Geothermal energy myths

The advantages of geothermal energy :

• The durability and reliability of installed equipment :
  • More than 25 years for the heat pump
  • More than 100 years for the underground heat exchanger
• A perpetual source of renewable energy
• Space savings indoors and outdoors :
  • Underground installation only
  • Very compact interior equipment
  • Recovery of the oil tank space and outdoor module location
• The peace of mind and comfort of the outdoor public space :
  • No noise indoors
  • No vibrations are transmitted to the building
  • No heat is transmitted to the outside, contributing to thermal islands in our cities
• Protection against energy cost increases in the short, medium and long term
• Environmental and physical safety in relation to fossil fuels :
  • Credit on your insurance premiums
• The increase in the value of the house and the real advantage that the system provides when time to resell
• Heating and air conditioning at all times :
  • by public electricity network
  • by generator
  • by solar and wind panels using energy storage batteries
• Because of climate change, we are now exposed to even more extreme weather conditions, and power failures are becoming frequent and time-consuming to repair. More than three days recently in Montreal's northern suburbs due to an event of freezing rain. The geothermal heat pump (well protected from the elements in the house) can easily be powered by an alternative energy source to keep you perfectly warm and provide you with the same comfort in winter as in summer by cooling during blackouts caused by increasingly violent wind events. The residents of Gatineau know all about it.

Notwithstanding all these benefits, from a strictly financial point of view, and contrary to popular belief, geothermal energy is currently one of the best investment vehicles available without any risk. It provides a powerful tax-free return with benefits you'll notice on every energy bill in your bank account. Also, it creates a comfortable environment both inside and outside your house. It is an eco-friendly and profitable investment that will avoid the equivalent of five tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year for a medium-sized home. With geothermal energy, we're all winners.

The extra cost of switching to geothermal energy compared with another heating and air conditioning system is now minor, thanks to government and municipal assistance programs, significantly increasing the return on your investment in just a few years. It's possible with the exceptional operating savings of a geothermal system, compared with a high-quality air-to-air or air-to-water heat pump combined with an electric or natural gas furnace as an auxiliary heating source.

Example: Forced-air oil (fuel oil or natural gas) heating for small houses, two-ton system. Undoubtedly, this is one of the least apparent situations to justify a geothermal energy system. The amounts represent the current market, plus taxes, but they may vary depending on the contractor and the house's unique features.

In Montreal, in the Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie borough, on the des Érables and des Écorces streets.

The Villeray neighborhood on 9th Avenue

Montreal, Chapleau Street, between the Sherbrooke and Hochelaga streets

We can drill our wells directly in your flower and shrub beds.

Geothermal energy can be considered viable for any building. Don't forget that it only transfers BTUs from the ground into the air or water, sometimes both simultaneously. This energy will then be distributed through your existing building system, either via a forced-air network or hot water.

The current geothermal heat pump technology achieves water temperatures that fully replace an oil-fired boiler for buildings heated with hot water. It can even heat your domestic hot water tank directly at any time.

Suppose convectors or electric baseboard heaters heat the building. In that case, adding water consoles at various locations will limit the work required inside. It will provide you with heating and air conditioning, which is becoming increasingly necessary as our cities heat up due to heat islands and climate change.

The geothermal heat pump benefits from extremely stable heat exchange year-round via its underground heat exchanger, which an air-to-air or air-to-water heat pump cannot provide since it is subject to highly variable outdoor temperature conditions. In Quebec, we have some of the most extreme temperature variations on the planet, with a summer record of +40 degrees Celsius in the Outaouais and Mauricie regions and a record of -51 degrees Celsius in the Abitibi and North Shore regions in our cold Quebec winters.

The geothermal heat pump works on exactly the same principle as an air-to-air or air-to-water heat pump via heat transfer. However, it does not require an outdoor module that is often unsightly and noisy, and we try by all means to conceal and make it less disruptive by attenuating its noises and vibrations. It operates under ideal operating conditions inside the building and is hardly noisier than a fridge.

