Geothermal Cooling Tricks and Hacks

let's do something interesting today today we're going to talk about geothermal air conditioning tricks and hacks in particular because i have other videos on geothermal air conditioning this video is going to focus on a lot of the questions that have come up from the previous videos as well as some little tricks and hacks that can answer some of the biggest questions that people have about low-grade or cheap geothermal cooling or air conditioning because what this system does is it uses ground heat or ground cooling temperature rather than using a heat pump and when you add a heat pump they work don't get me wrong whether heat pumps using a liquid or an air type system heat pumps can really work well but they use a lot more electricity than what i'm suggesting with this system and my system won't work in all areas so what i'm gonna offer in this video is how to do some quick tests to see if there's a good chance of the cheap low-grade geothermal air conditioning system working where you live simpletech that's the name of this channel and we have piles of other videos on greenhouses and growing and heating and cooling systems in particular for greenhouses and growing in our archives they cover an enormous amount of subjects so if you hit subscribe and start sniffing through there you're gonna get what you're looking for and more that being said if you like this kind of content hit the like thanks so the number one question i've been getting whether it's in the comments or whether it's in emails to me or whether it's from facebook and sending me messages through there on my account is how do i determine my ground temperature and is there a way to figure out how cold the ground is where i live without hiring a backhoe first or without hiring an excavator and digging up my yard or just you know going crazy and grabbing a shovel and digging down five feet you can do that it's a lot of work or it's gonna cost you a few hundred bucks to use a backhoe or an excavator to figure it out but there's a relatively easy way to find out your ground temperature and it's not going to work for everyone but it's going to work for most places i mean most people looking at this type of a system have an acre or more of land um they may be on a municipal water system or you may have your own well in either case the majority of people will have water coming through the ground and into your house well that water in many cases is either if it's coming from the ground it's the ground temperature or if it's traveling through a municipal system it's traveling enough distance actually it's probably traveling at great distance through the ground that it's going to pick up the ground temperature so the easy way to find out what your ground temperature is is to put a thermometer under your cold water tap let your cold water run for two to three minutes by doing that you're gonna get it's gonna slowly the water that's in your lines is gonna heat up in your house and what's there so if you run the water for two to five minutes it's to come back much closer to the actual temperature of the water that's in the ground well if you take a reading of what that temperature is suddenly you have a good idea now it may not be exact we might be within a degree or two up or down depending on your circumstance and what's there and a host of other things but it's gonna be very close so put a thermos a thermometer underneath your cold water tap after it's been running for five minutes and that's gonna tell you what your ground temperature is or very close to it the next question that i get has to do with well is i don't have an enormous amount of area or i have a pond or i'm on a fast moving stream or small river or something like that is there another way that i can do the cooling system well yes there is i mean what i have touted in my last video was to dig down you know five to eight feet or more to get the cold ground temperature and run lines but if you have a pond or a river running through your property and you know that the temperature of the water at the bottom of the pond or the river is i don't know eight degrees celsius or something whatever that temperature is eight twelve but it's cool you can actually put your lines into the pond or the river and just make sure you have it coiled up with enough space it'll work exactly if not better than having the lines buried in the ground because water transfers heat relatively good actually incredibly good so a ponder a river if it's deep enough if it's shallow it's just going to heat up to the air temperature and it's done so you're going to need a pond that has a good 8 to 10 feet of depth or a spring or river that's moving fast enough coming from a cold source that the temperature of the water down low in the river is what you're looking for so obviously you're going to have to test the water you can do that quite easily with a thermostat or thermometer on a string and run it down there and pull it up quick and see what the temperature is if the temperature of the water in the pond or spring or river that's running by your house down deep is what you're looking for yes you can use that and it works well the next one is can i dig straight down absolutely you can dig a well and where my understanding is a well will take as much water as it puts out so if you want to run a system like this you pretty much gotta dig two wells one for input one for output now depending on where you live and depending on how deep you have to dig this well to get a constant supply of water or just if you're digging a four inch hole into the ground straight