Car, Hydro, NatGas charts updated

Check out the links on the left "Graphs 2009-05-08" for new charts showing fuel consuption of our car as well as electrical consuption for the winter with our new Ground Source Heat Pump furnace.

Natural gas consumption has been zero for a while, the gas company come over a put a lock bolt on our meter. No gas bills.

Hotwater from Geothermal

Last night it dipped down to -20C, the furnace was running quite a bit in the afternoon so I took this chance to turn off the electricity to our electrical hot water tank and let the furnace heat our hot water.



Here you see how the tank is hooked up to the furnace. As you can see, the hot water comes out the top of the tank (since heat rises). The furnace draws from the bottom, and returns to the bottom on the other side.

Once the power was turned off to the tank we ran the dish washer, did a sink full of dishes and our daughter had her bath.

Updated Diesel/Hydro/NatGas Graphs

With winter coming, and our heat pump installed. I'll be doing my best to keep the graphs section (to the top and left) up-to-date.

2nd GeoThermal Furnace Video (what's inside)

Here's the second video, show what's inside the furnace. There's really only a few parts:
1) The refrigerant compressor
2) The heat exchanger
3) The blower
4) The computer control system

GeoThermal Furnace Video

Here's a YouTube video of my furnace. More to come, busy these days. So sorry.

"The Phoenix has Landed"

My contractor exclaimed to me on the phone in the usual gusto consistent with the stereotype of his cultural background. If you can't politely smile at stuff like that, what good is life?

Geothermal Heat Exchange furnace will be installed Monday/Tuesday next week (2008-06-23/24). In time to break it in a bit over the summer before the winter heating demands arrives.

Natural Gas Speculation

I peeked around for discussion on natural gas proces and came across a site that sounded objective and reasonably researched (or at least read). They gave this chart of past natural gas prices and some projections on its future cost.



Their reasons for their prediction of 30% increase in natural gas in the next 6-8 months?

Lower production from new gas wells, less new drilling and depletion of older wells.

New electricity generation is usually gas fired. The gas to be used in planned natural gas generators in Ontario equal a quarter of TOTAL provincial annual demand.

Supply is flat and is expected to remain so, and demand is up.

Historical oil-to-gas ratio is 7.5, putting gas at $13 per Gigajoule

It's crystal ball gazing, but worth mentioning.

Drilling Completed

The drilling is done. It was loud. It was dusty. It was awesome!

The drill holes were done at 11 degrees in one direction, and 22 degrees in the other. This is approximate based on my measurements.

Top view, looking down on the roof of the house:


Front view, looking at a cross section towards the front of the house.


Some videos:
Drill through overburden (aka. top soil).


Drilling through sandstone.


Feeding the copper heat exchanger down the 100ft hole.


The target.


The equipment arrives at 09:00.


45min later it's ready to go.


What I see from my living room.


Drilling gets underway.




It makes a mess.


What the drill bit looks like. It sounded LOUD. I measured it at 105dB at 5 meters away. When the drill shaft is pulled up and each link is separated - it would spike at 120dB.


Examine the hole.


Prepare the heat exchanger to go down. Notice the block of metal for grounding in case of lightning strikes.


Send the copper heat exchanger down the hole.


Fill it with silica sand (crushed quartz) up to the rock-overburden interface.


Then fill the top with "hole plug" bentonite. This is a form of clay that seals the top of the drill hole to prevent surface water from getting down deep in the rock.


Repeat 2 more times, and you're done for the day.


Next - we wait for the furnace unit to arrive and final stages of installation take place.

Drilling today

Well, the contractor from Earth Energy called me last week to arrange a time to start drilling for my furnace. "The phoenix has landed" he announced in his usual colourful exclamation.

And about the same time I got an email from a reader of this blog advising me to stay away from them. I'm not surprised since my experience with the owner was been less than reassuring. When the unit is installed, I'll be asking questions and taking notes. Such a niche furnace - it'll be hard to find good maintenance should this contractor go under.

Your thoughts on what info to ask for is most welcome fellow readers. Here's me list so far.

1. What's the refrigerant used in the heat exchanger?
2. How much refrigerant?
3. At what pressure is the heat exchanger filled to?
4. Make a list of parts inside the unit (small moving parts will likely be the first to break down)

And yes, there will be photos and videos of the mess they'll be bringing down on our house.

BioDiesel for non-hobbiests

My dad sent me think link today. Groovy. Expensive, but groovy. Don't know how good it is, but the description seems to suggest they know what they're doing. Acid/base pH balancing, 3 stage water wash, 110V @ 15A power suggests a drying stage.

If you're a boating marina selling fuel or farmer that wants to go with green fuel without modifying your vehicle - this looks like the fastest route. At $9,000 USD you better be prepared to make about 10000L of BioDiesel before this thing breaks even.

