My air conditioner saves me money the more that I use it!
That is a statement that most people don’t think they will ever here, especially when you have people on commercials telling you that if you want to save energy and save the planet you need to turn your air conditioning off. Well in my house that’s not the case.
In my house I tell my wife to keep the house nice and cool and make sure you use lots of air conditioning whenever you get the chance. Even in those days in the late spring and early fall you wonder if you should turn the system off and open the doors and windows, I don’t let that happen, I keep the air conditioning on.
The reason I do this is because my house has a geothermal heating system in it. This system heats my house in the winter and in the summer it cools it. This all happens just by pushing a button on the digital thermostat. One of the lesser known benefits of geothermal heating systems is that when you use them in the summer for cooling the system supplies you with free hot water. That’s right I said free hot water.
The way it works is that a geothermal system has pipes that run under the ground, in the winter they absorb the heat from the ground and transfer it back into the house to be used to heat your home against the winter’s cold. In the summer the pipes are used to transfer the cold in the ground to your house to be used as cooling.
A by-product of using the cooling is that the lines are left with only heat in them. The lines (that are now super heated) run from the furnace into a hot water tank. These lines heat your water to over 100 degrees giving you free hot water.
Most people don’t know that one of their biggest energy consumptions in a house is hot water and most hot water tanks are electric not natural gas. Since water that comes in from a well or city water lines comes in at a fairly cold temperature, having the ability to raise the temperature to 100 degrees for free helps your electricity bill because your hot water tank doesn’t have to work very hard. A hot water tank is used far less than most people think and if the water being supplied to it is preheated then maintaining that high temperature becomes a lot easier and cost effective.
If you don’t have access to natural gas then you should be looking into a geothermal heating system. Geothermal heating is actually more economical to run then natural gas furnaces. The only down side with geothermal heating is that it is more expensive to install then installing a high efficient natural gas heating system.
So in the summer when everyone is paying higher and higher hydro bills to keep their homes cool, I will be smiling all the way to the bank as I turn the air conditioner to cooler so that I can save more money.
Writing this from inside my house where I have no idea what the temperature is outside,
Rob Abbott
Operations Manager
Village Builders Inc.
