Geothermal Heat Pumps: A Guide for Planning and Installing

I have been installing Water Furnace heat pumps for the past eight years. When attending a software training class for integrated systems with geothermal, I found this book at the company. While the author does present his own products as the primary references for systems, the concepts and application are very well explained. From experience, the information is accurate and leading edge. Not just theory, but practical applications from working in with the technology for decades. While the theory may be beyond the DIY installer of geothermal (which I would not recommend anyway), it is accurate and highly relevant to the field today. In the unlikely event that you wish to move heat from the barnyard to the house, I found fascinating (and true, I kid not), charts of how many BTUs per cow you can get in energy output for thermal collectors located in the stable.Highly recommend for your library.

I had been looking for a good reference book on geothermal heat pumps, where you can extract "heat" from the earth to heat your home. It's based on the same principal as refrigeration. Plastic water pipes are buried under the frost line (6-8 ft. down). An antifreeze solution is circulated thru the pipes back to the basement where a refrigeration unit extracts "heat" (BTUs) from the fluid. The geothermal unit puts it into the home either as hot water or hot air. Hot water can be fed thru heat exchangers like radiators & radiant heated floors. Or hot air can be used in the house through a conventional system of ductwork. The same system can do the reverse process in the summer, and cool the home.For every dollar of electricity you use to run the goethermal unit, your return in BTUs (heat) is 4x (400%) the energy you put into it. The U.S. government will give homeowners a 30% tax credit for any installations that are "water-to-air" systems, installed beginning 1-1-09. Another method is to use a private well, pump water from it at 50 F. into the refrigeration unit, extract "heat" from it, and return the same water back to the well at 42 F. The chilled water is piped down to the bottom of say a 600 ft. well, and the pump picks up the water at 50 ft. from the surface. So the chilled water has 1150 feet to move before it is picked up again by the pump. By the time it reaches the pump it has heated up to 50 F. and the cycle runs continuously. This book is very informative, but at $95. priced too high I feel, and unfortunately is written all in metric dimensions, metric formulas, metric heat concepts, so was impractical to apply to use in the United States. If the Border's Bookstore had included that vital "METRIC throughout" comment in their review I would not have bought it. There isn't much out on geothermal, so I ended up doing all of my research on the Internet. We're installing a geothermal unit in our new home this summer. You can buy it on Amazon.com for $77.59 if you speak METRIC. Geothermal Heat Pumps: A Guide for Planning and Installing

I bought this book thinking it would be helpful with a geothermal heating system I was planning to install. The book appears to be no more than a translated product guide for various models of geothermal heat pumps that the author manufactures in Germany. There were some useful equations for various heat calculations but nothing really all that useful. I returned the book.

I am a licensed professional civil engineer specializing in water supply wells (22 yrs). I purchased this book to learn about geothermal heat pump systems, to the point of design competency. This book is basically an over view and will not in my opinion serve that need. It is extremely terse. I suggest a revised edition include many more examples and more basic explanations of the processes.

I pre-ordered this book before it came out and waited for almost 1 year past the print date to get it. I was very disappointed. If you have any knowledge of geothermal it is not for you. I returned the book immediately.

Do not buy this book!! This book does not offer any valuable information beyond that what can be found with a 15min Google search. There are no design formulas and no valuable engineering information! If it would cost 10Euros I could maybe pay for it, but again I would not use it. It is near the top of my list with the worst books EVER!* I am sad that I cannot rank it with negative stars, since it is consuming time without giving information!

don't bother with downloading a sample of this book, the text ends right after the "table of contents". ......... i have seen this with many book samples.

this is actually one of the books that i really regret buying it, and this is rare to happen. it is a book you read through and you see no point and you learn nothing. the level of information included can be easily found on the internet with a simple search. Free materials found on retscreen for example is much more valuable than this.

There are so few accessble books on the subject of geothermal heatpumps that nothing else comes close. Most of the subject matter is covered as part of generic books on alternative energy, whereas this covers everything from deciding whether it really makes sense to install a geothermal heat pump to how to do it. We're about to start an installation and this book will allow me to have informed discussions with salesmen and installers without having any wool pulled over my eyes. What's more the style of the book (for what could be a dry subject) is far easier than the simple title would suggest. A must for anyone seriously contemplating geothermal heating. Despite its somewhat high price, I have no doubt it will save that value many, many times over in the system cost and the ongoing energy savings.

This appears to be a translation of a German book written by Karl Ochsner. Most of the pictures of heat pump systems in the book are Ochsner heat pumps, so it's a fair assumption the author runs a business designing and selling heat pump systems. The book is relatively short, 146 pages including indices. A lecturer lent me his book for a week (I am a postgraduate student). It's not an exciting read, but I had no trouble getting through it or understanding it. It looked like it could be useful so I bought my own copy. It contains descriptions of a number of different heat pump types, including ground source, water source and air source systems, and their main components. It has a lot of technical detail and practical information for designing and installing heat pump systems. It starts with a couple of chapters on background and theory and then gets down to the nitty gritty. It covers space and water heating systems and also cooling.