But like it says on the page, because air source heat pumps have been getting a lot better they no longer sell the kits. There are a couple of individuals on YouTube who have used similar GSHP kits and had good success. The main challenge is that you need to dig 100ft of deep trenches per ton of cooling.
Edit: should be 300ft not 100
We just build a house on the west coast of Sweden and we initially considered both a ground or air heat pump. Essentially our builder said with modern houses and heatpumps going for the ground heat pump was really not worth it. Their efficiency gain only becomes significant at outside temperatures below 10 deg C and there were just not enough days of such low temperature. Instead it is better to invest that money into a solar installation.
As someone who's used air source heat pumps for years, they were good to around 5C, at which point they would start to ice up and need heat pumped out to melt the ice. They were utter crap if you had any kind of winter conditions.
I'd love to believe that modern ones are better, but its hard to pull the trigger on them after years of suffering.
I currently have oil heat, and love it. Nice hot (not luke warm) air. And if the power goes out, I just fire up a generator and I have good heat, because the blower doesn't take much to run. Having been w/o power for stretches as long as a week during winter, that is a massive benefit over electric heat.
Many modern heat pumps are much better than what you remember. Some maintain their full rated BTU output to 17F, or in the extreme models, 0-5F. They usually output some percentage of full BTU at even lower temps.
The common Asian 'mini split' models also use variable fan speeds to maintain higher coil temps and have output air that is warm enough to avoid the 'luke warm' issue of heat pump coils on 'dumb' air handlers that blow full speed.
That said, for cold environments, a backup is often required to make up for the performance drop at very cold temps without massively oversizing the system. Hopefully, you have your oil furnace coupled to a heat pump or perhaps supplemental minisplit heads. That is the best of all worlds: the HPs can cover 80-90% of the load, only needing the oil for extremes. Oil is likely to hit 5 a gallon this year, like last, so it would suck to rely entirely on it.
Yes - we have a dual fuel system. HP is used when the temps allow it. As far as I can tell, it's not eonomic to run it below 5C, and certainly not comfortable.
Similar in Lithuania, where buildings are required to be certified to A++ efficiency. Electric floor heating and air to air heat pump (aka split system) is enough. Solar panels are much better value. Cooling in summer is kinda becoming much bigger issue.
For older building even replacing wood furnace with air to water system is enough.
Ground heat pumps provide free cooling in the summer for a very limited amount of electricity as the ground will be at 10-15C (depending on where you live) so you don't need to use the compressor and just make the liquid flow to cool down your house.
It also has the extra benefit of heating up your ground for the winter period.
While that is in principle true, in practice there are quite a few issues. Many heatpumps here are made to heat the water for floor heating but don't transfer heat to air indoors. So you would cool using your floor which isn't very comfortable usually. More importantly because of the above the heat pumps are build for only one directional transfer. If one builds their own system it might make sense to plan for it, but even then it's unlikely that Sweden will become so hot that opening windows will not cool off the house enough. If it comes so far we likely have more pressing problems.
The ground heat pumps are not used in the opposite direction, it doesn't cool down water to the floor but it flows water at 10-15C into your floor. According to the installers I've talked to here in Belgium, all the ground heat pumps devices are capable of doing that.
While this might not be needed in Sweden, it's more interesting further south. I live in Belgium and we had a long heatwave this summer and they predict more of those in the coming years. So cheap efficient cooling might turn out useful here (even if nobody had AC systems 20 years ago)
Not to say you were wrong since in making that choice but with climate change days of extreme temperatures in both directions will become ever more common so so you may have considered it an investment into the future. Of course you may have other problems by then (a reliable source of food for example)
> (...) with climate change days of extreme temperatures in both directions (...)
This sort of take is unwise. It makes zero sense to invest today in domestic systems with the expectation that at some point in the future there will be extreme events a hand full of times throughout the year. The benefit of shaving a fraction of a percent from the baseline outweighs multipercent gains of hypothetical extreme events that happen a few times a year.
When building spend as much as you can on the building envelope (preventing air, vapor, water movement) and insulation.
Those cannot be easily changed at all, but you can relatively easily add another heating or cooling device.
