Ground source heating

[LemonTea]

Do any of you have ground source heating in your houses?

We are installing a ground source heating system in our new house, with solar panels to top up the hot water supply.

I would prefer to have a log burner installed to add extra input into the heating system, but my DH isn't keen on them (not too sure why...hmm). Anyway, if any of you have GSH, how often do you run the heat pump?

I'm worried that we'll have it running a lot of the time to provide heating (when in winter if we had a fire going that would supply the heat source without running the pump IYSWIM) and this will make it just as expensive as a conventional boiler system as we'll be burning up loads of electric to run it.

Does this make sense? Sorry, this is complicated and I've had a couple of glasses of wine.......

I dont really know much about GSH but we were at a Homebuild show on Sunday and one of the experts said that in his opinion GSH, solar panels and wind turbines were not cost effective for the average household in this country.

I have met a lot of people who have GSH combined with super-insulation (I am assuming you are building your home from scratch) and have very little need for top-up heating. Providing you have a largish garden and the coils can be laid horizontally then they seem to work very efficiently. Most people I have spoken to have a deal where they get cheap electricity during the night and only run the pump at this time and that seems to meet their needs. Hope that helps.

Just ask about the cost of running the pump....

I know some-one who reckoned he paid much the same running costs for the electricity as he would have paid for gas for a more conventional system. This was in Canada, though, so the relative prices may be different there.