Note: you can use BioDiesel in an oil furnace too, so 10,000L may not take too long for some of you.

Delay to our furnace

Installation of our geoexchange furnace has been delayed untill the spring.

We had hoped to get it in for Christmas, but the 150cm of snow we got really but a wrench in the plans. Add to that the Ontario ground water Regulation 903 (aka. the Walkerton regulation) you get more delays as the company investigates better ways to grout the bore hole. And to top it off, the company is going though a change of ownership (for the better in my opinion).

But all is not lost. We'll get our furnace in the spring when the ground is soft, and the snow is gone. Less of a point getting it now when the coldest parts of winter are done.

A MP3 podcast audio feature from CBC's Quirks and Quarks on the technology of our new furnace.

Hurry up and wait

The geothermal contractor we've made arrangements with has had a rough December with all the snow.

Drilling though snow isn't the problem. Operating a drill rig with exposed machine parts in blowing snow - that's the problem. With luck, I'll have a firm date soon on when the drill can start.

A neighbour emailed me today explaining a new local temple is having construction difficulties because bedrock is so close to the surface. That's great news. Hydraulic conductivity of fractured sandstone (the geological formation our house is most likely on) is very high.

Split rock == good water flow. Good water flow == good heat transfer. Good heat transfer + geothermal furnace == excellent heating.

Justifying the cost of a MADNESS

$25,000 is a lot of money for a furnace. If you won $25k, you'd be dancing. If you misplaced $25k you'd be depressed.

In spite of my tone in this blog, my wife and I took this decision seriously and here's how we came to it.

1. Assume we're replacing our furnace and air conditioner

That's $7,000 of assumed cost right there. Our furnace was mid-efficiency (by today's standards low-efficiency) natural gas. Our air conditioner is a piece of junk and we've never used it. With a baby on the way, it's a good plan to have one for emergencies. And resale of a home is quite difficult with no summer cooling.

2. Assume we'll get rebates

• $3,500 from the Ontario Provincial Government,
• $3,500 from the Canadian Federal Government, and
• $800 from the Ontario Power Authority

Total: $8,000

3. Assume we save $1,500 per year

• No natural gas bill (no delivery charges, debt reduction, or cost per cubic meter).
• Increase in hydro usage will only occur in low electricity demand months (electricity demand is always highest in the summer months as cooling systems operate)

Items 1 to 3 puts our pay-back period at about 5-7 years.

4. Assume there are no environmentally friendly investment mechanisms that make money

We wanted to save some of our money in "ethical" or "green" investments. My (and a few other) financial planners basically told us "don't bother".

The problem it seems is "green funds" are managed by people whose primary motives are not to make you money but to invest in green technology and historical performance (as short as it has been) is poor. Like losing money poor.

And companies who qualify as "green" are often run by people whose primary motives are not to increase shareholder value but to be the best green company they can be. Not a bad thing, just not money making for investors.

So, we decided if we're going to invest, we'll do it on our terms. Our veggie fueled car, our heat pump, super insulating the house, etc.

This blog doesn't just chronicle our "greeny" whims. These are our green investments and we treat each decision as such.

We're getting a new furnace

This morning the rep from Earth Energy Solutions came by our home at 08:00 and we signed over the first 25% of $25,000 and signed a contract. They'll be installing the unit before Christmas.

Catch? DX systems aren't eligible for the $7,000 in rebates from the Ontario and Canadian governments because they don't meet CSA-448 standards. The other heat pumps cost well more than $7k so this is still the best deal. And the DX systems are apparently this close to getting rubber stamp approved for the rebates. So we may still get our money back.

Home inspection coming over 2007-12-03 to get a baseline.

How to buy a heat pump

Tomorrow we're going to ask a contractor "ok, how do we pay you"?

It's taken 6 months to get to this point. We went through several stages to hunting:

Education

Upon contemplating producing copious amounts of our own electricity (not with dinky solar power) I started to wonder how much hydro we'd need to heat a home. The answer is about 50 kW (over 200 Amps at 220V). Insane. Then I tripped upon ground source heat pumps which are over 500% efficient(heat energy output is 5x the energy required to operate).

The EcoCite condos on Bank St were touting that they we going to be heating the building using this same technology.

What sealed the deal? My wife grew up in home that went from wood fire to GSHP and she didn't freeze. So I got the green light.

Shock

Calling around to a few Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) contractors who specialize in these systems we found the cost to start at $25,000 CAD. We spent less than that on our car.

Justification

$25,000 is a LOT of money for heat. The federal and Ontario government has paired up to provide $3,500 x2 in rebates for these heating systems. On top of this, the Ontario Power Authority offers $750 for GSHPs. Look at my links to the left for "show me the money" links.

If we were to replace our low efficacy gas furnace and air conditioner (which we never use) that would be another $8,000 without even thinking too hard. So we're down to $10,000. Assuming $2,000 per year in natural gas - that's a 5 year return on investment. Hydro costs will be higher with our higher usage, so stretch that to 7 year ROI to be safe.

