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Gov are committed to reducing our carbon footprint, and one of the things that is being put forward is Heat Pumps.
My understanding of these is that they take heat out of the earth. My question is, iw we take heat out of the earth, will the earth cool down?
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The overall amount of energy kicking around is always the same by the law of conservation of energy. The energy on the earth all comes from the sun (so the sun looses it) but is generally stored in the atomic binding of complex hydrocarbon molecules (growing plants and their ultimate conversion into peat/coal/oil/etc) rather than as heat. As for a heat pump (or fridge or freezer), yes, it just moves energy (heat) around but the pump itself requires energy to run (from an electricity supply) and emits it as yet more heat.
Gov are committed to reducing our carbon footprint, and one of the things that is being put forward is Heat Pumps.
My understanding of these is that they take heat out of the earth. My question is, iw we take heat out of the earth, will the earth cool down?
My mum used to live in a sheltered housing unit which used geothermal heating.
It was not good. The water pressure was very bad because it had to move slowly to collect the heat, it took ages just to fill the sink, thank goodness she had an electric shower otherwise she would have had to start running the bath three days before she needed it. The radiators were on full permanently for the same reason.
We had 'engineers' in many times but no one could fix it.
The fridge and freezer are heat pumps, if you have a good sized area of lawn you can collect heat from the soil to to heat the water, or have large radiators on the house roof or walls and collect heat from the air to heat the house.
The cost of extracting the heat from the air or land or adjacent area of water (eg river or canal or sea) used to give a 3 to 1 ratio - ie put in 1 unit of electricity to extract 3 units of heat. However things will have changed no doubt. THe ideal time to install a heat pump system is part of a new build when all the equipmennt to dig and lay the pipes are available.
Thanks guys. I am not proposing to install a heat pump. Maybe my original question need re phrasing. If we take heat out of the earth to heat our homes, water ETC, then that heat is dissipated and lost to the atmosphere. The heat in the earth is not there. With solar panels, we take heat from the rays of the sun which shines regardless of how we treat it. so it still shines. The energy is replaced. When we take heat from the earth, is it replaced by the suns heat?
Most heat pumps you see on houses are air sourced heat pumps. I walked past a house with one the other day and it was about 2C outside and the fan on their heat exchanger was going great guns, really fast. The heat from the air comes from the sun, it warms up the surface and that warms the air. You get geothermal heat from the Earth's crust and that is partly from radioactive decay, maybe some from tidal forces of the Moon / Earth system heating rocks etc. Heat pumps won’t cool down the Earth as the heat is being replenished from these sources. Also with heat pumps you put some energy in which comes from carbon fuels, wind, solar or nuclear sources so that is creating more heat. If you look at the Earth as a whole you have a lot of heat coming from the sun and some from the core and what we are doing releasing it from things on the Earth (fossil fuels and nuclear energy). Some of the heat radiates out into the vacuum of space but less than what comes in. Those of us down here are just stirring things up a bit internally with our heat pumps, fridges, cars and flapping wings etc and a maybe making things a bit hotter on the surface.
My brother moved into a new house with air source heat pump heating and swears by it and has no problems with it. You just leave it on all the time and the thermostats and controls maintain the room temperature you want. The alternative in rural areas is usually oil fired heating with the worry of oil tanks and associated pipe work and a boiler that is more expensive to service. I would happily get rid of our oil boiler but air sourced heating costs to change are around £15k.
We live in the countryside and like you, use oil for heating. A few months ago I had to replace our 18-year-old oil tank due to a small crack appearing on one side of the tank, just above midway luckily. It wasn't a cheap exercise.
The cost of switching to an air sourced heat pump solution is way out of my price range. It would take longer than my remaining lifetime to break even.
A couple of our neighbours use liquified gas but that is actually more expensive than oil and no cleaner in terms of carbon output. Also, I have to say having a large tank containing gas sitting in my garden would worry me a lot more than having an oil tank.
That’s interesting our plastic oil tank could be a similar age we have lived at this place 15 years and the tank didn’t look brand new when we moved in. They should really have an install date sticker on them. I check it regularly but it is hard to know when you should replace these given the expense and leaving to the point of failure is risking an expensive cleanup cost and liability too. I knew the house had oil heating as soon as we walked in before purchasing it as I could smell it - we had the outdated internal boiler taken out and replaced with a through the wall unit so all the smell when servicing it is outside.
