A geothermal heat pump system can provide many advantages, with its high energy efficiency, long projected lifespan and sizable federal tax credits. They especially make sense if they’re installed in a new house as it’s being constructed. But what about retrofitting your central Indiana home for geothermal heating and cooling?
You can certainly replace your existing air conditioner and furnace with a geothermal system, but retrofitting your central Indiana home for geothermal can often take some work. The ease and expense of installation depends on a few different factors.
Insulation
Retrofitting your home for geothermal is often easier if you upgrade your insulation first. The insulation level will influence the size of the needed geothermal system. The better your home is insulated, the smaller the geothermal system can be and the better it will function. An older home that has not been updated likely will require more insulation upgrades.
Air ducts
Geothermal heat pumps can heat its air output to about 100 degrees. Though that’s plenty hot enough to keep your home warm, it’s not as hot as the air from a traditional flame-powered furnace. Therefore, the geothermal system has to provide a higher volume of heated air, which may require installing larger air ducts.
Not all homes would require a duct upgrade, though. Insulation improvements to your home may have made the duct system oversized, which means it would now be the correct size for geothermal heating and cooling. And if you are replacing an air-source heat pump, the ducts should already be the correct size.
Radiant systems
If you have some form of radiant heating system already installed, you might be able to simply switch out the boiler for a geothermal unit. But, you might have to replace the old tubing, or add additional radiators. Again, it depends on the specifics of your existing system, and whether it will be adequate with the lower heating temperatures provided by geothermal.
To determine how easy or difficult retrofitting your central Indiana home for geothermal will be, contact the experts at Mowery Heating, Air Conditioning and Plumbing. We would be happy to answer your questions.
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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