Underfloor Radiant Heating works great with a Geothermal Heat Pump

Radiant floor heating has been the standard for comfort and efficiency for many years. The feeling of having a warm floor under your bare feet is priceless. Rolling on the floor while playing with your children or grandchildren is great when it is cold outside and the floor is pleasantly warm.

Geothermal Heat Pumps usually are associated with hot air heating and air conditioning systems. If you live in a climate that very seldom needs air conditioning, then you need to concentrate more on the heating. There is a super way to use geothermal technology to give you very efficient and comfortable heating. Underfloor radiant heating can very easily be incorporated with a geothermal heat pump to give you the best of both comfort and efficiency.

Here are some thing’s that you do have to consider before deciding on a system like this.
You will need to drill a few wells to extract the heat from the ground.
Piping must be installed in the wells correctly for the system to work properly.
You will need a heat pump designed for hot water heating.
You can not use a heat pump that is designed for hot air use and convert it for radiant heating.
The radiant heat design must be designed to use water temperatures that are cooler than that of many radiant heat systems.
The maximum temperature design should be 130 degrees F.
To get this kind of design to work correctly for you, you will need to use good quality heat plates and insulated under the heat plates.
By following these guidelines I have designed a number of radiant heating systems that have proven to heat houses very comfortably at temperatures well below zero.

If you decide on installing this type of system make sure that your installer knows exactly what they are doing. This type of system requires many things to be done exactly right, so that the water flows will allow the system to work correctly. The piping on the well side is extremely critical so that it uses all the wells equally. On the house side the piped using a primary/secondary piping scheme. Pumps and pipe sizes need to be able to give you very high flow rates so that the temperature drop is kept to ten degrees or less. When working with these low temperatures the piping and pumping becomes so much more critical.

By using these principles you can combine two very great heating types and can have a very good heating system that will perform very well for many years. The main drawback with this type of system is that you do not have the ability to get much cooling from this system. This is probably the only drawback of this type of system. It would be wondeful if there was a geothermal unit that was heating only. The elimination of the reversing valve would be a great cost savings and a plus overall. This system is best suited for cooler climates that require little or no air conditioning.