Solar Boosted Geothermal Heating for a Greenhouse

let's do something interesting today today we're going to talk about solar geothermal heating especially for a greenhouse but you can use this for a house or a garage too and we're going to do this for about two thousand dollars plus the radiant heat floor to disperse the heat what wait how is that possible that's huge savings up front and ongoing on a geothermal heating system geothermal heating install usually cost tens of thousands of dollars how the hell am i gonna do this for about two grand oh yeah and it takes less than 100 watts to run too that's an incredible investment that will use less energy and cost less than one or two years of a conventional geothermal heating system to build how i'm going to do this a little differently i'm going to use things like aircrete evacuated tube arrays or concentrated solar parabolic troughs water tubing and some simple pumps that's about it okay maybe some clamps and such but that's the bulk of it now if you know anything about geothermal heating i should have your attention at this point that's an investment worth looking at so when we say solar geothermal it's not the conventional geothermal most people are used to talking about yeah they're similar but there's some very key differences the real term for this should be solar geo battery yes you could charge a big battery and use a heat pump from a large solar photovoltaic system and run a conventional solar geothermal heating system but if you follow my videos there's a theme simple and cheap so how are we going to build a solar geothermal heating system simple and cheap does such a thing even exist the answer is a resounding yes and greenhouse climate batteries are a simple version of this but most climate batteries use air i want to up the efficiency here and make a liquid-based system for charging and heating the greenhouse what i also like about a liquid system is that you can build it beside your greenhouse so you can add the system to almost any greenhouse house or garage simply by adding a simple radiant heat floor something i did with 4x8 insulation sheets sand some pecs and concrete sidewalk blocks simple okay let's explain this in detail simple tech that's the name of this channel and we have piles of other videos on greenhouses heating greenhouses and growing that you can check out in our archives also you know i got to plug you for the like and subscribe and hitting that bell but the reason you want to do that is that the youtube algorithm will suggest you videos on the home page and on the right hand side which you've probably seen before and the more videos like this that you hit like subscribing the bell on the more youtube will suggest similar videos to this that you can watch so it's your choice either you hit like subscribe in that bell or you're going to watch more kardashians so a standard geothermal heating system the ones that we have here in manitoba where i live um run with ground temperatures at about five degrees celsius eight feet down and they use a heat pump to multiply that heat and they work but heat pumps require a lot of electricity now nowhere near as much electricity as direct electric heating often half or one-third the electricity of electric heating but it's still a lot of electricity and that costs money i know i know you can add a solar system to this and run the heat pump and it'll work great but adding a photovoltaic solar system with full battery bank large enough to run a heat pump 24 7 is a large solar system and a lot of batteries and batteries are very expensive i'd suggest that solar system right now would cost in excess of ten thousand dollars probably closer to twenty thousand dollars if done cheaply and that's just for the geothermal heat pump to run all the time and that's a do-it-yourself system too a contracted system like that might be 30 000 plus the furnace heat pump system in your house which those run at least eight thousand dollars or more but most likely many many thousands more so how on earth am i gonna do this for about two thousand bucks am i crazy okay here's the parts list we got tubing and i'm guessing that's going to be in around 300 range pumps about 200 bucks evacuated tubes if you look on alibaba are running about 300 bucks each or 1180 bucks for four of them glycol maybe 100 bucks concrete 200 bucks that's to make your air crate and seven nation ditch dish detergent uh 20 bucks i mean you can buy the proper air crete um type stuff and it might find you 40 but twenty dollars is a decent price to consider when looking at this okay we start by installing pex in the ground now i say packs but you can use underground rated plastic pipe which isn't all that different in cost it's probably better to use the underground piping to be honest we want this to last um i didn't include the cost of an excavator because the fact is you can dig with a shovel it's just that we're all too lazy to do that but it's possible and before you come up with any reasons in the comments why you need an excavator make sure you concede that you could have done it with a shovel and the extra thousand dollars or so cost to rent a tractor excavator it's just a lazy fee so yes some of you are gonna brag and that you already own a tractor or an excavator and that's great good for you you're so lucky but back to reality a standard geothermal dig is long often two to three hundred feet out from your greenhouse garage or house and it's great if you're relying on only mother nature's ground temperature to heat the lines it regenerates quickly and when you use a heat pump it's the most efficient way to do this but when you're using a solar boosted geothermal system we have to rethink things a solar boosted geo battery system should be a square or cylinder shape into the ground not run out long the lines should be coiled to better use the earth as an energy storage device and spaced in between the input and output lines input lines coming from evacuated tube arrays or parabolic mirrors and output lines going to your greenhouse house or garage now you can put the pipes in the ground but and this will work but if you want a lot more efficiency you need to add insulation insulation can be a tricky thing in the ground it can get wet it can break down bugs