Introduction -- A green project born of laziness and headaches

Despite my geeky technophile inclinations, my wife and I are usually technological foot-draggers -- mostly out of stinginess. When we got our microwave oven in 1990 we proudly told our friends we were moving into the '80s. We live downstream, technologically speaking, from my wife's sister and her husband, scavenging their outgoing TVs and computer monitors as soon as they are fresh on the metaphorical compost pile. (Yes, we compost metaphors here. Political speeches, in particular, we find to be a rich source of metaphors and other earthy, elephant-dung-like nutrients.)

So imagine my surprise to find us on the leading, bleeding, seeding, feeding, and other words ending in -ing, edge of green heating and air conditioning. Now I can report to you firsthand on the economic justification and installation of a geothermal system!

A geothermal system is something that, to provide heating, squeezes heat out of the temperate earth, which is a constant 55-ish degrees F (13-ish degrees C). It pumps this heat up to the more useful temperature people need to heat their houses. In air-conditioning season, it fairly literally runs backwards, sucking the heat out of house air and putting it into the comparatively cool (still 55-ish degrees) earth. Read more about it in my article, Geothermal and the Magic of Heat Pumps. It's one of the technologies that, if you are a U.S. taxpayer and homeowner, you can get a 30% tax credit for installing. (More about that in my article, Green Incentives -- Do It Now!)

This decision to install geothermal originated not so much from a concern about the earth (although that is certainly a factor) as from a general weariness with hauling wood from the woodshed all winter, and growing evidence that our winter sinus headaches were related to wood smoke. Our house was designed to be passive solar, meaning that it has a lot of window area on the sunny south side, high R-factor thermal curtains put up over the biggest windows at night, and a lot of insulated wall elsewhere. Heat is stored in the mass of the building during a sunny day, and released at night. Alas, the original owners compromised this design by not following through with stone floors to absorb the heat, and omitting other design features. Our main backup is wood heat, to the tune of about 3.5 cords of hardwood per winter for our 1700 sq. ft. (158 square meters) house. Generally this means about 2-3 trips to the woodshed a day. The backup when we're away or dog-tired is a total of three, count 'em three, electric baseboard heating units.

This means that we have no central heating. (Well, our woodstove is centrally located, but that doesn't count for too much.) It means that, unlike most of the rest of North America, we have no convenient dial to set to get our house comfortable. No amount of attempts to run the woodstove backwards has produced central air conditioning, either. (Do not try this at home; your face gets all sooty from blowing into the stovepipe.)

What to do? There were many options. We could continue to use a sustainable energy source (wood) by upgrading our 20+ year-old woodstove to a cleaner-burning, more efficient wood or pellet system. Of course, we'd still be dragging in wood or bags of pellets, and would the reduction in smoke be enough? We could put in a conventional oil- or propane-fired, high-efficiency furnace, but at best those solutions still have us consuming mostly fossil fuel. We could add some baseboard electric heaters, the lowest capital investment approach, but that's pricey energy in the long haul.

(more in future blog posts)