And if you build above code minimums (you should!) be sure to have someone knowledgeable calculate the actual heating/cooling load. If you don’t, the HVAC contractor may assume code minimums and oversize the system.
Or get systems that are entirely variable.
And get every step inspected! Mid build blower door tests are a great thing to do (right after the air seal envelope is up).
> Spending money hoping to bank on the occurrence of unexpected outcomes simply can't be justified.
I would have agreed a decade ago, but in the one year our house has been standing, it has endured two 100 year events (a heat wave and a rain/windstorm).
We overpaid about $1000 to go one size up on the (variable) heat pump / AC and $10-20k to oversize + harden the solar / battery.
It has been worth every penny at this point; the solar kept the fridge, freezer and AC happy in > 100F heat during a power outage. That's $500-1000 of food just for the one event, and outages are increasing in frequency. (Air conditioning was mostly unheard of in this area 20 years ago, since it didn't get hot enough to ever run it.)
My big concern is that we're already eating into the engineeeing tolerances for the wind rating on the house itself.
I do agree that you should consider what can be upgraded later, and put money towards things that are hard to change (insulation, wind ratings, etc.)
the "it doesn't get hot enough to need air conditioning" argument was used to build out tons of apartment complexes in the pacific northwest, say, around Tacoma and Seattle. I lived in Tacoma in the mid-2000s for a summer and it was miserable. And everyone i spoke to about it said "yeah, that's the joke."
You are making assumptions that may be not true.
1. Those events will be a handful, I see no indication of that on the contrary
2. You can always upgrade later. You don't how a system can deal with extreme
and you don't that those things will be available later. Maybe they will, maybe they won't.
> The same can be said for most insurance products.
That's a terribly silly thing to say. Think about it for a second, particularly how insurance premiums compare to the cost of buying/rebuilding a new item.
The part with the compressor in it costs $12000-$15000 minimum just for the device, nevermind installation and the rest, and that's for an equivalent to 3-6 ton systems commonly installed.
My mini-split system worked fine down to about 10F, then it was defrosting for 10 minutes after every 8 minutes of use or so. I just turned on crypto miners on a few computers to supplement. Laptop crypto mining is useful if you want to keep your hands and wrists warm, hats, blankets, sweaters, and some old 100+ watt light bulbs will also help.
All this is to say "you can just get a -30 degree capable system" is out of reach for most people in the world. A large swath of people geographically close to my house still use window or wall HVAC units, rather than ducted systems. I was the only split ductless system my HVAC installer had ever installed - they had to come fix their install 4 times (four!) and eventually i contacted the asurion purchase protection people and got refunded for the cost of the HVAC system.
it works fine now, i told the HVAC installer to cut the threaded connectors off everything and sweat all the copper lines together, and it hasn't had an issue since.
it was always breaking in the late fall and early spring, where it had to heat at night but cool during the day, it would always break around 11AM. The pressure differentials must have been an afterthought in the design, i guess.
Here in Finland you can get a split system good for -30 Celsius for 2-3k€ including installation. Mitsubishi is considered the best, but others are available. My Panasonic has been working fine.
is that for a single head minisplit? In the US i installed one back in 2004 by myself, and i remember it costing around $1400.
the system i have now is also a minisplit, but it has 5 heads, and is 5.5 tons. If i run one of 4 heads by itself, it can do 3 tons to just that head. the fifth head is smaller BTU, i think it's 3/4 ton max. It cost $3,723.68, plus an additional $5000 to get it installed and working, give or take. As i mentioned, i got the $3723 refunded due to manufacturer's defect.
That's for single head, yes. From my point of view, single head is the norm here. In here too, I would imagine multi-head to be cheaper per head than single head.
However, what I have found in the process is that for well insulated homes GSHP probably doesn’t make sense.
Originally I was considering buying a kit from this site: https://www.123zeroenergy.com/pricing/geo-thermal.html
But like it says on the page, because air source heat pumps have been getting a lot better they no longer sell the kits. There are a couple of individuals on YouTube who have used similar GSHP kits and had good success. The main challenge is that you need to dig 100ft of deep trenches per ton of cooling. Edit: should be 300ft not 100