On 19/05/2021 08:09, RJH wrote:
On 19 May 2021 at 07:20:21 BST, "Adrian Brentnall"
wrote:

On 18/05/2021 13:45, RJH wrote:
On 18 May 2021 at 10:54:03 BST, ""NY"" wrote:

When my wife and I were looking for a new house, we saw one which had
central heating with an heat-transfer pump and radiators. The house was
perfectly warm, but we both agreed that the constant whine of the stale-air
extraction pump, audible in every room, would have driven us mad very
quickly. The boiler and floor-to-ceiling hot-water cylinder occupied most of
the utility room, and that was excluding the heat-exchanger (on the wall
outside) for extracting heat for the ground.

Interesting. My sister is thinking of getting a ground source pumped system.
Are there any decent sources of experiences of them in use? Hadn't thought
of
the pump before . . .

Also, does the cooling of the ground have any effect? I'd have thought
flora/fauna would suffer . . .


We have a ground-source system installed here in South-West Ireland -
replacing the oil-fired boiler that was installed when the house was built..

The heatpump lives outside in my glass workshop, and there's 3 or 4 100m
coils of black plastic pipe in four separate trenches under the polytunnel.

That's a lot of pipe. I'd guess the garden's about 200m x 100m - not sure if
that's enough. But her husband's an environmental scientist, so I'd guess he
knows what he's doing.

Yes - lots of pipe..
As luck would have it, there was some significant earth-moving going on
at the same time - so
the cost of the trenching got absorbed into that.

In tight spaces, they recommend a borehole rather than trenches and pipes.




In an ideal world, they say that the hot water (which isn't as hot as
you get from a conventional CH boiler) should be fed into wet
under-floor heating (so the floor-slab becomes a huge storage heater) -
but, as we were retro-fitting, we used the existing rads instead.

System works well, pretty-much zero-maintenance (had to fit a new
motor-start capacitor - ‚¬15) about three years back - but apart from
that it's run without issues for the last 15 years.

No noticeable effect on the local environment - there's a lot of heat
stored in the ground, and our coils are in some very soggy ground
adjacent to a stream - so this all helps.

Interesting, thanks. I was thinking about that whole subterranean life cycle
and any knock-ons. But to know would need some pretty involved research I'd
have thought.


Yes - could be quite a research project...
Most of the coil area is covered by our polytunnel - so I guess that
contributes to replenishing the heat a little..