What's All This About Geothermal Heating???

Here's the deal with geothermal heat...you use the ambient temperature of the earth - not the surface temperature, but deeper down where the temp remains constant and pull that heat in to a heat pump to warm your home and your water.  (Apparently water at zero degrees celsius still has heat energy...sounds a bit dodgey to me, but that's science for you.)

Shows the cooling phase - turn arrows for heating

(Ours is drawn from well water.)  The logic behind this idea is that it takes less energy to warm something that already has heat energy, than to just burn a fuel that doesn't have existing heat energy.  Clear like mud?  Let's get practical then...we figure it's saving us probably $200 a month on our heating bill.  The extra nifty thing about it is that you can reverse the flow and use the system to cool the house in the summer!  (Yes, we MAY need it, even here in PEI - don't think I can't read your minds, even from here.)

Here's the furnace itself (yes, it's whopping big, you could hide a body in the main vent - not, of course, that I would ever consider such a thing):

The black pipes in the first picture are the incoming & outgoing pipes from the well system.  In the second picture you can see the two (yes...count 'em) 60 gallon hot water tanks that both give us the obvious (hot water) and heat for our house.  Previously the house had been heated with an oil/wood burning furnace that was probably 50 years old plus some and resembled the gates to hell.  We're well rid of it.

Small selection of previous wall papers

Naked walls

On another note, I'm happy to announce that the wall paper in the living room (plus about 4 other layers) has been removed.  Nothing has been put up in it's place yet, as we have some serious wall prep to do, but I think it still looks better than what was there before.

Due to the condition of the walls and strange and unidentifiable surfaces used (presumably) to cover some failing plaster, we will have to also wallpaper.  We've selected a bold damask pattern in a paintable wall paper, which we are painting a nice sedate "Tea Room", don't ask me - I don't make up the names of these colours.  The sofa we picked out for the "bonus" room wouldn't fit up the stairs, so we went to plan B and put the two apartment sized sofas upstairs and the large red sofa and club chair downstairs.  (Red sofa means no red walls, at least in the living room.)

I have to get back to my walls, I've learned to tape dry wall & I have more joints to seal.