Low Grade Geothermal Greenhouse Heating - Air vs Liquid

let's do something interesting today today i'm going to talk about low-grade geothermal greenhouse heating and cooling when i talk about low-grade what i mean by that is there's no heat pump the residential geothermal heating and cooling systems that you look at employ a machine called a heat pump that can multiply the heat and it does this by pressure and it will cost a lot more electricity to use this than a low-grade system the problem with a low-grade system is it's not as easy to regulate the temperature within the range that you want for a residence a high grade or a regular geothermal system can keep your house to an exact temperature cooling it heating it 72 degrees fahrenheit or whatever you want on your thermostat perfectly a low grade system might have a 10 degree temperature range but this isn't a problem for a greenhouse simple tech that's the name of this channel we have piles of other videos on greenhouses and growing that you can check out after you watch this one youtube's algorithm tends to reward those channels that have videos that you like so if this is a topic that you like hit like and subscribe and youtube is going to show you more stuff like this not just for me but from other creators as well go ahead hit like and subscribe so there's regular geothermal systems that people use on their residence and that these are the ones that you see advertised and you get sometimes rebates from your power company if you implement this type of system and then there's low-grade systems low-grade systems cost a lot less a high-grade system with a heat pump may cost you fifteen to thirty thousand dollars a low grade system is going to be substantially less than that a low grade system is going to comprise itself of basically some water or liquid type lines usually there are pecks and a pump to move the liquid through them and a radiator and or a radiant floor and that's about it now to install the lines in a low-grade system you really just need an excavator and someone that's a little bit skilled and using it and time if you can do that a low-grade system is going to be fairly easy and fairly cheap to install for a liquid delivery type system now one of the low-grade type systems that's fairly common for greenhouses is a geo-air or an air delivery system not a liquid system there's multiple youtube channels and greenhouses out there that use this um sergi's lds prepper saint iris farm as well as citrus in the snow use fantastic low-grade geo air systems the biggest problem well there's two problems i find with the geo air system versus a liquid system though the first one is you need to be located in an area that has good ground temperatures so if your ground temperature is 15 degrees celsius a geoair system is going to work really well for you but if your ground temperature in winter is 8 degrees or 7 degrees celsius a geo system isn't going to be as good a system for you to use thus we're going to talk about liquid delivery systems because i believe this type of transfer can avoid that problem with a couple modifications so a low-grade geo liquid heating and cooling system needs to be broken into two separate components a lot of the geo air systems will heat and cool with the same air tunnel that's possible but it's not really recommended and it's much easier to actually run completely separate systems for cooling and for heating now if you're in a location that needs a geo-liquid heating system you may not even need a cooling system you may not get hot enough in the summers to really worry about it you might be able to get away with just venting but if you have the excavator there and you like digging and you've already paid for the time on that machine it's really not that expensive we're talking a couple hundred dollars to add the piping in to put a geo liquid cooling system separate to your geo liquid heating system i'm going to start by describing how easy it is to put in a geo liquid cooling system all you really need is some three-quarter inch packs you can do larger if you want you can actually get away with smaller but three-quarter inch gives you a decent volume of liquid to pump around and an excavator um a small taco pump and a radiator and we're just talking a radiator out of a car you can go to any wrecker and get a pretty decent large radiator 50 bucks you can buy them new for a hundred that being said all you need to do to get a liquid geo liquid cooling system is dig a trench down about eight to ten feet eight feet is good and run it out about a hundred feet so you're gonna need a little bit of property to be able to do this but if you have the property and you run that um pecks out and you don't necessarily want to have it as straight as possible you can have a little curvy you can have some bends in it as long as there's no breaks um and have one the return section far enough away from the input section that you can get double the amount of cooling out of it fill it back in gently so that you're not going to pierce the lines and you have as long as you connect the taco pump and connect the radiator with a fan behind the radiator you have a functional air conditioner that's gonna pump out eight to ten degrees celsius air as much as