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Hot Water Heating
KW
Sorry to hear about your trouble with the geothermal unit.
On the front page of the local paper there was an article about a 7k sqft home using a geothermal unit. Their elec. bill last year was just over 2k, but their unit used well water then dumped it in the pond. Not bad for Michigan. What happened to the outdoor stove idea?
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jdcman, I'll try to post some specifics in the next week or so. I'm gathering data to take to a lawyer. The heat pump started tripping on a water flow fault light over the weekend but the pumps are running and water pressure is good.
AndyH, $2k/year for a 7k foot house? Our electric bill for just january was $320 and we have the cheapest electrical rates in the country. I've jettisoned the outdoor wood stove idea because of smoke issues. We don't want to live in a cloud of smoke and there's no way to know up front how much smoke there will be.
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I understand your concern about the smoke. My stove is only 70ft. from the house, which is close. There have only been a few days in two winters that I could smell the stove if I opened the back door of the house. It just depends on how green and how wet the wood is. I don't even cover mine, I just stack it on a trailer that I pull up in front of the stove. The stove I have, you make the chimney as high as you want. The stoves that have blower fans only smoke for the first 10 seconds and then clean up. My last electric bill was $97 for 1254kwh. My propane is at 40% of 500 gal. from 10/04.
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Ken,
Just caught the error of my ways,
My arithmetic was off --- assuming 11.5KW output with a 400% eff, would dictate an input of about 2.9KW, not 29W. For sake of arguement again, assume that all the energy went into the pump, in theory, a unit of up to 3.87 hp could be used. I'll assume that a unit of half this size could actually provide enough drive to cover the flow requirements.
So the up shot is that I now believe that the eff spec's do seem plausible, provided the assumption about the flow requiremnts are correct.
My home is relatively small compared to yours, (2500 sf, 24ft vault only in the living rm and kitchen), but based on these numbers I could in theory have this unit on for 16 hours a day, 31 days a month and expect to pay approx. 105 bucks for heating, (albeit it be damn hot). Based on how we actually use our forced air system, it would actually be closer to an ave of less than 5 hrs a day. Looks like quite a savings provided the system actually worked.
Having said all this I really haven't priced out a system, but I suspect for us the time to pay off may be a really issue considering that we generally only have 3-4 months of any substantial heating bill per year.
Again good luck, too bad you're having such problems. But I know how frustrating it can be when the "supposed" experts come out and aren't very helpful. Worse when they deceive you and you've paid good money.
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JD - we have the system on more for cooling than heating. I did not stop cooling into October. I will probably start periodically in April.
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JD, I worked through all those numbers before purchasing our system and they seemed to make sense. In real life it's just not working out that way for us. You mentioned that you were considering a geothermal system and I see you're nearby in Washington. If you decide to install one let me know and I'll tell you who NOT to use for your loop installation.
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Thanks,
I'm going to do some more research and thinking about our requirements. Good to have access to a group of people with experience on both sides of the coin.
Priceless.
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02-01-2006, 23:48 
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