It's quite true to say that, given the same heat exchange temperatures and quality of equipment manufactured, the performance (COP) of the two types of equipment will be the same, which rarely happens during the year. Therefore, it is totally false to claim that the annual savings will be as good as those of a geothermal system. It will always be easier and more efficient in heating mode to extract heat from an environment at 10 oC than at -10 oC, just as it will always be easier to reject heat in an air-conditioning mode in the ground at 10 oC than at a temperature of +40 oC in full sunlight. The WaterFurnace Series 7 reaches a record COP of 5.3 in heating mode, or over 500% efficiency, regardless of the outdoor temperature. www.waterfurnace.com

The same rule applies in summer, so we strongly advise our customers against using geothermal energy to heat an outdoor pool at any time other than winter. An air-to-water heat pump will perform better than a water-to-water geothermal heat pump since the outdoor temperature is higher than the ground temperature, at least from May to October, with the same logic of extracting heat where the temperature is highest. Of course, unless global warming requires our pools to be air-conditioned, geothermal energy can be used very efficiently in summer.

With a marginal price differential, as shown in myth #1, for replacing a heating system with geothermal assistance programs, the cost of access to geothermal energy remains exceptionally competitive with high-efficiency heat pumps in dollars. It is far superior in terms of all kinds of benefits in the short, medium and long term.

Unfortunately, it's no longer a myth. Using drilling technologies unsuited to geothermal drilling in high-density urban areas forced municipalities and boroughs to impose strict measures to limit damage and obstructions while constructing an underground heat exchanger.

Moreover, wells are often located in front of houses close to the street, given the space required by heavy drilling equipment and the risks associated with potential structural failure caused by the high pneumatic pressures of this equipment. Often, the wells are located in the municipally-owned part of the property, which also requires regulations limiting the installation of wells on the customer's property, with or without a setback.

On the other hand, our equipment offers great flexibility when installing wells. They are generally located less than three meters from the mechanical room and sometimes even directly under the mechanical room in the case of a new construction. We use hydraulic percussion for drilling and for highly safe use near structures such as building foundations. Pneumatic pressure is only used to expel drill cuttings, and as the wells are shallow and have a small diameter, the air pressures required are minimal and safe.

Our drilling is dry with very little drilling debris, which is much appreciated by municipalities and is the advantage of having wells with a diameter of 6.99 cm (2 ¾ inches).

The stone dust is collected in bins to be later reused as a substrate when backfilling the trench.

Our workspace's footprint is minimal since all the components required to carry out the work are integrated into a single piece of equipment, which usually does not take up any public space.

• No high-flow, high-pressure air compressors
• No container to collect drilling waste
• No sludge pump
• No ten-wheel trucks
• No service truck for handling steel casings
• No need for large platforms for preparing and injecting grout
• No hydraulic reels for handling geothermal loops

The expertise we've acquired over the past 15 years, solely in the field of geothermal well drilling, allows us to offer our services at a fixed price no matter what the drilling conditions are. We take all the risks when installing an underground heat exchanger on your property.

Additionally, our equipment and work method for all the exterior work required to install the underground heat exchanger means that the installation time, and therefore costs, will be significantly reduced, and the cost of restoring your landscaping will be either non-existent or reduced to a minimum.

The performance of our equipment is such that a two-ton project (92 meters or 300 feet) can be completed on the same day, including the trench. We can complete a 16-ton project (732 meters or 2,400 feet) in a week when the weather, geological and mechanical conditions are right.

A 460-metre (1,500-foot) project with 10 wells, 46 metres (150 feet) long, was completed in three days in Westmount.

Our drilling and grouting techniques and our excavation equipment make it possible to carry out work without any problems 12 months a year.

