Share pictures or your geothermal: plumbing

buckeyefarmer · Mar 21, 2016

I was working alone, and had only used a backhoe once before this time. L3940 with bh90 and 18" bucket.
Your loops look real good. Looks like nice soil, no rocks.
Mine are around 5' deep.

LD1 · Mar 21, 2016

buckeyefarmer said:
I was working alone, and had only used a backhoe once before this time. L3940 with bh90 and 18" bucket.
Your loops look real good. Looks like nice soil, no rocks.
Mine are around 5' deep.

Trust me, there was lots of rocks. Bout two kubota bucket loads of big ones. Didnt worry too much about the ones that were 6" or smaller. But digging with a 3' bucket, I dont see all of em as they just dig up and mix with the dirt.

Doing loops with an 18" bucket on a 9' hoe wouldnt be fun. I wouldnt have wanted to give up my 5500 for anything....unless it was bigger of course

LD1 · Mar 22, 2016

Loops burried. Now just need some rain and let the settling and mud mess begin. On the bright side, its about 1/3 acre I dont need to worry about mowing this year:thumbsup:

buckeyefarmer · Mar 22, 2016

Looks good. I still have a huge pile of leftover dirt from mine.
Saw your damaged HP in the other thread, ouch..

LD1 · Mar 22, 2016

Ouch indeed. Another two to three weeks likely. At my suggestion, they are gonna try to send this one back to the factory to only have the damaged sheet metal replaced. These are built to order units, so hoping this will speed things up.

Did get a free $219 wireless t-stat for the inconvenience though.

Eric Salop · Mar 24, 2016

Our system went in 5 years ago, at a time when geothermal was relatively rare in the UK. I received a government sponsored rebate by using a suitably accredited plumber for the install, who became a good friend. This was his first ever heat pump job and now his business is almost exclusively based on "renewable" power.

The ground loop is 2 x 200yds of 40 mm pipe. My neighbour did his at the same time, so with trenches going down 6' and being 3' wide, the field looked like a scene from the first world war.

My friend subsequently bought his own Kubota for pipe installation and now generally uses a narrow trench with a single pipe.

The loops terminate in a manifold buried in the garden, with a single flow and return pipe then running to the heat pump in an outbuilding 15 yds. away. An indoor manifold as you are doing makes a lot of sense if you have the space and if I started again would be how I would do it.

[Cylinder is buffer tank for the under floor heating. There is a hot water storage cylinder too, out of the picture on the left]

Good luck with the rest of your install. Mine turned me into something of a heat pump nerd, to this day I can't resist having a look at ground loop temperatures as the pump and winter weather cool the ground.

jrclark · Mar 24, 2016

Good thread. Unfortunately our house was completed last September, otherwise I would have given this a lot more thought. The biggest regret I had with our build was not doing geo.

The biggest issue facing us would have been the loops. We live in the middle of the woods and purposefully cleared only what was needed for the house. There's also the school bus sized rocks that lurk just below the surface acting as a deterrent for horizontal loops. Pricing for the vertical loops was somewhere between $9,000-10,000.

Oh well, guess I'll have to wait for an affordable version of these Energy Server - What is it? | Bloom Energy