Bye Bye Fossil Fuel!

 When we first moved into our house, I was a bit dismayed by the huge oil tank in our basement:

It always felt kind of vulgar when an oil tanker would stop in front of my house and chug 100's of gallons of oil into my basement just so we could burn it in our furnace to heat the house.

Here we were contributing to global warming and heating our house in the most primitive way possible.

Luckily, progressive politicians in Washington and Boston recently structured a series of incentives to enable homeowners like myself to convert to geothermal (namely a tax rebate, a zero percent loan, alternative energy credit you can sell, and an outright rebate) so we did it!***

As a physics guy, how could I not love the idea of exchanging heat via a compressor and giant underground coil with the Earth itself?  Steal heat from underground in the winter and then run it in reverse to dump heat underground in the summer.  How cool is that?*

First up:  A giant rig drills two bore holes 100's of feet deep in the front yard:

These two vertical bore holes are connected in parallel to two outlets in our basement.  All of the connections are buried four and a half feet underground.

Finally, the old furnace was hauled away and an advanced compressor/blower unit was installed to feed air warmed by the heat extracted from the fluid (extracted from the Earth) into our existing ductwork:

Since our electricity comes from our solar panels,** we are a now a net-zero house! 

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*pun intended but this pun only works in the summertime!

** we overproduce electricity in the summer by about the same amount we underproduce in the winter. 

*** our conversion should pay for itself in 10 years or less (without factoring in the fact that we will no longer be polluting!)