you want it so you set it on a thermostat when you hit certain temperatures and bang you're cool in your greenhouse heating with a geo-liquid system is there's two aspects to it you can do like citrus in the snow does and run a liquid line out a hundred feet or 200 feet or something like that and pick up the ground temperature eight to ten feet down which in the winter in areas of where i live around north of winnipeg manitoba canada you're gonna pick up about eight five to eight degrees celsius now this isn't a great amount of heat to heat your greenhouse with it may keep the frost off just but when you're trying to fight 30 below in a howling wind of 80 kilometers an hour you need more heat than this so how do you get that from a liquid system and my suggestion is you inject heat into the ground instead of running out in a line if you don't have 15 degree ground temperature in 30 below temp winters what you need to do is actually dig out a pit type area and circle the lines around in that pit then run separate pex lines that come out outside of the greenhouse so that you can connect evaporated tubes and evaporated tubes take solar thermal energy and will inject it into the ground and you have it in separate lines but these lines are positioned only six inches to a foot above and below the other lines that go into your greenhouse that withdraw the heat so what you're going to do is you're going to heat up the ground all spring all summer when you've got huge amounts of daylight and then come winter the ground is going to be not 5 to 7 degrees celsius it's going to be 20 to 30 degrees celsius and now you've got some real heat that you can pump back into your greenhouse you can put that into a radiant floor you can put that into a radiator it's heat that you can use and you can actually have this on a thermostat as well to heat your greenhouse in severe temperatures so the next question comes with the idea of if you're going to heat up a section of the ground should i insulate it and the answer to that is most of the geo air systems when they heat up a section of the ground do insulate some have insulated the bottom some haven't my suggestion is look at air creep aircrete is simple to make it's cheap to make and you can make a lot of it fairly fast to insulate the bottom part of the pit you dig out and to insulate the walls if you insulate the bottom of the walls in the top of 30 40 yards that are dug out you have something that will act as a thermal container to hold more heat and hold it longer as well your evacuated tubes will work in the winter in 30 below they're not going to work as long as they are in june in june you're going to get 15 hours of heat pumping into the ground in january you're gonna get three or four but it's still additional heat to heat up the ground so instead of having the ground at 30 degrees you may actually get the ground up to 50 60 degrees or more by using three or four depending on the size of the greenhouse that you have of course for my situation 200 square foot greenhouse i'm really only going to need one or two evacuated tubes in a 20 to 30 yard pit that i'm going to dig out and use as a thermal battery so basically i've gone over three types of geothermal low-grade heating and cooling systems the first is the geo air system and they're common they work well in heating they may not work so well in cooling most of the people i've talked to with cooling on the geo air geothermal systems tend to just fall back on vents vents are easy vents and fans can cool down your greenhouse if you're in an area that needs a substantial amount heat in winter you generally don't get huge amounts of heat in the summer although some areas do the liquid systems are designed more for colder climates canadian alaskan [Music] north dakota those type of areas even colorado the liquid systems can take more temperature swings they need to be deep they need to be done right but especially the liquid heating system where you're injecting more heat into the system it's a nice way to get through a cold winter with a decent amount of heat that you can have on a thermostat and control the delivery of that heat either by a radiant floor or by a radiator with a fan behind it that turns on and off as heat as needed as long as you can keep the amount of heat you need a low-grade system can actually stay within five six degrees celsius of your desired temperature but if you want to have exact temperature control you're gonna have to spend a lot more money on incorporating the pump so for a greenhouse all you need is a liquid geothermal low-grade system and it should be enough to keep your plants happy because plants are used to growing in nature and nature does not keep a steady even temperature that's colder at night it's warmer in the day you just want to make sure that they survive through the night and can thrive during the day have a great day hope to see in the next video you

Channel: Simple Tek

Views: 111,081

Keywords: geothermal heating, greenhouse geothermal, geo air greenhouse, liquid geo thermal, low grade geothermal, low grade geothermal greenhouse, low grade liquid geothermal, low grade air geothermal

Id: BdnBolN1ypY

Length: 12min 22sec (742 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 06 2021