My DIY Geothermal System Was So CHEAP!!!

hey guys garrett here and today i want to tell you a little bit about my diy geothermal system that i installed within my new home build if you know anything about geothermal systems they're generally pretty darn expensive especially if you have a contractor install it for you i've had friends that have gotten quotes from contractors to put like a five-ton unit in and install the wells and basically everything that goes with it and it was about a twenty-five thousand dollar quote and to me that's just crazy it does not have to cost that much it did not cost me that much and i put in a four ton and a three ton unit i don't have access to natural gas but i could get propane it's just pretty darn expensive so i had to look at options that were just electricity only and so one of the options was the traditional way which has an air handler inside the house as well as a condenser on the outside of the house your next choice is a heat pump and all this really does is add a reversing valve within it so during the winter time you can reverse the direction of that refrigerant flow meaning that during the summer time you are extracting heat pulling it out of the air within the house and dumping it outside however during winter time you energize that reversing valve it makes the flow go backwards meaning that it tries to find heat outside and then dump it to the inside of the house now that's a heat pump heat pumps are a heck of a lot more energy efficient than say like a resistance heater with a resistance heater you put one watt in and you get one unit of heat energy out of it with a heat pump you put one watt of energy in and you can get two three four units of heat out of it so from an electricity standpoint you use a heck of a lot less energy and you get a lot more heat output and that's really the name of the game whenever it comes to efficiency so when you're talking about air conditioning efficiency you have what's called a seer rating that is the seasonal energy efficient ratio so it's s-e-e-r and the higher the seer rating the more energy efficient the unit is so for example if your current air conditioner unit is say an 8-seer and you replace it and you put a 16 seer unit in you effectively doubled the efficiency of your unit and therefore you're using half of the electricity to get the same cooling power for heat pumps whenever we're talking about the heating side of things you have the cop the coefficient of performance and the higher the coefficient of performance the better the efficiency is of the unit so generally speaking a an air to air heat pump is going to be anywhere from in the mid twos to the mid threes but a geothermal heat pump is going to be between three and five so again what that means is you put one watt of energy in and you get anywhere from three to five units of heat out of it and then this is how efficiency is rated so whenever it comes to like a heat pump system that again uses a condenser that sits outside you are dependent upon the air temperature coming through it so the more consistent the air temperature coming through that unit meaning say it's anywhere from say 30 to 60 degrees you're gonna get a hundred percent of your efficiency rating out of it but you start dropping that temperature of the air that comes in it means the unit has to work harder it has to work longer and therefore efficiency actually drops well the way to combat this is to use a geothermal heat pump system and this uses the earth's heat to heat and cool your home when we're talking about geothermal heat pump systems there's two main ways to do it open loop and closed loop the most efficient is open loop and what that does is you drill two wells one is a production well where you're actually going to pump water out of the ground it's going to go through your geothermal unit and it's going to go to another well where it drops back into the earth i chose not to use that type of unit and there's two main reasons number one it's the most expensive way to do it the second reason we have incredibly hard water it's very very high in calcium so my fear was that keep pumping that water through the system it's going to have build up on the inside of the geothermal unit and then i'm just going to lose efficiency as time goes on or things orifices stuff like that are just going to get clogged up and i'm going to have constant maintenance that i'm going to have to do to the to the system so with everything i try to do it once i try to do it right for my situation and so i went with a closed looped system before we go on i want to be honest with you geothermal is not for everybody especially those that don't have much in the way of land if you have a city lot you can still do it but you're going to have to do an open loop system which means that you're going to have to have two wells one is production and one is receiving you're going to have to do a pump and dump style otherwise if you try to do a closed loop system generally speaking they require a fair amount of land and so those that are going to do a closed system i would suggest having at least an acre you can get away with it with less but it's a heck of a lot easier if you have some actual land space like i said before i went with a closed loop system what a closed-loop system means is that you bury a series of pipes and then you pump a liquid through it that then transfers the heat through the pipe walls into the earth again it's going to take some space whenever you do it and there are several different ways to do it if you have a body of water near you you can actually put those loops or those that pipe out in say a lake or a pond or something like that just make sure that you have sufficient depth within that pond so that the pond itself does not completely dry out or it doesn't freeze i would say at least a 10 foot deep pond another way to do it is to