Underground solar heat - a vast reserve of energy just waiting to be tapped!
Look out of your window and what do you see? The street? The house opposite? The trees and fields? What we at NIBE see is a free source of energy – the ground!
With the aid of a ground source heat pump, solar energy stored in the ground can be collected and used to heat your home. Here’s how.
Warmth builds up underground from the first days of spring when the surface of the earth starts to thaw, to high summer, when the rays of the midday sun penetrate deep down into the ground. By the time the autumn leaves are falling, there’s enough energy stored in the ground to heat up your house throughout the coldest winter. A heat pump captures and upgrades the naturally occurring warmth, so even if the summer is wet and cool, it can still provide enough energy to maintain a comfortable indoor temperature.
If at any point it gets too hot inside your house, the same system can be used for cooling. Drawing on the lower temperature underground (between 4 and 12 degrees) passive cooling also exploits nature’s own resources – simply for cooling instead of heating.
It’s amazing, but true. We know, because we’ve already been using heat pump technology in Sweden for over 30 years.
Why choose an ground source heat pump?
Here are the two most obvious reasons
Installing a ground source heat pump from NIBE can lead to a reduction in energy consumption of up to 80%. The reason for this is that a ground source heat pump uses the ground, surface soil or nearby lake as its main energy source, and all these kinds of energy are free of charge.
Although the heat pump doesn’t pay for itself in the first month, you will notice the financial benefits the first month after installation because your heating bills will be so much lower.
Moreover, the efficiency of NIBE’s latest generation of ground source heat pumps (they have an especially high operating range) positively impacts the speed with which you recover your investment.
The second reason for choosing a NIBE ground source heat pump is that it’s so environmentally-friendly. By merely storing and converting solar energy from the ground to heat your home and hot water, a ground source heat pump leads to much lower CO2 emissions than a traditional fossil-fuel based heating system.
Some governments and regional authorities offer subsidies to homeowners to switch from fossil fuel based heating to a more modern, renewable source of energy. Since ground source heat pumps are now officially classified as renewable energy, there couldn’t be a better time to change!