I also have oil-fired heating and had to have a new tank installed a couple of years ago. In retrospect it might have been an idea to have the boiler replaced with an electric one, the extra cost of electricity over oil would probably have taken my remaining lifetime to exceed the cost of the new tank plus the boiler servicing! Ground source heat pumps are very expensive and I believe often not easy to install retrospectively. A friend swears by his air source pump and solar panels and reckons he actually makes a profit from selling the excess power to the Grid!
You need quite a lot of area to install the loops for ground source heat pumps - the energy it's collecting is stored solar energy not geothermal which is much deeper down (in the UK).
You can also use a body of water or drill boreholes to access stored heat too but the drilling is very expensive.
The amount of solar energy stored in the ground is phenomenal and inexhaustible.
We fitted air source heat pumps in 2009 to replace an oil system and meet building regs for a renovation including a large glass conservatory (rebuilt on the Victorian footprint with double glazing).
They didn't cost anything like £16K and it's a 5 bed, 5 reception Georgian farmhouse not a 2 bed house.
Energy efficiency in the renovation is excellent with underfloor heating but there's a massive glass roof balanced against it
The old house house solid brick walls with no insulation and radiators so not up to modern building standards and not practical to update.
Driving the motors does need energy as the external temperature drops you need to move a lot of air to get noticeable amounts of heat out.
At a point some way below zero there are direct electric elements to supplement the air source so you're not cold but you stop benefiting from getting more heat than you put in in electricity.
In the mild UK climate my pumps are very rarely calling for the direct heat.
I can't make cost comparisons with the oil but I can say I don't miss the hassle.
Not having to check the tank and organise oil deliveries is a delight.
When we moved in the oil broke down after 2 days. I had a devil of a job to find someone who would come out and fix it, when he did he found it was leaking carbon mono-oxide into the utility room.
In one short cold snap in March we ran out as did half of East Anglia and all the suppliers - so a two week wait for a delivery by which time it had warmed up again.
Several of my neighbours have had their tanks fail which is very expensive to fix and polluting.
I don't have to have the pumps serviced which saves me another >£100 a year.
Our conservatory is South facing, and we have roof blinds that are reflective for summer and in winter the solar gain can often be enough to produce warm air, that then circulates up to the top floor. We have had all the insulation that we can put in, added and have an A rated boiler. I looked at reversible heat pumps to cool in summer and heat in winter, also evaporation cooling systems that could be used in summer, using ground water for both cooling and low grade heat source in winter...
Bottom line is we have to many people on the planet
................. When we take heat from the earth, is it replaced by the suns heat?
Overall, the Earth is warmed by radiant heat from the sun. This energy is absorbed and raises the temperature of the earth, which then starts to radiate heat away into space until an equilibrium is reached. If there were no atmosphere, this equilibrium would be reached when the earth was at a chilly minus16°C. (average)
Fortunately, we do have an atmosphere and some of the gases, such as CO2 and water vapour, absorb some of the heat re-radiated from the earth and prevent it from being lost into space. This process raises the overall temperature to something we can live in.
When we burn fossil fuels, we release lots more CO2 into the atmosphere, which then absorbs more of the re-radiated heat and so the overall temperature of the earth rises. On the other hand, if we use heat pumps, we only move some heat from one place on the earth to another (our homes). This has no effect on the 'total' amount of heat stored by the earth and therefore has no effect on the global temperature..
The various heat flows that control the temperature at which the earth reaches equilibrium can be shown in a diagram. There are a great many factors, in addition to the effect of greenhouse gases, such as cloud cover, which lead to a complex scientific problem that makes it difficult to predict exactly what will happen to climate in the future. The evidence so far indicates that CO2 is, however, a major factor.
Thanks Mike. U see that air heat pumps do just move heat from on place to another, but what about the heat pumps that take heat out of the earth by a sunken shaft. Not sure I have explained it very well.
Glad you found my comment helpful. You need to think of the earth and its atmosphere as what we scientists call a 'closed system'. It receives energy from the sun and it radiates energy into space. The balance between these two determines the mean temperature of the earth. If we move heat about, within the closed system, it makes no difference to the overall balance.
There is more heat entering the system from the burning of fossil fuels, all food animals produce heat and the Billions of people giving off 60W each just sitting there. We need to get all the joggers off the streets and onto generators.
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