down you can do that too you don't even have to get the water the ground itself can be cold enough the problem is digging straight down costs a lot more than digging out digging five feet down and digging a long trench is much cheaper than getting a well-digging machine or a machine that thinks straight down you can do it if you have access to this at a reasonable price it works and you don't necessarily have to hit water it'll work with a well in and out or it can work with a single hole dug down um with a four inch type pipe and you can just run the the lines down and down and up but you're gonna need a lot of space because 100 feet isn't enough you're going to need about 400 feet so if you're doing it with you know wells and water that's different because you've got a regular supply that's coming through there but if you're doing it with just lines that are let's say your water table is you know 3 400 feet down and you're just running lines 200 feet down you're going to need a few holes dug to be able to get four or 800 feet of cooling power so yes you can do this by digging wells and you can do it by digging holes straight down but the caveat here is it can be a lot more money the next question that i got a lot of was how much tubing do i need and that's a good question so if you're running tubing through the ground um how much tubing do you need to equate to a certain amount of what we consider to be an air conditioner's btu or a tonnage which is another way of raiding air conditioners and my experience in my area where we are running about an eight degree ground temperature in the summer maybe even a little lower might be closer to six celsius um my experience has been you need about 400 feet of three-quarter inch tubing to get about 12 000 btu or about a ton of air conditioning so if you need two tons of air conditioning you're gonna need 800 feet um that's a simple equation it's not it will vary depending upon the type of materials that you're going into and like if you're in a cold water bath you can use less if you're in a clay type material and the ground is warmer say it's 12 or 14 you're not going to get as much btu um but of course if you're in cold water you could get more so this is just a rough example of how to calculate this and i hope that helps it it is there's a lot of variables there depending upon where you live but it just gives you a rough idea the next question i get a lot of is how much glycol or windshield washer fluid or radiator fluid or whatever type of liquid you're going to put in the pipes are you're going to need and it's a good question because you have to buy this stuff before you put it in there so my experience has been for three quarter inch tubing 100 feet of it needs about a gallon of liquid so you're going to need a gallon of whether it's rv radiator fluid or windshield wiper fluid or glycol figure a gallon for every 100 feet of three-quarter inch pipe if you've got smaller pipe you'll need less if you've got thicker pipe you're going to need more but that's a rough idea to give you some idea how much to buy so would be you buy an extra gallon or two this stuff isn't super expensive you spent an extra ten dollars the next question i get a lot is if i dig a trench should i curl the lines in the trench or should i just run a straight line through it and the answer to that is if you have the pipe curl it you want more distance on the pipes if possible um it's not a hundred percent necessary but it gives you a lot more surface area and surface area is what gives you the cooling so if you get the chance to curl the lines in your trenches do it the last question that i get a lot of has to do with heat pumps and the basic question is do i buy a heat pump or don't i buy a heat pump heat pumps are great they're going to use more electricity it's going to allow you to heat and cool but you're going to spend a lot more money to do a heat pump in this of a ton or more adding to this system is going to double triple quadruple the price um the heat pump alone is going to be two to three thousand dollars plus everything else that i've mentioned so suddenly from a thousand dollar system you're gonna go up to a five six thousand dollar system doing it yourself will the heat pump work yes absolutely it might work even slightly better but it costs a lot more money and i had a lot of geothermal installers contact me about this going on about i don't know what i'm talking about or this isn't going to work on the other side of the coin i had a lot of people contact me that are using this system in the same price range that i've quoted built it almost exactly like i've talked about and it's been running for 10 or 20 years so what i'm describing here as a cheap geothermal low-grade air conditioning system works you don't need a heat pump if you're gonna do a heat pump sure but you're gonna add four five six times to your price so this system may not be exactly what you want for your house but if you need to heat it or cool a greenhouse or if you want to cool your garage or a commercial building like a mechanic shop or something that you're working in this might be the best way to go affordably if you have enough land or if you're on a pond or a stream or something like that that's really cold this system well dollar for dollar it's hard to beat it hope to see in the next video you

Channel: Simple Tek

Views: 276,769

Keywords: geothermal air conditioning, geothermal cooling, cheap geothermal, Tips and tricks, geothermal hacks, geothermal tricks

Id: 0N61DwS6PpU

Length: 12min 35sec (755 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 25 2021