Good deal.

Investigation

We started by talking to a contractor who had a lot of experience with GSHPs. Problem was, he was too busy with other work to get to us. His price was quite a bit lower than others we had contacted, so we waited. And waited. And waited. And gave up.

Contractor-2 was friendly and knowledgeable. His initial price for closed loop (our preferred option) was $50,000. Too rich for us. We asked for a different configuration (open loop) and he could to $25,000.

Contractor-3 equally nice, priced $30,000 closed-loop, $20,000 open-loop.

Contractor-4, $25,000 closed loop DX from Nordic. Price is right, smaller chance of ground water contamination than open-loop, and they were prepared to show us a contract.

References

We called references from all the contractors. Everyone was pleased (surprise, surprise) with the functioning of the units. Only complaints were unavoidable things like "it made a mess of our yard" and "I didn't have ventilation before, and that was a mess".

So tomorrow, I hand over 1/4 of the $25,000 to get things going. Let's hope we get it before Christmas so I can put up videos.

Heat from the Earth

Now a little something about the furnace we're looking to get.

When we bought our home in 2005, the previous owner put in the cheapest furnace he could get - he was just flipping the house. At the time (nothing's changed I understand) the efficacy of a furnace did not have an effect on the value of a house.

One cold winter day the price of natural gas jumped in sympathy of high crude oil prices. Yay capitalism. The good old CBC morning radio was interviewing someone who heated their home using the stored heat in the ground. What bent my brain was this statement:

"The ground in Ottawa stays 10C year round and that's plenty to heat my house, yeehaw."

A house @ 10C just isn't comfy. I knew of geothermal heating using hot geysers in Iceland, but heating your house using something that's colder than what you would find comfortable didn't make sense.

Then a web site beat me with a clue stick (Images in this post are from that link, more info from CanRen, Wikipedia, and GeoExchange.org). Let me summarize it for you.

Air Conditioners
An air conditioner compresses a gas (refrigerant) to make it hotter by grace of thermodynamics. That hot gas is then cooled to air temperature using that big loud thing outside your house you identify as your air conditioner. The gas is then decompressed inside your ductwork - usually near a fan - where it cools down. The cold gas then cools the circulating air in your house and the cycle repeats. An air conditioner is moving heat out of your house - it doesn't "make cold" (I will not get started on how wrong that statement is). Your refrigerator and basement freezer operate on the same principal - cool down the inside while heating up the outside.

Air Sourced Head Pumps
One can reverse this and heat your house while cooling the outside air. This is commonly called an air source heat pump. Problem is the thermodynamics of refrigerants can't move much heat from -40C air to heat your house to +25C. That's 65C difference in temperature. In the summer you're only trying to cool your house by 10C (35C outside, 25C inside). Think about it.

Ground and Water Sourced Heat Pumps
A ground source heat pump tries to refrigerate the ground to keep your house warm. Consider that the density of air at STP is 1.2kg per cubic meter while rock averages 2,400kg per cubic meter. 2000x more dense. Not taking into account the greater specific heat capacity - you'll have a very very hard time freezing the ground over the course of a Canadian winter before the summer sun warms it up again. Now you're heating your home to 25C from ground that is 10C - a manageable 15C temperature differential.

And as a bonus - it's much easier to cool your home in the summer.
And as a second bonus - domestic hot water heating is taken care of as an after thought.

How does it work? Well, there are a few flavours of heat pumps.

1. Air Source
2. Water Source
3. Ground Source

Air source I've mentioned above. Water source uses well water - or a lake, pond, spring, etc). Ground water itself comes in a few sub-flavours.

1. Closed loop horizontal
   
2. Closed loop vertical
3. Direct Expansion (DX) vertical

Horizontal is just as it sounds. Loops of plastic coil containing a water-ethanol anti-freeze solution circulate a few feet below the surface of your property. This requires you tear up at least a 1/2 acre of lawn.

Vertical requires drilling 30 to100 metres down into the ground far from the colder surface. In these bore holes, plastic piping containing water-ethanol is put in for heat exchange.

DX is a vertical system but copper piping containing refrigerant is put into 30 metre drilled holes. The copper piping is a better heat exchanger and the refrigerant is now circulated in the ground where the heat is. Heat exchange is amplified.

First post

This is a first for me. These fancy-shmancy blogs that all these trendy 'kids' have to talk about this and that. So why did I betray my stubbern mindset to avoid being trendy?

Because the stuff I'm doing to my car, my house, my friend's house is just too damn cool. I want to share what I've learned about using waste vegetable oil as car/home/power fuel, furnaces, and other misc things that happen to peak my interest.

There will be photos, videos, howtos, diagrams, and comedy. Let the fun begin.