Recharging the ground via the geothermal well(s) is an aberration that illustrates a design flaw in the geothermal system due to an undersizing of the ground heat exchanger to reduce the system's costs or simply to a poor assessment of the building's heat losses. With ground diffusivity, it's hard to see how the ground can even be used as a thermal battery. There are other ways of storing energy, such as large-capacity watertight tanks.

An aspect often overlooked when determining the heating load is the water-tightness of the building, which translates into the number of air changes per hour and the customer's set temperature. The home of a customer who finds it comfortable at 24 °C with an air exchange rate of 10 per hour will probably require more than twice as much heating capacity than a home of the same size with a set temperature of 21 °C and two air exchanges per hour. Insulation, orientation, fenestration and geographic location are also factors to be considered at the most essential and critical stage of a geothermal system: the building load calculation.

Failure to consider these different factors will diminish installation performance, house comfort and customer satisfaction. The underground heat exchanger extracts energy from the ground and must meet the demand. Determining the volume of energy to be extracted and its distribution depends on a proper assessment of needs and the quality, know-how and experience of the company you entrust with the mandate

We only cooperate with installing geothermal systems with companies that have demonstrated their interest in geothermal energy over the years, their professionalism and their skills in carrying out such projects to guarantee quality installation and performance for years of trouble-free operation.

Our wells' design optimizes energy extraction from the upper ground layers.

• Multiple wells varying from 0 to 30 degrees amplify heat exchange, allowing a more significant temperature differential between the heat transport coolant and the ground.
• A 45.72-metre (150-foot) deep well leverages the soil's natural regeneration by the sun, the hydrological cycle and urban activity.
• A very small-diameter well of 6.99 cm (2 ¾’’) into which two 2.67 cm (1.05’’) outdoor HDPE pipes are inserted.

• To fill the annular space once the pipes have been inserted into the well, grout must be injected to eliminate any air gap and allow continuous contact with the ground. No matter what type of grout is used, it will always cause some thermal resistance to the ground. We succeeded in reducing the well's diameter to a minimum and thus considerably reducing the volume of grout to almost eliminate this disadvantage. The geothermal loop is literally integrated into the rock as part of our constant drive to optimize heat exchange.
• In the soft part of a well (unconsolidated, loose soil layer), the casings are removed after the insertion of the geothermal loop so that energy-rich areas such as surface water tables can be perfectly exploited through direct contact with the pipes. Another benefit for the customer is that there are no additional costs for casings since we recover them!

Geothermal energy has absolutely no problem meeting all of a building's needs, whether in heating or cooling mode, regardless of your desired temperature, as long as all parameters have been considered when calculating the load. In the event of a prolonged power outage, or if you want to be independent of your energy supplier like Hydro-Québec, there's no better solution than geothermal energy to keep you comfortable all year round, regardless of the weather conditions, without making any compromises.

Is it economically profitable to meet 100% of my needs with geothermal energy? The answer is no, and the CSA-448-16 standard allows the designer to install a geothermal heat pump capable of supplying between 70% and 105% of the building’s total load.

Based on a load calculation of 70%, it has been established for our climate that the system can easily meet 90% of annual requirements. The remaining 10% represents only a few dozen hours per year and can easily be made up by an auxiliary electrical element or another heat source, thus avoiding an unnecessary price increase of several thousand dollars for the geothermal system.

By analogy, Hydro-Québec has to cope with a winter peak of a few hours a year when its installed capacity is insufficient to meet the electricity needs of its customer base in Quebec. To rectify the situation, HQ will buy electricity from our neighbours (admittedly at great expense) to make up for the temporary shortfall of a few hours in the coldest winter. Even so, it's much cheaper than building new multi-billion-dollar dams and hydroelectric plants to meet the occasional domestic needs of a few hours during our peak intense cold spells, i.e. between 6:00 and 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 and 9:00 p.m. This is an excellent illustration of Hydro-Québec's financial and real estate resource optimization. The same reasoning applies to geothermal energy. The geothermal heat pump is your power plant.