Pompey home taps underground energy

on January 26, 2009 at 3:52 PM, updated January 26, 2009 at 10:16 PM
Kevin and Alexandra Coursen in their 19th century farmhouse in Pompey. They recently installed a geothermal system to heat and cool their home. The $40,000 system replaces an oil furnace. The Coursens figure it will pay for itself in less than 10 years.
Geothermal system heats and cools using earth's constant temperature

Air gets cold in the winter and hot in the summer. But if you dig down 6 feet or so, the ground stays a relatively constant 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

Cave dwellers understood this. It's why they lived in caves.

Modern humans are rediscovering the fact, turning to geothermal energy to heat and cool homes and other buildings in Central New York.

The ground, experts say, works like a giant solar collector, storing heat from hot days past. Here, the ground is about 50 degrees at a depth of 6 feet, said Hugh Henderson, principal at CDH Energy in Cazenovia and energy system consulting company. In Florida, the ground temperature is about 72 degrees, he said.

A geothermal system draws the heat from the ground in the winter and steps it up with a heat pump. In the summer the system reverses, pushing heat from the home into the ground.

The Coursen home on Windy Hill Lane, in Pompey. A 6-foot trench contains pipes through which liquid is circulated, heating or cooling it to the ambient temperature. In Central New York, that's about 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

There's no furnace and no boiler. The heat pump -- think of it as a refrigerator in reverse -- runs on electricity. Geothermal systems save around 40 percent on energy costs, experts say. But they are expensive to install.

Alexandra and Kevin Coursen, of Windy Hill Lane, in Pompey, spent more than $40,000 replacing the heating system in their 19th century farmhouse with a geothermal system.

Alexandra figures that the system, along with $17,000 in insulation they had installed, should pay for itself in less than a decade. That's because the alternative was to continue to spend $7,000 a year or more for fuel oil to heat their roughly 3,100-square-foot home.

"In a little more than eight years, I will have paid for this," she said as workers connected plastic lines and moved heat pumps into position.

"It's a very attractive energy solution for our climate," said Ed Bogucz, executive director of the Center of Excellence for Environmental and Energy Systems.

The center is installing a geothermal system at its new building in downtown Syracuse. The work required drilling 49 wells, most of them 300 feet deep, Bogucz said. That part alone cost about $300,000 he said.

Installation costs can be offset on commercial buildings, schools and other similar buildings, said Henderson. The savings from not installing boilers or cooling towers can offset around 25 percent of the additional cost, he said. In time, energy savings and the lower cost of maintaining heat pumps more than make up the rest, he said.

For homeowners, Henderson said, the payback is tougher.

"If you are only going to sell with the payback story you are going to lose a lot of customers," said John Manning, a geothermal pioneer in Central New York whose work involves training and supplying companies that install geothermal heating and cooling systems.

Geothermal systems can be built using deep wells or much shallower trenches to hold the hundreds of feet of necessary plastic piping in loops 6 feet below the surface.

Manning said modern plastics have made the underground part of the system very reliable. "The loop field will probably outlast the house," he said. Fifty years is the typical warranty for the ground pipes, he said, while a new product is coming out that has a 100-year warranty.

Manning said beside savings energy, geothermal can provide a more comfortable home. In a conventionally heated home, a thermostat signals a furnace to kick on. A blue-hot flame heats air that gets blown around the house or building until the thermostat signals the desired temperature has been reached. The space cools and the whole cycle repeats. In contrast, he said, a geothermal system pumps a steady flow of warm air.

Henderson and Manning said maintenance on a geothermal system is simple. "About the only thing you've really got to do is change air filters," Manning said.

After two months, Alexandra Coursen said, "the house is so much more comfortable." She wonders why geothermal doesn't get the headlines or government subsidies that have increased awareness of wind power and solar power.
But geothermal is enjoying a boom. Companies that used to do eight or 10 installations a year are now doing 60 to 70, said Manning and that's due to "grass-roots demand."

Finding people who know how to install the systems is limiting growth, said a spokesperson for the International Ground Source Heat Pump Association in Oklahoma. As the systems become more popular, economies of scale will help bring down prices some, she said.

As the systems and their savings become more well known, "it will probably, actually, grow faster and faster," Manning said.

Contact Charles McChesney at or 740-2244.