environment now the easiest way i know how to do that is with geothermal cooling but as soon as i say geothermal cooling people start thinking oh my god this is going to cost me enormous amounts of money except that the system i'm talking about is cheap this is low grade cheap geothermal cooling that isn't going to cost you much and what's cool is we're going to explain exactly how that works so the first thing we have to figure out though is will this work in your area and how we do that is we need to know what type of material you're sitting on if you're sitting on sand or gravel or if you're sitting on clay this is going to probably work well but you need to be able to get down into the ground at least six feet preferably eight to ten and if you can dig that far into the ground and dig relatively cheaply like if you can get a small excavator that you can rent for two or three hundred bucks for the day and most areas can do that this is gonna work for you assuming you're in an area where the ground temperature is cool in canada and northern united states we're looking at ground temperatures nothing's going to get much over 12 to 15 degrees celsius with some exceptions around um areas where there's volcanoes or super volcanoes or things like that but in most areas if you dig down eight to ten feet in the northern states and in canada you're going to wind up with at least 10 degrees celsius maybe 12 where i live we're looking even cooler we're looking at about six which is amazing for an air conditioning system so i know i'm talking in the thousand dollar range to do this if you're gonna buy an air conditioner that you just plug into the wall and it's 15 000 btu look it up on amazon you're gonna be in around the thousand dollar range if you're gonna buy a heat pump you're gonna be in the two thousand dollar range i know there's bargains you can buy one used but that's an average price you're looking at to do this now both of those units are going to use an enormous amount more electricity than what this system is going to use this system is going to top out at maybe 100 watts which if you're off grid and you're running a solar system or a wind powered system this is what you want to look at for proper air conditioning this is going to cool you down in the crazy hot days that are coming not some geo air system with tubes in the ground pushing air through it now the problem with pushing air through those tubes in the ground is you're gonna pick up bacteria and mold and all kinds of weird things and they're gonna plug sometimes because they're gonna get a crack in them because they're they're four to six inches wide if the ground shifts just a tiny bit they're going to fill with water and as soon as they fill with water you can't get air through and then there's going to be all kinds of nasty things in them so this system avoids all that this system uses the water lines that you can buy cheap the same ones that feed your house so what do you need for stuff you need about 400 feet of three-quarter inch water line now if you're going to have a higher btu output you need a thicker light you might want to use a one-inch you might want to use one and a half inch that increases your cost though for this system we're going to use a three-quarter inch water line i bought 400 feet of this at home depot the other day for a little over 100 bucks i think it was 115 this is underground rated line now what else do you need above that you need a radiator you can buy a new one for 200 bucks 150 bucks but all you re if you're running a greenhouse do you care if it's new or used you can go to a car wrecker and get a radiator for under 50 bucks a large one that'll cool like a look at something the same surface area as a 1500 btu air conditioner and you're going to kick out about the same amount you need a fan a fan is going to run you 40 bucks and it's nice if you have something that can push a fair bit of heat on it you need a thermostat that works on a plug that way you can turn your air conditioner on and off so you can get the exact temperature you want in your room you can order these on amazon for under 40 bucks and lastly you need um a circulation pump and these are about a hundred dollars so i mean you add all this up we're under a thousand bucks so i mean the rest of this is time but these are not difficult things to put together you might need a few connectors too and that's it this will run your air conditioning system the most complicated thing and this isn't that complicated in this system is installing the water line in the ground if you get an excavator that can dig eight to ten feet you just spend some digging time it's fun to play with a new machine you can rent them for the day for maybe 300 bucks i don't know what they cost in your area but we're not talking a 20-ton machine here we're talking something that only needs to dig 8 or 10 feet down if you have the right ground where you live so if you're cutting through gravel or if you're cutting through sand or clay most of these excavators will do this no problem the next thing is you don't really need to have a pit or what do you call it a ditch that's dug that's safe because you're just dropping a water line into it so it doesn't have to be that wide it just needs to be a little wider than the bucket now you have to worry about sluggage but if you're digging it down and getting the line down quickly so that you can do this as fast as possible nobody's going in the hole nobody's that close to the hole you drop the water lines in the hole and away you go you put one water line deep you put a couple of buckets on top of it so you've got a foot and a half or two feet of material and there's your return lineup going back you just stretch this out and that will provide the cooling effect that you need for your air conditioning system now if you're in a northern climate you have to realize that water freezes and okay it doesn't freeze in the summer but this is a system that's not going to last just one year if you do this you're looking at a system that's going to last 20 to 40 years because you're going to use good water lines that are going to last underground so the problem comes from freezing now okay if you're eight feet down you're probably not going to freeze in the lines but where the lines come up it's going to go through the frost line and if you go through the frost line you have to have a material or a liquid in the pipes that isn't going to