Your Climate Stories: Thomas Flores Goes Geothermal

This is part of a regular series on Planet Change called “Your Climate Stories,” where we share reader stories about changes that they’re seeing and actions that they’re taking in their daily lives to help reduce carbon pollution and respond to the impacts of our changing planet.

If you have a climate story, please send it, along with any of your photos and videos, to us here. 

Name: Thomas Flores

Location: Gooding, ID

We have a geothermal heat pump.  It cycles a water and alcohol mixture 2000 feet through five wells, each 200 feet deep.  The fluid in the closed loop picks up the ground temperature — at our location it’s 54 degrees — and uses that temperature to heat and cool our house.  Our electricity bill is one-third of what it was when we had electric heat, and provides a corresponding decrease in the carbon needed to generate that electricity.

Payback for the cost of the system was projected at eight years.  Actually, the payback for our system was six years.

Graphic courtesy of hvac-trainingclass.com.