MONTROSE — The family home of Montrose County Commissioner Michael McCracken has geothermal heat exchangers for home heating, cooling and hot water, and he says “it’s the greatest,” saving his household 30 to 40 percent on energy expenditures.
McCracken was on hand Tuesday when Sonic Drilling Ltd. began drilling the 36 core holes necessary to install a geothermal heat-exchange system at the Montrose County Health and Human Services building at 1845 S. Townsend. In just two weeks, the project will be complete, and Health and Human Services will boast the first operating geothermal exchange system in a government building on the Western Slope, McCracken said.
Originally constructed by the Colorado-Ute Electric Association in the 1950s, the all-electric building was sold to Montrose County by Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, which during its ownership paid wholesale rates to operate the expensive electric boilers, County Manager Dennis Hunt said.
Once the county took over the building, county staffers were given the mission of finding a cheaper way of heating the multi-floored building, Hunt said.
The answer they came up with, supported by a $300,000 Department of Local Affairs grant, was geoexchange, he said. It will take only five years of geothermal savings for the project to pay for itself, Hunt said.
“It’s getting more and more conventional for residential heating,” he said.
Intermountain Energy, one of the contractors involved in the county project, has installed geoexchange systems in about 280 homes in Western Slope towns including Grand Junction, Montrose, Delta, Gunnison, Ridgway, Ouray, Olathe and Paonia, Manager Ed Thomas said.
The technology relies on the ability of water to quickly absorb and release heat to literally move heat into a building from the ground outside.
Holes drilled 350 feet deep are filled with interconnected polyethylene pipe, which pass water through the ground to heat it (or cool it) to the year-round ground temperature of 55 degrees.
The water is piped into the building, where pumps keep the water moving through heat exchangers, and the chilled and heated water created by the exchangers is stored in indoor tanks.
The building’s regular ventilation moves heated or cooled air throughout the building, and the four heat exchangers can work independently of each other, allowing one part of the building to be heated while a sunny side is cooled.
“For every degree of energy you invest, you get three more from the ground,” said Ward Huffman of the U.S. Department of Energy. “A lot of facilities are doing this in other states.”
Sonic drilling, which goes through granite or frozen ground like butter, and hydraulic pipe-insertion equipment “have done a huge amount to bring down the cost” of installing geoexchange systems, Huffman said.
“It’s more affordable in this area,” said Enlink Geoenergy Services’ Director of Sales Rose Dowdy. “It makes it easier to put these projects together for your home.”
Geoexchange systems also have minimal impacts on the environment, relying on properties of nature, using unseen technology and diminishing reliance on natural gas, coal and propane, she said.
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Ron Bain can be reached via e-mail at rbain@gjds.com.
