The total square feet of the house are 7,760 including the basement. The main entrance for the property is facing west. The north side of the house has only one window that is placed in a storage room. (This was an advantage when we redesigned the entire ductwork distributing system and mechanical equipment room.) The basement is finished and 1/3 of the height is exposed to the outside weather. The windows into the house are made from Pella tree glass with a tin color. Most of the windows are facing south and southeast. That allows the sun to heat some of the rooms during the winter.
The height of the first floor is 11 feet and the second is 10 feet.
The outside walls are 2X6 and have a blow in fiber glass insulation. Note (one person from our company was present during the placement of the insulation. It’s one of our good habits to have a very knowledgeable person to watch how the insulation is placed into the structure. It is a very delicate and important job.)
There are five bedrooms total, plus the living, dining and the entertainment rooms. The house includes a huge kitchen, a guest room and four full baths and three half baths.
The blueprint originally had radiant heat in the basement and three duct work systems equipped with 90+ furnaces with total input heat of 400,000 Btu. The total recommended cooling input by blue print was 12 tons.
The shape of the house was actually one quarter of a circle, which made it very difficult to work on almost every single field of work. 95% of our distributing system for the geothermal equipment has been prefabricated in our shop.
We took into consideration all of the habits of the family we redesigned the whole mechanical system and came with a bin number of 185,000,000 Millions of BTU. This amount of heat is required for an entire season to heat that space up to 72° F during the winter months. We went even further than that, and broke down how much heat would be needed to heat every individual room daily. The numbers we saw spoke for themselves. We completely removed two of the mechanical systems and lowered the input power on the third one. We also cut one third of the boiler input which provided the heating energy on the basement.
What did we come up with: mechanical wise?
The boiler for the basement (2,200 sq ft.) heating floor is 80,000 Btu. input.
The total output heat coming from the significant geothermal Climate Master unit is 69,000 BTU which provides heat for a total area of ……. 5, 500 sq. ft.
Total BTU capacity installed from us, was 145,000 vs., 400,000 by original place.
Total cooling power for 7,760 sq. ft. is only 6 tons rather than the original plans with a requirement of 12 tons
How have we done it?
First we recalculated our input data three times based on the blue prints of the Architect specifications. The calculated numbers for the heat loss for the house were the same each time.
We then used some of our European techniques to lower the heating loads even further. This way, we were able to cover a larger spread of area for the geothermal Climate Master variable speed unit.
The significant design of the house from an architect was able to provide us with a unique design of fluid distributing system. On the other hand we were able to implement 100% of return air during the summer period, and a completely different return air during the winter period.
The geothermal site in this particular house has three zones, and eight zones were on the radiant heat side. The modulating boiler was providing heat for the basement based on the outside temperature. The entire heating system for the house was receiving signals from a sophisticated control system which was managing the entire process based on the outside temperature.
The Geothermal unit efficiency for this house is 6, 2 COP (620%) first stage and 5, 7 COP (570%) second stage. 80 to 85% of the time the unit runs on its first stage.