and microbes can be an issue but there is a material that's cheap and immune to most of that it's called aircrete on youtube you see lots of people using aircrete as a building material but although they mention this they don't focus on what i think is the most important attribute of aircrete and that's insulation the bottom of the pit can easily be filled with air creep five to eight inches of it or more and the walls could be lined with panels made from air cream the top like the bottom could be easily poured with another eight inches or more of air creek making an insulated sealed container for heat for even better energy retention one could put a layer of plastic around the air creek to stop groundwater from seeping in and reducing your heat the insulation on a small system allows this small system to compete with the larger non-insulated systems like drake landing in alberta that relies on massive volume of heated material rather than insulation to hold the heat longer to generate heat you need something like an evacuated tube array or a parabolic trough that can heat up water from the sun and inject it into the ground i suggest a small photovoltaic powered pump here on the evacuated tube because it'll work when it's sunny and stop pumping when it isn't the evacuated tubes only produce heat when it's sunny so you don't want to inject cold liquid into your geo battery when it's nighttime this kind of solar pump is cheap now you have a solar heater for your geo battery that will pump heat all spraying summer and fall into the ground and you could draw that heat out in the winter as you as your evacuated tubes will continue to pump heat into your geo battery even in the winter as well this is the basis of a seasonal solar heating system as you need the summer heat in this system as a starting point for the winter okay the efficiency of the solar heat from the summer isn't great you might only get 10 to 20 percent of that energy back but it's free and it's free energy that even if it's 10 to 20 is over a long period of time way longer than the winter and the daylight is way longer than the winter so it's double maybe triple the amount of heat that you can inject into the system in the winter from the spring fall and summer okay now we figured out how to install the system into the ground and how to insulate it and inject heat into that system so how do we draw that heat out and cheaply there's a few ways the two that i've tried is a radiant heat floor and a radiator with a fan behind it the radiant heat floor is by far the most efficient now most people think you need to pour a concrete floor to get a radiant heat floor but for a greenhouse you can dumb it down and make a radiant heat floor cheap like i did first you attach a taco pump to one of the hot water lines from the geo earth solar battery coming into the greenhouse then you just add three to four inches of sheet insulation on the ground or aircrate whichever you have access to that's cheaper then add two to three inches of sand on top of that now the sand is for your pex tubing to sit in and once you have that laid out you can add concrete sidewalk blocks on top if you use sidewalk blocks this gets very affordable as people are always selling or giving away sidewalk blocks on kijiji or facebook marketplace or the like and it's repairable very easy to do as you just pick up the sidewalk block to fix any leaks now all you need is some kind of thermostat that can turn the water flow on and off when your sidewalk blocks hit a specific temperature the fan on a radiator is even simpler you can get a car radiator attach your heated water lines to it and put a fan behind the radiator you attach a thermostat to the fan turning the fan on and off as you need heat easy breezy quick and sneezy sneezy wait a minute anyway you know what i mean this system of geo battery isn't as good or fancy as the geothermal heating system with a heat pump but roi return on investment is massively better a typical geothermal heat pump furnace is in the 10 000 range installed in fact i just had a guy come here telling me that he replaced the furnace heat pump for his geothermal system in his house and he was over ten thousand dollars this system that we're talking about here a solar geo battery heating system installed is thousands and thousands of dollars less than that okay it's not as precise as a fancy dancing geothermal system but you could make it fancy with a few more dollars so now i'm gonna get a pile of comments from geothermal heating system installers about how i'm wrong this will never work et cetera et cetera it's never been done but this system is working on a large scale right now for homes in drake landing alberta a 55 house community heated exclusively for over a decade now by a large system that works on this principle and drake landing isn't the only one there's several other communities in europe that have done the same thing so this works i've just offered it on a simple down version designed for a greenhouse and garages when you think about the installation and long-term cost of most other heating systems this solar geo battery system is exponentially more affordable and all around and probably the best choice to heat a greenhouse in climates like mine as you have to use a properly insulated greenhouse of course to use this like a chinese or passive solar design greenhouse but the amount of money you're going to save versus heating with wood or oil or electricity or propane or natural gas and this system is phenomenal if you have a system like this or know of one please tell me in the comments below and don't forget to hit like and subscribe with the bell because that tells youtube what you like so youtube can send you more suggested videos like this or the youtube algorithm isn't going to know what you really like and it's just going to serve you up more kardashian videos now think about it we all don't want that to happen see you in the next video

Channel: Simple Tek

Views: 98,062

Keywords: geothermal, heating, solar, dirt battery, climate battery, evacuated tubes, pex, Chinese greenhouse, solar heating, solar geothermal, solar boosted, storing heat, seasonal heat storage

Id: _cyxlheX-qg

Length: 13min 40sec (820 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 03 2022