Geothermal heating and cooling systems are increasingly taking root under the green, green grass of homes.
Area contractors say they are doing 40 to 50 per year, up from five to 10 a few years ago.
As more metro homeowners fret over the rising costs of energy, demand for residential geothermal systems is skyrocketing – even on small city lots that don’t have room for the most commonly installed “loop” systems.
“I think the term ‘exploding’ would be the best way to sum it up,” said Mike Otto, owner of Mike Otto Construction, a Minneapolis-based remodeling company that specializes in upgrading older homes.
A few years ago, Otto said, he would hear from perhaps one homeowner a year who had an interest in geothermal, which taps into the relatively consistent temperatures of the earth to heat or cool homes.
Now he’s finding that geothermal is “pretty much a standard inquiry” for any sizable job, he said.
Roughly 50,000 geothermal heat pumps are installed in the United States each year, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
A 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology study, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, estimated that geothermal energy will eventually power 25 million U.S. homes at a combined cost of $40 million per year.
Chris Friend, a geothermal installer for Burnsville-based Genz Ryan Plumbing and Heating, said he has had contracts for more installations in the past month than he did in all of 2007. He said he gets at least two inquiries a day.
Contractors who specialize in geothermal installations are doing 40 to 50 projects a year, up from five or 10 a few years ago, Friend said.
“They are very small companies and they are having a hard time keeping up with those 50 jobs,” added Friend, who trained contractors on geothermal installations before joining Genz Ryan.
Still, he said a lot of contractors are leery of doing geothermal installations because it requires special training and they’re afraid of making costly mistakes.
“Any contractor that is trying to do geothermal, if they haven’t been trained, will have a tough time for a while until they figure it out,” he said.
Otto’s latest geothermal project is on the 3800 block of York Avenue South in Minneapolis. The owner is spending about $30,000 for a system as part of a whole-house Prairie-style renovation that will add roughly 800 square feet to the 1,800-square-foot home.
At the heart of the system is a series of underground wells and pipes that will feed into an indoor geothermal pump. An environmentally safe fluid circulates through the pipes, pulling heat from the ground and feeding it into the home.
It reverses the process for cooling purposes.
Typically, crews dig shallow trenches to accommodate the underground pipes in a horizontal layout. Given the relatively small lot size of the York Avenue project, installers are digging six holes 150 feet into the ground for the piping system.
Otto said the latter method costs about three times as much as the former.
But it’s worth it to the homeowners, who expect to add resale value to their home and save roughly 50 percent on their energy costs when the new system is up and running.
Moreover, the project made sense for the York Avenue site because the owners needed a new furnace system anyway at a cost of roughly $15,000.
Geothermal systems can be “several times” more expensive than an air-source system of similar capacity, but the systems pay for themselves within five to 10 years via reduced energy consumption, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
Otto believes rising energy prices across the board are inspiring people to find ways to save and conserve.
“Every time they go to the pump they are paying $4 a gallon for gas,” he mused. “Every time you fill up it reminds you of what energy is doing. Every week you are reminded about energy costs, not just once a month when you get your bills.”
