Environmentally friendly or "green" household features are all the rage amongst the buyers of brand new homes for sale in Erin Mills Mississauga and around the developed world. While green features may cost more at the outset, they're designed to save the home owner money in the long run while simultaneously contributing to a more sustainable future. Whether you want to be green because it's cool or because you care, geothermal heating and cooling is one of the features you may run into as you search for your next home.
Despite what the owners of the North York real estate development you're interested in may want you to think, geothermal heating is not a cutting edge method but rather a practice that has been in use by humans for thousands of years. The basic principle is this: the Earth's core is very hot. Deep underground this heat, coming from radioactive decay and left over from the planet's formation, is hot enough to melt rock. If tapped into, some of this energy can be used to heat a home.
The most readily available source of this heat exists in places where access to the inner reaches of the Earth is easier, such as around the boundaries between tectonic plates and near volcanoes. This is why countries like China, Sweden, Iceland, Turkey, and New Zealand have had great success with geothermal techniques. Earliest applications of geothermal heating occurred in these locations. However, your Edmonton home need not be located on top of a volcano to make use of geothermal heating. Even colder Ontario ground contains some heat which can be accessed by means of a geothermal heat pump. A relatively new technology, geothermal heat pumps do use some electricity and make use of compressed coolants, not unlike a refrigerator.
Although the Earth's core is generally associated with extreme heat, and therefore its used in Mississauga real estate is most often assumed to be purely of a heating nature, geothermal pumps can also be used to cool a house, making a geothermal energy system useful in both summer and winter. Cooling is achieved by using the ground's immense capacity for heat absorption. Heat energy from the house is drawn from the air and forced into the ground, where it is absorbed.
Setup costs for such a system are higher than for a traditional oil or electric heating system, so be prepared to shell out more for Mississauga real estate for sale with this feature. However they generally pay themselves off in energy savings within five years and the system itself has a life of 25-50 or more years before needing to be replaced.
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