If you’re thinking about alternatives for heating (and cooling) your Indianapolis home, you can’t do much better than a geothermal heat pump. With geothermal heating, you can significantly reduce your energy bills. A geothermal heat pump uses the underground as a heat source. The principle behind this is simple: Outside temperatures vary widely with the changing of the seasons, but temperatures four to six feet below ground remain consistently and moderately warm throughout the year because soil serves as an insulator of solar heat stored in the ground.
A geothermal heat pump works much like its conventional air-source counterpart, except that the geothermal system gathers heat from the ground and not the outside air, and transfers it through liquid-filled pipe loops buried below your lawn. In a closed-loop design (which is the most common), the heat energy from underground is released from the water/anti-freeze mixture after it’s brought inside, where another heat exchange is accomplished with the heat pump unit that’s inside the ouse. The process is reversed in the summer, when heat from the home is “rejected” back into the earth.
So why are geothermal heat pumps so efficient? It’s mainly because the heat exchange process requires much less energy when the temperatures are closer together, as is the case between the ground and your desired indoor temperatures, both winter and summer. On the other hand, an air-source heat pump has to extract heat from very cold air in the winter, and deposit heat energy into very warm air in the summer. Even in the coldest winters, it reaches efficiencies between 300 to 600 percent. That’s leaps ahead of the efficiency levels of air-source heat pumps, which reach only 175 to 250 percent.
To know more about geothermal heat pumps, please contact us at Mowery Heating, Cooling and Plumbing. We have more than four decades of experience in heating and cooling, so you can count on us to provide the perfect energy-efficient solution for your home and your needs.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Brownsburg, Indiana and surrounding areas about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).
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