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Old 01-06-15, 11:41 AM   #1721
AC_Hacker
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Quote:
Originally Posted by IWarm View Post
As titled, 'The Importance of Groundwater.'
IWarm
I am glad that you are underscoring the well-known importance of ground water. It is good to be reminded.

So, on with the show! It is time for you to achieve the success you are envisioning, and to demonstrate your findings with the performance of your new project.

Obviously, Spring is the best time to begin such a large undertaking.

As I said, the more project detail, the better, and pictures really are worth 1000 words.

By the way, have you already done a heat load analysis on your house? Have you done a Manual J analysis, or do you have heating data that you can use as a guide?

Without a reliable heating load target, it is difficult to build the optimum GSHP system.

Have you done everything possible to reduce your heat load?
  • Have you attended to eliminating all infiltration losses?
  • Have you attended to losses due to insufficient insulation?
  • Ar you satisfied with the efficiency of your windows?

These are simple things that will cost you much less in money and effort than every unit of GSHP and loop field you are about to build to meet your heat load.

Do you have a map, topo or otherwise, of the land that you intend to site your loopfield on, that you can share?

Any photos of your house?

Best of luck,

-AC

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Old 01-06-15, 12:23 PM   #1722
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Quote:
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...
What I was trying to convey in the 'Manifesto' was that I hit a year-round wet layer at 17 feet, then hard pan... so I stopped drilling...
From your drilling report:
Quote:
Originally Posted by AC_Hacker View Post
Yesterday I finished up hole number 11 of 16.

I thought I'd summarize what I have learned so far about this process...
2 FEET TO 6 FEET - clay to clay/sand
This was the toughest layer to get through. The clay was pretty dry and hard. Initially I tried just a hand auger. It was slow, exhausting work. Using a pointed iron digging bar to loosen things up a bit, ahead of the hand auger helped, but it was tough work.
This clay would normally be referred to as 'hardpan'. Look it up. The only place rain is impacting your results is were your digging disturbed this layer.

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Old 01-06-15, 12:32 PM   #1723
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From your drilling report:


This clay would normally be referred to as 'hardpan'. Look it up. The only place rain is impacting your results is were your digging disturbed this layer.

IWarm
Around here, "hardpan" is consolidated clay. It is hard as a rock and very tough.

Around here a type of soil called, "clay" is not consolidated.

Is it different where you live?

-AC
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Old 01-06-15, 01:23 PM   #1724
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Around here, "hardpan" is consolidated clay. It is hard as a rock and very tough.

Around here a type of soil called, "clay" is not consolidated.

Is it different where you live?

-AC
I put it in quotes to indicate your non-standard use, please, look it up. The important quality is 'generally impervious to water'.
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Old 01-06-15, 02:16 PM   #1725
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I put it in quotes to indicate your non-standard use, please, look it up. The important quality is 'generally impervious to water'.
IWarm
OK...

Maybe what has put a bug in your shorts is when I said I was digging through a "clay" layer?

It was not a 100% clay layer, it was clay mixed with sand, and the digging was definitely tougher than when I was digging through layers with progressively less clay percentage. And it was never completely impermeable to water.

The hardpan (consolidated clay) was definitely 100% clay, hard as a rock and impervious to water, and that is the primary reason why I stopped digging.

* * *

But I truly think that your energy would be much better spent moving forward on your own project, rather than trying to dissect the the minutiae of the construction of a loop field that was built 6 years ago, and 2500 miles away from you.

Your own project will have plenty of problems for you to turn your mental and physical skills toward, that will be much more worthy of your attention, than my loop field.

You really need to start your own project.

-AC
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Old 01-06-15, 02:32 PM   #1726
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...
You really need to start your own project.
You know nothing of what I have done or plan to do.
You have made it clear that you're not interested in having a conversation.
That's enough for me.
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Old 01-06-15, 03:41 PM   #1727
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You know nothing of what I have done or plan to do.
You have made it clear that you're not interested in having a conversation.
That's enough for me.
IWarm
All I am interested in is that you are working on your own DIY GSHP.

