On 30 Jan, 18:36, "Stewart" wrote:
My son will soon be building a new house and intends to install a ground
source heat pump, hopefully as a main source of hear in conjunction with
solar panels.
He will be location the underground pipework in a pond beside the house.
The pond may be about 150 metres by 50 metres by 1.5 metres deep; it is in
Perthshire.
Does amyone have experience of ground source heating? *How effective is it?
Can it ever act even for a short while as the primary heat source?
Is there an independant body that would give professional advice?
Thank you.

Dear Stewart
I recommend that your son (and you?) knuckle down to some serious
reading and study. I know FA about this apart from O level physics
from about 1962! I spent about 3 months studying and reading it up in
order to be in a position to judge the snake oil salesmen I came
across selling heat pumps. I looked at the whole range. I made the
serious mistake of listening to a firm called Ice Energy who entered
into a contract to survey my site and whose final work did not comply
with the contract to survey and whose service fell below what a
reasonable lay man would call "fit for purpose". It cost me £500 and
my suggestion that they pay some of it back (some because not all of
their work was unfit for the purpose) has fallen on deaf ears.
I eventually designed my own system which has proven to be efficient
in practice.

I opted for a straight line style of collector as this from simple
physics is the most efficient COLLECTOR per metre run. If you have a
pond then that is probably the best possible source of collection but
for my money I would put it in the ground just a few inches under the
soil at the bottom of the pond. You will get the neat transfer with no
complications of needing to take it out when / if you have to drain
the pond or clean out the base and less chance of damage.

If I did my design again I would have knocked the house down (it was a
refurb) and put in a foot of insulation a la ~Passivhaus. The need
for a heat pump is largely eliminated but I would get one regardless
but just the smallest one possible to heat up DHW

I would also have a couple of buffers
one for DHW
one for Heating
into each buffer I would have as many sensible sources as I could for
input
eg solar water (with a thermostatic switch to go from DHW to CH when
DHW is up to temp
Wind generation DC Heating element say 1.5 kw +
AC input from the grid
Gravity primary circulation from a wood burning/ multifuel? heater
with a back boiler (will need to be near the buffer for gravity
circulation)
I would not bother with PV but would set aside a location for later
installation when the price comes down

http://cms.atics.co.uk/3/heatpump.html

is a link where you can see quite a lot of the work I have done in the
past

Chris