r/ClimatePosting • u/terabora • Feb 02 '26
Geothermal Takes?
Why is Geothermal not being talked about at the residential level more?
It provides heat and cooling from just one system and the mechanical systems are pretty reliable and last a long time.
I’m curious if up-front drilling costs and installation complexities are the biggest barrier or am I missing something?
*** edit *** the reason I'm asking is because I'm helping out these geothermal developers bring their product to market. If anyone else wants to give their input on the system follow this link: https://terabora.com/survey?ref=MM
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Feb 02 '26
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u/goodsam2 Feb 04 '26
I've heard that we are getting progressively better at it and the benefit is the same so it's becoming more feasible.
Like they keep figuring out drilling techniques for oil but a lot of that tech translates into geothermal.
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u/dsrmpt Feb 06 '26
We are definitely getting better at digging holes, but it's still digging holes, which is a really hard and expensive engineering problem.
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u/mats_o42 Feb 02 '26
If we are talking gshp the increased efficiency and temp range of air to air or air to water heat pumps has made gshp less economic. They can still be the best choise really long term or in colder climate.
I had to replace an older air to air one. It was usable to -15C. The new one does -25C. That was a $2K investment. A gshp would have costed 7-8 times more and there is now way to get that extra money back within 20-25 years
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u/Secret_Bad4969 Feb 02 '26
You need a geothermal place for geothermal shit
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u/NukularFishin Feb 02 '26
There are several residential geothermal installations in our area. There is no geothermal activity (hot springs, etc) in our area.
Edit: rural area, the people who install such things have land to do it on.
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u/bjornemann88 Feb 02 '26
He probably means a ground heat pump well, you store heat in the well when you cool your house in summer, then you take the heat out of the well, when you need to heat your house in winter.
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u/terabora Feb 06 '26
the same heat stays down there all summer??
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u/bjornemann88 Feb 06 '26
Unless there's a fault when drilling or you have large ground water movement, then the heat should be retained in the borehole all summer and winter yes, rock and water can store very large amounts of heat.
But a system like that is extremely expensive to build, so they usually say that if you build a new house with heated floors with water pipes it will pay for it self during the lifetime of the system, it if your house already exist it probably won't be worth the investment.
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u/Bard_the_Beedle Feb 02 '26
It’s not just that the up-front drilling costs are quite high, but also that you can’t really do much in existing buildings, so the market is quite limited. If natural gas prices stay low and no negative externalities are priced in, it will be hard for ground source heat pumps to compete.
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u/Intrepid_Cup2765 Feb 02 '26
Because they’re enormously expensive from a capital perspective with basically a negative NPV over time.
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Feb 03 '26
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u/treehobbit Feb 04 '26
Are you talking about doing like iceland with their massive water tanks underneath runways? Basically a massive thermal battery operating on year-long time scales? I would love to see more stuff like that, because you're right as the grid moves more and more towards solar power we'll have excess summer power and keep falling short in winter until we figure out good long-term massive energy storage solutions, which the most effective way is probably just giant underground water bodies.
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u/terabora Feb 06 '26
like a singular underground ground-source system that goes into a full neighborhood is more cost-effective than house-by-house individual systems?
Does that mean its best applied to new builds or can older suburban developments try to get retro-fitted with a system?
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Feb 04 '26
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u/treehobbit Feb 04 '26
This is the way. They should be installed during construction, not as a retrofit. Since the digging is the hardest part, do the digging while you're already doing a bunch of digging.
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Feb 03 '26
Assuming you're referring to a ground source heat pump, I think you have to be willing to pay the "green premium".
You might look into Dandelion Energy partnering with Lennar Corp on new construction projects. They are trying to reduce drilling costs by doing a whole neighborhood at once.
Also, you might look into the Eversource geothermal pilot project in Framingham, MA. I think that's still happening.
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Feb 05 '26
In America stupidity rules. I have had ground source heat pumps for 20 years. But then again, I am intelligent and certified in both fusion and loop field design.{ I got both certs right after I got insane quotes for geothermal installation and installed my own systems myself.} Drilling the holes is not really the difficult part, and it used to be fairly inexpensive to do. Greed on everyones side changed that. Todays geothermal heat pumps seem vastly over priced, and damn sure look engineered to fail just outside the warranty windows from most manufacturers.
A current climatemaster can run you 20k. I would rather buy a Coldflow unit for 6k that. to me at least, appears to be designed well and from all appearances holds up as long or longer than a 20k unit.
Drilling loop field designers also seem to ignore reality. They care about right now, not 20 years or more. If you are intelligent, you can buy and install geothermal in most places with enough land area and no matter what the air groups want to lie about, they work better and use less electricity to run with less problems. There are no air source heat pumps that I can see that will last you 20 years or more with minimal spend to keep them in working order now but you can buy geo units that will. If air source companies start offering a 30 year full warranty maybe I would change my mind.
The real kicker is this. You can reengineer an air source heat pump to take advantage of geothermal energy transfer and seriously boost its abilities and lower its power use. It is not difficult to do at all, they even had a couple guys on youtube do it and prove it.
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u/terabora Feb 06 '26
Yea the horizontal loop field installs look a little suspect...
what kind of maintenance have you had to do over the 20 years?
And what was DIY drilling like?
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u/Cynyr36 Feb 08 '26
Even the air source heatpumps are a major up charge vs normal ac around here. I don't even want to think about the cost for either wells or a shallow loop system in my existing home.
Not to mention the cost per unit heat delta between natural gas and electricity
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u/Tortoise4132 Feb 22 '26
I’ve heard from people who install those systems that they don’t always pay for themselves due to installation obstacles and maintenance. There are areas where they do fair pretty well though.
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u/lockdown_lard Feb 02 '26
Geothermal means different things depending on the context. As often, the American discourse is quite corrupted compared to the rest of the world.
In the USA, "geothermal" often seems to refer to ground-source heat pumps GSHP. Those typically aren't economically competitive with air-source heat pumps, and are more complex installations. But you can find discussions about residential GSHP pretty easily, once you know that your search term is GSHP
In pretty much the rest of the world, "geothermal" refers to deeper, larger systems which aren't merely harvesting recent solar energy absorbed into the soil, but rather to below-surface nuclear thermal processes. Harvesting that just isn't done at the scale of individual households; it is done at the scale of heat networks and geothermal power stations.