In article ,
Clive Mitchell writes:
In message ,
R.P.McMurphy writes
As it happens i have a stream flowing past my garden...is it
easier/better to use that as a heat source than burying pipes? I have
considered seeing if it'd be possible to have my own hydro electrical
generator running of it too..but am unsure where to start!

Is the stream fairly fast flowing and consistently full during the
months when heat is needed?

Is it prone to heavy flow with attendant rock movement? My dad has a
small river at the bottom of his garden and it can be very destructive
to anything that gets in it's path.

I would be tempted to look for a solution which didn't leave a
heat exchanger in the path of all the crap coming down the river.
You could have a settling tank off the stream, overflowing back
into the stream, and have an exchanger in that or pump a flow of
water from it to an exchanger above ground, returning to the
river.

One of the first buildings to use heat pump technology for heating
was the Royal Festival Hall on the Southbank when it opened in
the early 1950's. It used a heat exchanger to take heat from the
Thames. It was rather quickly abandoned due to continual failure
of the river heat exchanger, but it was a new technology at the
time.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]