freeze the cheap solution to this is minus 40 windshield washer fluid you can get glycol too if you find a sail but windshield washer fluid minus 40 won't freeze you're good to go and it'll transfer the cool that you need transfers heat and anti-heat or whatever you want to call that to the radiator day in day out now you can fill it with radiator fluid too that won't freeze but that'll break the bank and we're looking at doing this relatively cheap so if you use water water will work but water freezes so keep that in mind now if you're going to use this system for heating later maybe you can use water but i suggest something that will not freeze in minus 40. what's so beautiful about this system is it's a closed system it's not an open system taking air from the greenhouse or from the outside or anything like that and that would impart all kinds of micro organisms into your air and i mean if you're breathing in stuff that has bacteria and mold or if it could possibly shut down because the ground shifted a bit and the air tubes got water in them these systems sound great but what if we had something better the geothermal liquid air conditioner works on another level there is no worries about mold there is no worries about bacteria you're just using the air that's in your greenhouse or your house or whatever you're using it's just a fan pushing across a cold radiator that's it and that radiator keeps staying cold because the cold water from the ground from the circulating pump keeps it cold it's a really simple system and it works incredibly well i'm surprised more people haven't been using this because what happens is people buy the big geothermal systems and spend 35 000 and it works great and then you're using a heat pump and the heat pump is adding an enormous amount of extra electricity but if you want to use almost no electricity and have great air conditioning this is the way to go okay if you're doing this where i live you've got a ground temperature of about six or seven degrees celsius that's not a lot for heating but when you think about it that actually is it's not great for heating your house but what about your garage i mean this is above freezing for your car it'll melt the snow off especially if your garage is insulated what about your greenhouse well if you have the ability to hold heat in your greenhouse with some insulation this is going to give you six to eight degrees celsius and if you've been using this system as an air conditioner it's gonna have heated up the ground a few more degrees you're probably going to get 10 degrees if you used it through a hot summer 10 degrees will keep your tomatoes alive i mean if you're using a greenhouse it's going to heat up by the sun naturally during the day you're going to have 20 30 degrees celsius during the day even in 30 below on a sunny day in your greenhouse but at night if you have a thermal blanket covering your greenhouse that's removable and you have some insulation on it and you have something that's kicking out 10 degrees celsius this works now imagine what you'd have to pay for 10 degrees you'd either have to cut a lot of wood or you'd have to spend a lot of money on things like propane or electricity but what if you got that out of just 100 watts running a circulating pump and a fan that's it you can run this off a solar system and a cheap battery even in the winter with low daylight now we need to do some real comparisons here to an air conditioner or a heat pump if you look around on amazon and you want a 1500 btu air conditioner i don't think you can get it under 800 bucks you're probably looking at a thousand for something reasonable and if you start going to a heat pump system which is going to use a little less electricity but nowhere near the electricity this geo thermal system will use you're going to spend at least two thousand dollars on some sort of a heat pump air conditioner or an air heat pump air conditioner for your house this system of 100 watts there's nothing that comes close to it and it will crank out crank out regularly enormous amounts of cool air and of above freezing air in the winter as well think about that think about how easy this is to install and why hardly anyone's using it the number one restricting factor is the excavator excavators are cheap now many excavators that will dig eight to ten feet down are 300 bucks for the day almost everywhere in northern canada and northern europe are in southern canada and northern united states it's rare that you're going to pay more than that and often you could hire a guy for the day to dig this in for you know 300 bucks or something like that or do it yourself so how long is this system going to last and that's a good question to ask because people say that the geo air systems that have the four and six inch corrugated tubing in the ground if they get a crack in it i mean it's going to fill with water etc etc well doesn't that happen to water lines well the material that we use for these water lines is tough it's designed to be underground and it's designed not to break whereas the corrugated tubing they don't really care if it gets a break it's designed to shoot water away not to push air around so if you're using what this tubing is designed for there are exceptions and it happens but um these things are going to last 20 40 50 years i mean okay you might have to replace a circulating pump would be 100 bucks you might have to replace a fan once in a while there's 40 the radiator most likely is going to be good for the life of this but even if you have to replace it's not that much money it's a matter of using the right materials that for what they were designed for to get your costs down and to work within a off-grid system so that your solar panels can give you air conditioning that's equivalent to spending thousands of dollars for the system and hundreds of dollars to plug in or to have a massive solar array that can run an air conditioner this is the right way to do it if you have a little bit of land and that's the key this isn't going to work in the city on a small lot you need to have an acre or two or more if you're going to do this hope to see in the next video you

Channel: Simple Tek

Views: 263,046

Rating: 4.853889 out of 5

Keywords: geo thermal cooling, low grade geo thermal, liquid geo thermal, air conditioning, ground cooling, no mold

Id: nV7XJXETr0Q

Length: 14min 57sec (897 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 30 2021