That is why this thread exists.

If you want to share the details of your ongoing project, great! There are many people who would be very interested in the details of your project.

If you get stuck and need some advice so that you can continue to move forward, great! There are many people here who can offer their seasoned advice.

Best of luck... it is not a simple undertaking,

-AC
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Old 04-17-15, 07:59 PM   #1728
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Hello AC and everyone else following this discussion,

I am glad I found this thread, I have been searching for days for something like this!!

I live on a boat (sailing Catamaran) I have two 55HP diesel motors and 1 diesel generator.
One of the motors is coupled to a small heat exchanger and supply hot water to the 23lt electric water storage/heater.
I have no means of heating the boat while I waste so much heating energy every time I run one of my three diesel engines.

On top of my engines, it is alway very warm, the actual reading on my infrared thermometer shows the engines are at 70ºc.

All that heat is wasted, I could have boiling water using a heat pump!

I have not been able to find a DIY heat pump construction, lots of commercial ones.
I would like to use some recycled parts from perhaps fridge, air conditioner or car/truck heat exchanger. Or a combination of them.

Do you know of efficient ways to recover heat from those motors, perhaps heating water that I can circulate through the boat to heat it?
Any ideas/ links would be very much appreciated.

Keep smiling
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Old 04-17-15, 08:23 PM   #1729
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If it were me I would get a junkyard rear A/C / heat unit out of a van / surburban and a 12 volt circulator pump out of most things German (usually after run coolant pump) and plumb that in to the hottest spot you can find on your coolant loop.

I bet that if you plumbed the return back to the cold side you could get heat for quite a while after engine shut down.

A better but more expensive solution would be to add an insulated heat storage tank and pull from that all night.
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Old 04-18-15, 05:33 PM   #1730
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...One of the motors is coupled to a small heat exchanger and supply hot water to the 23lt electric water storage/heater.
I have no means of heating the boat while I waste so much heating energy every time I run one of my three diesel engines.

All that heat is wasted, I could have boiling water using a heat pump!

I have not been able to find a DIY heat pump construction, lots of commercial ones.
I would like to use some recycled parts from perhaps fridge, air conditioner or car/truck heat exchanger. Or a combination of them.

Do you know of efficient ways to recover heat from those motors, perhaps heating water that I can circulate through the boat to heat it?
Any ideas/ links would be very much appreciated.
Stef,

Thanks for your post.

Regarding heating, heat pumps are best suited to harvesting 'low temperature heat' and raising the quality (temperature) up to a level where it is suitable for applications like room heating or domestic hot water. Due to the physics of the refrigerants, going much beyond 120F or even 140F is not in the cards, unless you go with specially designed compressors and other components and use CO2. Even then the max temp would be around 160F.

So, a good use of a heat pump might be, for times when you are in port and have shore power, to harvest the low temperature heat from sea water and elevating the temperature to heat the interior of your boat... but boiling soup would not be an option.

As you mentioned, the wast heat from your engines is considerable, and as dremd suggested, directly using that heat via a heat exchanger is your best bet. If your cooling system is under pressure, your circulating water might even be a bit over 212F.

The temperature of a gas or alcohol flame is something like 3400F, which is considerably higher than 212F, and it enables us to boil water in the prompt manner, to which we have become accustomed.

However, elevating the heat that cools an engine to the point where you could boil water would be really tricky, and I am not aware of a well known technology that would do this for you.

There is a possibility that a completely new type of heat pump could be designed that would use a special refrigerant that could do it's change of state in the temperature range that was well above 212F... in the 2000F to 3000F range

Your post definitely points to a technical problem that to my knowledge, has never been successfully addressed.

If this problem could be solved, I believe that it would open up a whole new technical field and market.

-AC

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