Livingston man keeps house warm, cool pulling energy from ground

By Scott McMillion, of The Bozeman Daily Chronicle - 04/08/2007

Eric Schneider, shown recently in the top photo at his home east of Livingston, uses a geothermal heat pump to keep the hillside home, above, comfortable. He uses a minimal amount of supplemental heat, even with a 22-foot vaulted ceiling. A long underground loop of pipe extracts heat from the ground in the winter to heat this home. A reverse process in the summer acts as an air conditioner. Photos by Deirdre Eitel / Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

LIVINGSTON — Eric Schneider lives in a big, airy house with high ceilings. He’s got a lot of cubic feet of space to keep warm. He does so by tapping the Earth, pulling heat from the cold, cold ground.

Schneider’s house is heated with geothermal energy. He didn’t have to cap a geyser or wrestle with intricate subterranean plumbing. He didn’t even have to go very deep. ‘‘It isn’t a big complicated thing,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s like a refrigerator that runs backwards.’’

And it’s cheap, too. Even in the depths of winter, when the winds howl around his eaves and the mercury drops below zero, his power bills run only about $70 a month.

Only when it gets really cold does he fire up his wood stove, burning just a couple cords of pine a year.

In the summer, he flips a switch and reverses the refrigeration. Then the same system keeps his house cool even on the most blistering of days.

Geothermal heaters for homes have been around at least since the 1940s, though they’re rare in the West. They work by burying a few hundred feet of pipe full of water and some environmentally friendly antifreeze, then circulating it with a small electric pump.

The fluids coming into the house don’t have to be very warm: about 40 degrees to 50 degrees is plenty, said Curtiss Moe, of Campbell’s Plumbing and Heating in Belgrade, who recently completed a two-week accreditation course in geothermal installation.

The fluids enter a refrigeration coil, which works just like the one in your kitchen that sucks the heat out of the milk and the cold cuts. You don’t need much incoming heat because the fluids inside the refrigeration coil boil at much lower temperatures. But instead of boiling those fluids with electricity, you’re pumping in heat from the ground, even if it isn’t very much.

‘‘When something boils, it creates energy,’’ Moe said. Then that energy can be captured and put to work. The only electricity you need is for the circulation pump, which puffs the warm air into ducts so you can send it where you want.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Web site, geothermal heat pumps will save you about 50 percent on your heating costs and even more on air conditioning.

Installation, however, can be a bit pricey: upward of $15,000, Moe said.

Schneider lives on a large acreage, so when he was building his home 14 years ago, the retired scientist and author had his contractors dig a 6-foot-deep trench and lay about 1,400 feet of polyethylene pipe, which they then connected to the pump in his basement.

People without as much space can opt to drill straight down about 300 feet. Or they can bury a length of pipe that’s coiled up like a Slinky.

That’s a lot of dirt work or drilling, neither of which is cheap.

Still, DOE calculates a geothermal heat source will pay for itself in two to 10 years.

If you’re installing one on a new house, you can add it to your mortgage. That will increase the size of your payment, but lower power bills will more than offset the additional cost, DOE says.

And there are extra benefits, Moe said. Buy an auxiliary device and you can power your hot water heater. You can also use geothermal heat for snowmelt. Plus, you aren’t directly burning carbon-based fuels like propane or natural gas.

Water Furnace, a company that makes the devices, uses geothermal to heat its 110,000-square-foot headquarters in Indiana.

Schneider, who wrote a book about the little known science of thermodynamics — the way energy flows from one location to another — had seen geothermal heating systems in the South and knew they were popular in Canada.

The heat in the ground is solar heat, cast by the sun, captured by the Earth and ready for harvest.

‘‘There’s heat in there that you can scavenge if you’ve got the right gadgets,’’ Schneider said.

On the Net: Manufacturer: www.waterfurnace.com US Department of Energy: www.energy.gov