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66 comments on Will conservation efforts have an effect?

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Praedor on November 14, 2005 - 4:28pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Geothermal.  Geothermal heating of houses is the only real way to go.  Burn wood/pellets?  Everyone?  Lots of dirty chimneys dumping carbon and soot into the air.  Gas is going to get evermore expensive and NEVER come back down.  Electricity?  One of the worst ways of heating a home there is - really wasteful and merely transfers the pollution/fuel use upstream to electricity generating plants.

 

 The only valid way to properly heat AND cool a house in the coming problematic times will be, for the middle and poorer strata will passive earth - buried or partially buried housing that thermoregulates from the ground.  For those that can afford more elaborate systems is geothermal - drilling deep and laying pipe to transfer cooling/heat from the ground.  

   

I'd LOVE to go geothermal but to retrofit a house with geothermal heating/cooling is extremely expensive.  As it is, I'm rural and my house uses propane and a woodburning stove for heat.  I've been looking into solar heating, at least for water.  It is too expensive to retrofit for solar home heating as well as water heating.  


 

Passive geothermal or deep geothermal are the easiest.  You could try to sell people on it by tapping into the Lord of the Rings movies:  homes and communities built along the lines of Hobbitown.  

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mcain6925 on November 14, 2005 - 7:12pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
The only valid way to properly heat AND cool a house in the coming problematic times will be, for the middle and poorer strata will passive earth - buried or partially buried housing that thermoregulates from the ground.

But... this is a very long-term undertaking. Roughly speaking, 50% of the US population lives in the suburbs and 25% lives in urban areas. Buried housing is impractical for much of that — there is no buried equivalent that matches the density of high-rise housing (or even three-story tall "garden" apartments), and while it might be possible in the suburbs it would require complete replacement of the existing housing stock.

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GreyZone on November 14, 2005 - 10:46pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
My understanding is that earth sheltered housing benefits primarily from the huge thermal mass of the earth itself. It would seem then that any other building technique that can employ high thermal mass, either from the earth directly or in some other manner, might be able to achieve similar heating and cooling benefits. Such structures would also seem to be candidates for 1-3 story multi-use buildings.
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Stoneleigh on November 14, 2005 - 7:35pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
The house I live in came with a geothermal system, but I don't use it very often because it's too expensive to run and it doesn't keep the house even vaguely warm by itself if the temperature dips below zero Celsius (which it does frequently). When I bought the house, I installed an outdoor wood-burning furnace to provide heat and also hot water in winter (I have solar thermal hot water in summer when the wood furnace isn't running). The next step is to hook the furnace up to baseboard radiators so that I can avoid using the main fan to circulate the heat round the house.

I only use the geothermal heating as back up if I'm going to be away and I don't want the pipes to freeze. For the time being (while I can still afford it) I use the system for cooling in summer when the temperature gets into the truly unbearable range. I recognize that it's a luxury though, and that I'll probably have to do without it in the future. If I was looking for a home again, I'd do as you suggest and build a hobbit-hole.

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bigfootvegan on November 14, 2005 - 7:56pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I know not everyone could do this but its such a beautiful design, for all you budding hobbits

www.earthship.org

this house doesnt need heating!!

and is made from recycled materials

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bigfootvegan on November 14, 2005 - 9:10pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
mabye for the non troglodites we could use wood pellets, nice to see a "green" power station being built

http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/story.asp?j=162495078&p=y6z495784
The CHP plant makes the sawmill site self-sufficient in electricity, saving over £1 million a year, with the surplus electricity sold to the Northern Ireland grid.
In addition it powers the largest bio fuel pellet production facility in the British Isles.
The plant produces 50,000 tonnes of high-energy fuel pellets - displacing fossil fuels and the 200,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide which would otherwise have been released into the atmosphere.

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tom deplume on November 15, 2005 - 5:00pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
When citeing production figures you should include a time factor. Is that 50,000 tons a second or 50,000 tons per century?
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bigfootvegan on November 15, 2005 - 5:25pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
sorry tom that was a direct quote from the article I didnt write it.
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Bigelow on November 15, 2005 - 3:05pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
"The house I live in came with a geothermal system, but I don't use it very often because it's too expensive to run and it doesn't keep the house even vaguely warm by itself if the temperature dips below zero Celsius (which it does frequently)."

Your system was not sized properly. Can you go after the contractor?
I wanted a ground source heat pump system but municipal code precludes drilling and my lot is too small for the other trenching method.

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Stoneleigh on November 15, 2005 - 7:48pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I don't even know when, or by whom, the geothermal system was installed as I didn't own the house then. If it was upgraded in order to be able to provide enough winter heat, presumably that would make it even more expensive to run. The thing devours electricity and I'm trying to move towards living off-grid. I could never run it with renewable energy.

Perhaps newer models are more efficient, but the cost of replacing it would be too high. Of course if my house were newer, better insulated and had a lower surface area to volume ratio, the geothermal system I already have would cost less to run and would keep my house warmer. I should have built a hobbit-hole when I had the chance!

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66 comments on Will conservation efforts have an effect?

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