Home made geothermal????

[shinnlinger]

Hi,

Parts of my geothermal Ideas have been up before and have been influenced by this forum.  I plan to bury a snorkel for wood stove make up air and then a loop or two or more of anti freeze filled water pipe I circulate into  a truck radiator in my basement.

I was initially just going to bury as I have an excavator and I have the land, but then I started thinking the antifreeze loops might do more good if they were coiled at the bottom of a pond, but my latest idea/question is  what about ledge???  My new house sits partially on a huge spine of ledge that keeps reappearing in regular intervals on my property.  Snow melts early off of ledge and the my thought is it is a huge heat sync in the 40-50 degree range. Would I be better off running my underground lines right on top of the ledge about 6 feet down?

WHat do you think?  Any other ideas???

[John Mc]

Are you doing this for heating, or cooling? If it's for heating, isn't your basement already going to be at about the same temperature as your buried loop? I can't see how the loop and truck radiator is going to get you much, without some sort of heat pump.

Burying on the ledge is an interesting idea. If the ledge is more conductive to heat than the soil (which it probably is) it may allow you to get by with fewer loops (?? maybe... I'm no geothermal engineer).