dig really deep trenches and just lay a pipe in that trench all the way out and then all the way back again this takes a ton of land to do and a whole lot of digging to do so with the help of my supplier i was able to determine that each ton of cooling heating power that i had required 600 feet of pipe therefore i got 600 foot coils of pipe i have seven tons of unit therefore i needed seven trenches about a hundred 120 feet long that i could place these pipes within and the way i did it was i actually coiled the line so i lay the pipe out it's coiled in circles as it goes and once it gets to the end you have one straight pipe all the way back into the house and then i just did that seven times and i'm going to be honest it was a lot of work but thankfully i own a mini excavator so i was able to dig those trenches myself you may have to hire an excavator to come out to do it if you do you're probably going to have a unit that was much bigger than mine my mini excavator had a bucket that was 24 inches wide and therefore i could do a 24 inch wide trench i know some people recommend at least a 36 or even a 48 inch trench which means the wider the trench you don't have to make it nearly as long but because mine was narrower i had to make the coils a lot tighter within that and therefore lengthen them out let's talk a little more about the trenches themselves they are pretty crucial and depth is pretty darn crucial the general rule is four to six feet deep but a lot of it kind of depends on your frost line our frost line in my area is not that terribly low so i could probably get away with four feet but to be completely honest i overdo everything and therefore i went as deep as my mini excavator would go which was 10 feet deep but most pros out there would probably say that's complete overkill but i'm looking for every ounce of energy efficiency that i can get plus i own the unit so it was just really more of my time and a little bit more diesel so i dug down 10 feet with each one of these things 120 feet long and it took me an entire day to do each one of these lines so that meant seven different trenches seven days to actually do it they were pretty darn long days too with that said honestly the efficiency is going to be even better so the deeper you get the more consistent the earth's temperature is and therefore the ambient temperature of the air outside is not going to affect my coils that are buried really deep that's one reason the second reason is generally speaking the deeper you get the closer to groundwater you get so with even a couple of my trenches i hit groundwater so i actually had some standing water that was sitting down in now the earth does a great job of conforming around these pipes and extracting heat but water does a better job and i'm fortunate enough with this geothermal system the half clay soils and clay soils do a better job of transferring heat so it is my recommendation to dig as deep as you possibly can obviously if you hit rock your kind of host at that point you need soil if you hit sand you're also kind of hosed you don't want to bury your lines in sand it is just not a good conductor of heat another benefit of going that deep means that my lines virtually have no chance of freezing and therefore whenever you put the liquid within your system it's generally going to be water and glycol that mixture is pumped through and you generally put that antifreeze in so that you don't freeze the lines well the deeper your lines are the more consistent the temperature is in my case it's around 60 degrees down there at 10 feet deep and it stays that way very very consistently therefore my water mixture is not going to freeze and when it comes to efficiency you want maximum efficiency well water moves heat more efficiently than antifreeze does so the higher the water ratio to the antifreeze ratio the better off you're going to be i would still suggest putting some antifreeze in there but the lower that you can get away with the better you're going to be obviously if you're in northern climates where it is cold all the time you're going to have to have a little more but if you're southern you may not need any at all and to be honest i probably did about a 30 percent uh antifreeze to seventy percent water and i probably could have gotten away with twenty fifteen percent which would have saved me some money not having to buy the antifreeze to put into the system as well as it would have microscopically increased my efficiency along the way i also want to be pretty specific with the water that you put within your geothermal system my suggestion would be to use distilled water for this you want as few contaminants in it as possible again to keep the insides the internals of your geothermal unit clean and clear as long as possible you're going to keep your efficiencies that much higher not only that but you get to go to the grocery store and fill carts full of gallon jugs of distilled water and look ridiculous doing it i probably had 60 70 gallons worth that were in these carts the cart was about to collapse but i needed it people looked at me funny and i knew what it was going for they just thought i was hoarding water the geothermal unit that i bought was bosch and again i have two units so one's a four ton unit the other one's a three ton unit and they both have variable speed fans and two stage compressors if you can get multi-stage compressors your efficiency ratings are going to go higher however the cost is definitely more so you're going to want to weigh one versus the other i just wanted to buy a really good unit up front and i bought the bosch again it's probably one of the most expensive units out there but i firmly believe that you get what you pay for when it comes to this sort of stuff so i want the good stuff i want it to last a really really long time so like i said before i had to bury a whole lot of those coils of