Thinking about investing in Ground source heating, especially in view of the Renewable Heating Incentive recently announced.

Anyone any thoughts, experience? We have an oldish 4 bed house, half of it is a recent extension that is insulated beyond belief, the older half varies quite a bit. Currently no central heating at all, just a wood burner and some electric radiators. We have about an acre of land adjacent to the house.

I’m sure there was an old thread about it on here but i cant find it, perhaps it was pre-hack.
The companies touting the renewable heat incentive payments reckon installation costs will typically be recouped within 3 years and thats before considering the energy savings made.
Any idea of reliability or on costs associated with these systems?

Sounds too good to be true….should that tell me everything I need to know or is it a technology that is coming of age?

I was looking at this website

http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/

rhi is only out for consultation at the moment. and if I had my way heat pumps wouldn’t qualify for it anyway as 20-50% of the energy used is not from renewable sources. there’s been a recent thread you may want to search for

Dunno if it’s sorted now but my brother’s initially turned out to be very expensive to run, never mind the install costs.

Also not sure a heat pump will be best suited to a poorly insulated house.

In my opinion, a heat pump should only really be used on a very well insulated building, using underfloor heating and if possible a heat recovery system.

If you do go down the GSHP be prepared to sit down when you get the costs for groundworks!

Drillski, if you’re the guy going by the same moniker as per the chase trails forum then you may be in luck as the ground surrounding the chase may well be suitable for an drilled open system. As noted above though, it’s a ” put three kW in get 7 kW out” type of thing (bit like a backwards fridge) so not really up there with solar thermal water heating. Costs for an existing house will be pretty high too.

I am indeed. Probably not suitable for drilling for the borehole approach as though we are near the chase, we actually live in /on the edge of what was once a sandstone quarry, and half the house sits on bedrock, it almost certainly isn’t that far below the surface for the rest. Quite a good spot for drilling wells for water though as the water table is pretty near the surface on a lot of the property, we actually had a 100 foot deep and eight foot wide well that supplied the ingestre estate many years ago via a beam engined pump, before it was filled in thirty years ago.
When you say open system do you mean the sort where you suck in water from the environment/soil?

Or is easily drilled sandstone with a nearby groundwater level good for this borehole option?

We do have a pond , but it’s only about three feet deep and twenty feet across, which I imagine isn’t big enough to act a as as source on its own.