Installers of Geothermal Heating across the North East of England
About Geothermal Heating
Geothermal heating has been in use for thousands of years, Roman's and people in Iceland have been using Geothermal heating as an efficient and environmental friendly way of heating. From the most basic forms of geothermal heating like spas, to the more complex district geothermal heating, geothermal heating is the fast, effective and renewable source of heating. Most heating sources today either use indirect forms of combustion of biomass (read electricity), or they directly use items like wood, coal etc. to achieve heating. However geothermal heating is quite the opposite, there is very little or no forms of biomass combustion involved. An added advantage of geothermal heating is that you don't have to use a lot of energy to carry out the basic processes, in fact one can use renewable sources of electricity like solar energy to meet what little electricity demand geothermal heating requires.
Geothermal heating is based on a very simple concept, the temperature of the earth at a given depth is always constant no matter what the conditions outside. Like any air conditioning system, geothermal heating too works on the simple principle of heating the room, the heat pump converts hot water that has been heated by the earth, hence the term geothermal heating. Since the temperature of the earth below the frost line is constant the year round, heat exchange is carried out, using a geothermal heat pump set. The biggest advantage of this geothermal heat exchange is that compared to traditional methods of heating, there is no combustion to create a heat source, merely thermodynamic transfer of geothermal heat from one source to the other.
A geothermal heating unit is essentially composed of three units
a) Loop fields
A loop field is basically a series of looped tubes that carry the heated water from the ground to the heat pump. Based on the geothermal heating requirements, the length and capacity of the loop fields vary, the bigger the structure the bigger the length and capacity of this geothermal heating component. Also based on the geothermal unit, the liquid in the loops could be in direct contact or indirect contact with the heat source.
b) Liquid pump pack
This is responsible for sending the hot water, or liquid to the heat pump. Of all the geothermal heating components involved this is the simplest to understand. After all the geothermal heating system, simply carries the water that has been warmed by the ground to the heat pump.
c) Heat pumps
The heat pump is the most essential component of the geothermal heating system, the heat pump actually converts the warm water or liquid it receives based on the requirement, into warm air, or allows the warm water to flow forward for various purposes. Heat pumps are broadly classified into three categories
1) Water to air heat pump – This type of heat pump actually converts the energy from the warm water, into warm air, just like a fire place or a furnace. Such heat pumps are useful in geothermal heating for rooms etc.
2) Water to Water heat pump - Some specialised geothermal heating units require, warm water to flow through conduits to rooms, for example in floor heating, compare this to a boiler and you will see the disadvantage is that this geothermal heating unit cannot provide cooling in summers.
3) Hybrid heat pumps- Simply put it, such units can either provide warm air like furnaces, or if need be converted into a more traditional thing like a boiler.
The idea behind explaining the various heat pumps is simple, at the end of the day what you need from your geothermal heating unit varies, and the essential ingredient (as you will notice) is the heat pump.
To sum it up, you might have your reasons for choosing geothermal heating, there are initial costs involved in setting up geothermal heating, no doubt. But if you sit down and do the numbers, you will notice that the initial costs of installing geothermal heating are recovered very soon, as you are using very little additional electricity to run the geothermal heating unit. Not to mention the biggest reason geothermal heating should appeal to you is because it is environmental friendly, as there are no hazardous gasses of any form involved or biomass combustion involved.
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