pipe and you do it like fingers you don't want them too close to each other so they go out in kind of a fan style so the four time unit i had four of those going out into my yard the three ton unit i only had three then those pipes come back in through the foundation wall and get collected into what i'll call a manifold mine was homemade i made it myself and then gets piped into the geothermal unit and then back out to a pump that then starts the cycle all the way over again as you pump that liquid through during the summer time it's going to heat the liquid it's going to go out into those pipes that are in the earth it's going to shed that heat and it's going to come back cooler than what it was when it started and generally speaking with those geothermal units if you put a thermometer in the intake as well as the outlet there should be a six to eight degree difference in that coolant temperature and that's exactly what mine is i have variable speed pumps that pump that liquid out so you can experiment if you have a temperature gauge with what speed you want that coolant flowing through your system to get maximum efficiency so if you add up all of the costs that i have within my geothermal system again i have two units so i probably have between 17 and 18 000 in those units themselves plus the pipes and the fittings and that sort of stuff but i was doing a new build so for tax purposes i am able to deduct a heck of a lot more from my system because it's a new build but if you are putting a retrofit in tax law states that you can deduct the unit that you are putting in place so with that said at the time that i did it i was able to get a 30 tax credit on my entire system which meant that i was getting 30 percent not only on the geothermal but on the pipes the electrical to the unit and the ductwork as well because it is all integral to that geothermal system and therefore once i added everything up it was in the 20 some thousand dollar range and i was able to deduct 30 percent of that on my taxes and get an actual dollar for dollar tax credit off of it so that brings my costs way way down but let's say you're doing a retrofit system you're putting it in a house that already has duct work and all that kind of stuff back all of that stuff out i probably had 17 to 18 000 into my system and that's with me doing the vast majority of the work and the one nice thing about these units is they are self-contained units meaning i don't have to have an hvac person in there to do anything with the refrigerant you are going to need an electrician to hook up the unit itself and of course you're going to have to put a condensate line in to drain out the condensate within those units but you're going to save a bunch of money because they are self-contained units so in my case i was building my house i was the electrician on the job i didn't have to pay someone else to come in to do that and then i just had my duct guys go ahead and set the unit in place hook all the ducts to it as well as do that condensate line and then since i did all of the digging and the placing of the pipes all myself it saved a ton of money on the backside of it so my estimate if i had to hire someone to come out and actually do this it would have been probably thirty to forty thousand dollars is what they would have charged me and in essence i was able to do it if you just count again the geothermal the electrical as well as the the pipes going out for like 17 to 18 thousand dollars and then you get that 30 percent tax credit so what that means is i'm basically getting this unit for the price of say a decent efficiency air to air unit except my efficiency ratio is on the sears side when it's running full tilt it's around a 24 but when it's running it's a half duty cycle it's around a 29 to 30 seer and on the coefficiency of performance it's in the mid fours is what i'm running so it's an insanely efficient unit and because it's geothermal the heat of the earth stays very very consistent and i don't have to worry if it gets 110 degrees outside during the summer or minus 10 degrees during the winter it does not affect my system my efficiency stays the same the whole year long obviously the more work that you can do yourself the more money you're going to save over time as well as use some of those tips and tricks that i was telling you and you're going to get an even better efficiency ratio this can be an affordable option especially if you have land i also got one more bonus with my geothermal system i'm part of an electric co-op and therefore they give rebates based off of heat pumps well they give a hundred dollars per ton of just regular heat pump but since i have a geothermal system they give a hundred and fifty dollar rebate per ton therefore on my system with the seven ton i was able to get seventeen hundred and fifty dollar check back from the uh the co-op so that offset more of the cost of my system making it a heck of a lot more palatable and again it just keeps bringing that price down to where it's very very manageable so if you're thinking of changing your system consider geothermal it can be a very very competitively priced system compared to what you would traditionally get but you're going to get a heck of a lot more energy efficiency and you're going to get every month that that electricity bill comes is going to be so much lower than what it was before it just keeps paying for itself it's a literal investment if you guys are considering putting a geothermal system in let me know down in the comments i'm really curious how many people are thinking of doing this make sure to subscribe down below to get more great content like this as well as hit that like button i'll see you guys next time

Channel: Garrett Glaser

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Id: MUWjjjFgXdg

Length: 19min 34sec (1174 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 03 2020