Geothermals Top 10 Takeaways September 06, 2017 If you don’t know anything else about geothermal heating and cooling, know this – especially if you’re considering retrofitting your current Columbus home’s HVAC system or wondering how best to heat and cool the new home you’re having built for you: Geothermal HVAC systems are among the most environmentally friendly you can buy. Their relatively uncomplicated technology harnesses subterranean temperatures to provide your Columbus home with winter heat and summer cooling. Thus, your home and the earth are always in sync, bonded together in a distinctive – and distinctively sympathetic – home-earth symbiosis. Sound a little too showy? All it means is that, with geothermal heating and cooling, your home isn’t unduly disrupting the natural order of things. Instead, it’s becoming a “nicer” part of the environment. Geothermal HVAC systems qualify as “renewable energy technology.” Certainly, they run off of electricity. But they don’t require much of it for all the value you get. Just one unit of electricity can transport up to five units of natural heating or cooling from the earth to your home. Geothermal HVAC systems are significantly more efficient than solar (photovoltaic) or wind power systems. Generally speaking, solar and wind technologies, whatever the appeal of their “renewability,” consume four times more kilowatt-hours of electricity per dollar spent than geothermal systems. Geothermal HVAC systems won’t take over your yard. Don’t have much yard space in the first place? No shocker there: most home lots in Columbus and elsewhere anymore occupy a comparatively compact the polyethylene piping required for the geothermal earth loops doesn’t have to be buried horizontally. It can be dug in vertically and extended to a depth of anywhere from 100 to 400 feet. Hardly any above-ground surface is necessary at any rate, whether vertical, horizontal, open (well water), or pond loops are installed. Result? You can keep your little patch of paradise a whole lot greener. Geothermal HVAC systems are incredibly quiet. Every element of a geothermal system is designed and engineered to run much quieter than conventional gas furnaces, heat pumps, or air conditioners. Best of all, there’s no outside unit, so you and your neighbors areen’t subjected to the annoyance of fans, belts, and compressors whirring, whining, and rattling away at all hours! Geothermal HVAC systems are dependable heating and cooling solutions, designed and engineered to last for generations. Current geothermal technology, manufacturing guidelines, and installation procedures assure ground loops of outstanding longevity and heat-exchange equipment that will continue working flawlessly for decades. It helps, naturally, that the heat-exchange equipment is sheltered indoors. At least, when it does sooner or later have to be repaired or replaced, you undoubtedly won’t be redoing the ground, well, or pond loops along with it. So replacement costs can be relatively low. Geothermal HVAC systems don’t demand much maintenance at all. The earth loops, as noted, are designed to endure for generations, and when properly buried, will do so without any need for intervention. Fans, compressors, and pumps, shielded indoors from weather extremes, necessitate only a sporadic check as well as periodic filter changes and a once-a-year coil cleaning. Geothermal HVAC systems are as effective in cooling as they are in heating. The old notion that geothermal HVAC systems don’t cool as well as they heat has been pretty much laid to rested by steady advances in the manufacture of geothermal technology. Geothermal HVAC systems can be configured to multitask. Very well, so you’ve decided on heating your home’s water geothermally. But can a geothermal system provide ambient heat for your home also? And what if you have a swimming pool? Rest easy. Today’s systems can take care of it all and take care of it all at once, with no favoring of one task over another. Geothermal HVAC systems are becoming increasingly affordable – even in the absence of federal and local tax incentives. Congress has yet to bring back federal tax credits for geothermal heating and cooling that expired December 31, 2016. Still, a number of factors – material and technological advances, new installation practices, and more competition in the marketplace, predominantly – are helping to better correlate geothermal solutions with the cost of traditional heating and cooling methods. Contact the geothermal professionals at Patriot Air Comfort Systems today. They’ll clearly outline the advantages of geothermal heating and cooling so you can make the best decision for your Columbus home. Back To News