Where In Sussex

I’ve spent the last few days helping a friend of mine install Ground Source Heating.

To cut a long story short, below the frost line (1m/3.5ft deep around here) the ground temperature is almost constant.  By using this fact, you can send water in a pipe around your garden, on a 500m trip and then use the energy it’s picked up along the way to make magic heat in your house via a special heat exchanger called a Heat Pump.  The heat pump solution is a lot cheaper than oil heating, which most country folk use, the price of RBO has increased by about 75-90% in the last year alone!  Ouch!

So I have been helping install the 500m of pipe in his field…. the 1m deep trench needs 10cm of sand, the pipe, another 10cm of sand and then the project is topped off with the soil putting back.  Easier said than done.  About 40,000kg of sand were required (that’s about 100,000lbs!) and the soil, although dug mechanically, is a thick, sticky clay, which was in huge football sized clods, which baked in the sun into pottery!  Putting that back in the ground, even with a digger was hard work.

Hopefully the system will be complete by August.  Here are some pictures from the weekend: