Geothermal system offers a green option for pools
When Leigh and Irwin Segel wanted to remodel their swimming pool last year, they weren’t planning on an overhaul of their heating and air-conditioning system. But that’s exactly what happened.
And today, rather than shivering in an unevenly heated home, the Segels enjoy toasty warmth — all thanks to heat from the Earth and their swimming pool.
The system works using geothermal technology, which Geremia Pools of Sacramento is combining with swimming pools to create a system that works perfectly locally. The mild winters here eliminate the need to drill deep, expensive wells normally required for geothermal heat pumps, and the hot summers mean a prevalence of backyard swimming pools.
Rather than using heat from the air, as normal heat pumps do, geothermal heat pumps rely on the more stable heat from the Earth. The swimming pool provides another source of heat as well as fluids, which, linked to the house, assist the heat exchange process.
“To duplicate the amount of heating this pool can get, we’d have to put in several deep wells, which would cost more than $100,000,” said Ray Schwartz of Geremia Pools.
The Segels, both retired professors at UC Davis, began looking into remodeling their pool last year.
The Segels had built a custom home in South Davis in 1978, with an air-to-air heat pump system. Their heat pumps were 16 years old and were inefficiently and unevenly heating the home.
“Those cold winter months were a problem,” Irwin Segel said.
But “when we were first talking about remodeling the pool, this wasn’t on our radar,” Leigh Segel said.
Schwartz told them about the technology and it piqued their interest. In the winter, heat flows from the pool and the ground surrounding installed geopanels into the home. In the summer, heat flows out of the house into the pool and the ground.
The components of the Segels’ system are their swimming pool, a pool cover that conserves heat, glycol-filled geopanels in the ground, an air-to-ground source heat pump and patented heat exchanger.
“The pool water and glycol meet at one heat exchanger,” Schwartz said. “Both fluids flow at a very slow, consistent rate from variable speed pumps. We dial in the exact speed, maximizing energy savings.
“The glycol then moves on to an air-to-ground source heat pump, where it passes by a second heat exchanger with the standard refrigerant from the home’s heating and cooling system.
“BTUs are extracted from the home when in cooling mode and shipped just a few feet away, to be dispersed into the ground surrounding the panels, and throughout the pool’s volume.”
For heating, the process is reversed.
After the installation — done by Sierra Pacific Home and Geremia Pools — the problems the Segels experienced with their traditional heating and air-conditioning system were gone.
“The bottom line is, so far, we love it,” Leigh said. “There’s a lot of volume that needed to be heated and cooled. In the kitchen, which is the farthest area needed to heat, it’s very comfortable.
“It’s very good to be able to monitor the energy uses. Our heating bills in the winter were astronomical.”
According to Schwartz, “it has turned out beautifully.”
“It’s a renewable energy source right there in the back yard,” he said. “This system probably lasts forever. It’ll certainly last 30 years. These folks have made an investment that’ll last forever. They made a green decision. They wanted to do the right thing.
“Electricity demand just keeps increasing, and one of the biggest strains on our economy is the need to build more electric power plants. If we can just become more efficient and use less electricity — if everybody was geothermal — we’d use a heck of a lot less energy.”
The Segels enjoy the dual purpose their pool now has.
“It’s a little scary being the first on the block to do something, but this works like a charm,” Leigh said. “This is so much more efficient than grabbing heat from the air. The comfort level in the house is just wonderful.”
Another benefit of the system is its relative quietness compared to traditional air-source heat pumps: “There’s none of that big fan noise,” Leigh said.
There is also the financial benefit of installing the geothermal system.
“The government is offering huge tax rebates on these systems, so there’s financial benefit,” Leigh said. “You can make green choices right here in your own back yard.”
Geremia Pools owner Mike Geremia sees “the potential in this product to redefine what a pool can do for homeowners. The pool is now a part of (the Segels’) lifestyle in two different ways.”
“Once it’s installed, it’s very long-lived and low-cost to operate. In a place like Davis where there’s already so many pools, you can make it useful, rather than something that just sits in your back yard,” Schwartz said.
Short URL: http://www.davisenterprise.com/?p=134021
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Posted by Chloe Kim
on Feb 8 2012.
Last Login: Mon 21 May 2012 02:48:00 PM PDT
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