| ▲ | frevib 5 hours ago |
| Drilling alone is €10.000. The whole installation of a air/water heat pump is €10.000. Mostly not worth it. |
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| ▲ | wattso 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| To jakozaur’s point, there’s plenty of reasons drilling can get cheaper and there’s at least one other company working on it [1]—would love to hear about others! I’m a minimally informed amateur but my intuition is that the way it’s typically done (multiple inch borehole, U-tube geometry) is fairly suboptimal since the diameter is a lot wider than you need it to be just for hydrodynamic resistance and you get losses from the outgoing liquid cooling the incoming liquid. Dropping the diameter should make drilling a lot easier—-you can sink a 5/8”x12’ ground rod with hand tools in the right soil! (you’d still have to figure out how to make the holes meet up but I imagine there are ways of doing this). [1] https://www.borobotics.ch/ |
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| ▲ | crote 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | The fact that you need to roll out a drilling rig plus crew at all is going to be a large part of that cost. For it to become interesting for the average homeowner the price is probably going to have to drop by something like 75% - but that basically kills any margins for clever new innovations... | | |
| ▲ | wattso 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What I was trying to get at with the ground rod example is it’s entirely possible that you wouldn’t have to roll out a drilling rig and crew. To zoom about a bit, the main risk for heat pumps is really ugly winter peaks but besides that, ASHPs are perfect 90+% of the time. So the main role I see for GSHPs is backing up ASHPs to shave that peak, and once you scale back their role like that it seems like there’s a lot of ways to cut installation costs significantly. | |
| ▲ | Terr_ an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | In some potential future, there is an engineered a plant/fungus in a pot that you place onto the worksite. Months later, with regular sugar-water and hormones, it gives you a root-pipe for pennies a day. Of course at that point we might not need the cheap pipe in the first place. |
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| ▲ | aaron695 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
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