Just realize the hole he dug is probably the bare minimum to handle the heat load from the smallest window AC. It takes a lot of digging to cool a real AC unit. And European homes aren’t known for have large yards.
I gotta say I understand the cost. Dig a full size grave by hand some time. It’s freakin exhausting. And sure, an excavator can do it in minutes, but that means you’re paying for time on a very expensive machine.
There’s places with district heating from back in the days that people still invested in new infrastructure. We could do the same with cooling but I’m afraid the neoliberal rot has penetrated too far at this point.
Heating is easier than cooling. For heat you just run a set of lines from the source to the homes, same as plumbing. To dump that heat into the ground, the field you need grows very quickly. A small town would need a large, and probably deep field of pipes. The cost would be huge. Geothermal is great, but digging is hard, so it’s relatively expensive. Every project needs to be individually considered, to determine if it’s really the way to go.
Just realize the hole he dug is probably the bare minimum to handle the heat load from the smallest window AC. It takes a lot of digging to cool a real AC unit. And European homes aren’t known for have large yards.
You can dig straight down, and run the ground loop vertically, but it’s surprisingly expensive to dig the hole. Like 15-40k expensive.
I gotta say I understand the cost. Dig a full size grave by hand some time. It’s freakin exhausting. And sure, an excavator can do it in minutes, but that means you’re paying for time on a very expensive machine.
There’s places with district heating from back in the days that people still invested in new infrastructure. We could do the same with cooling but I’m afraid the neoliberal rot has penetrated too far at this point.
Heating is easier than cooling. For heat you just run a set of lines from the source to the homes, same as plumbing. To dump that heat into the ground, the field you need grows very quickly. A small town would need a large, and probably deep field of pipes. The cost would be huge. Geothermal is great, but digging is hard, so it’s relatively expensive. Every project needs to be individually considered, to determine if it’s really the way to go.