Driving to WaterFurnace Inc.’s corporate headquarters near Fort Wayne International Airport, one has an indelible impression of one of Indiana’s biggest natural resources.
It’s ground – wide, flat, open ground, broken only here and there by a factory or warehouse building. There’s ground stretching far as the eye can see.
Wouldn’t it be great if all that ground could remain virtually undisturbed, yet we could use it to provide something we all need and now have to pay dearly for to get from somewhere else?
Indeed, that’s the premise of WaterFurnace’s business.
The company is the nation’s largest designer and manufacturer of geothermal heating and cooling systems. The systems take energy stored in the ground and use it to heat and cool homes and businesses.
For the past 20 years, WaterFurnace and a network of local installers have been quietly refining the technology and plying a steadily growing geothermal trade. But in the past few months, they’ve seen a jump in interest that roughly corresponds to the rise in the price of natural gas.
“It’s about a 100 percent increase. It’s double the number of people this year calling in asking for a geothermal quote,” says Mike Miller, sales consultant for Korte Does It All, a Fort Wayne heating and air conditioning contractor that installs geothermal systems.
Interest in geothermal spiked after this year’s hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, according to Jessica Commins, spokeswoman for the Geothermal Heat Pump Consortium in Washington.
“Our manufacturers are telling us their shipments have doubled in the last three months, and we believe that this is due to natural gas prices that shot up around Hurricane Katrina,” she says, adding that geothermal had been shown to cut home heating and cooling bills by 50 percent to 70 percent, even before recent price increases.
Fort Wayne homeowner Eric Stetzel was converted to the technology long before the hurricanes hit.
In May, he and his family moved into their new, custom-built home in an addition on the city’s north side. When the house was being built, Stetzel decided to use a pond he’d already had constructed on the property as part of a geothermal system.
“I’m kind of a mechanically inclined person, and I like that kind of stuff,” he says. “And it was a big house, bigger than I had had before, and I was worried about what it was going to cost to heat and cool it.”
So far, the system’s performance, including during recent single-digit weather, has been “impressive,” says Stetzel, 48, until recently owner of a medical equipment company. “You really can tell the difference. The house feels warmer, and what is amazing to me is the bill. The bill is lower than the house I moved out of, and it (the new house) is twice the house.”
Still, according to manufacturers and dealers alike, geothermal remains a hard sell locally.
While several businesses, including Dupont Hospital, WaterFurnace’s own corporate headquarters and some area schools have geothermal systems, residential installations have been mostly in new, high-end construction, says Kent Kuffner, WaterFurnace’s marketing manager.
The reason is cost, he says.
“It looks like it’s more expensive,” Kuffner says, adding that a typical residential geothermal system costs about $5,000 to $6,000 more than a conventional furnace system to install.
But he says that the amount comes to only about $30 a month when rolled into a mortgage, and that’s the number homeowners need to look at.
“If we can save the homeowner more than $30 a month on heating costs, which is more than possible, then that homeowner is getting a positive cash flow from Day One,” Kuffner says. “When you look at heating and cooling systems, you have to look at more than the first cost.”
The reason for the extra up-front cost is the way geothermal systems work. An underground piping system and special pumps are used to tap and transfer stored energy from the ground or groundwater.
Because the ground stays close to 50 degrees year-round, it amounts to a source of heat in the winter and a source of coolness in summer. Electricity runs the required pumps, but conventional ductwork can be used, and no additional fuel is required.
Overall, contractors say, perhaps less than 5 percent of the area’s homes are geothermal – slightly more than the less than 1 percent of homes nationally, according to Commins. She says there are about a million geothermal installations nationwide, but she did not have a breakdown of how many are in homes.
Locally, most new geothermal homes have been in rural areas not served by gas lines, says Nick Caley of Collier’s Heating & Air Conditioning in Ossian. He saysthe area has yet to have an all-geothermal subdivision.
We’ve tried and tried,” Caley says. “I think … builders are more interested in selling granite countertops and upgraded flooring and brick than they are in my equipment. They’re thinking about buyers, and buyers don’t see the furnace. They don’t see the ductwork. When they think about a house, they’re thinking about how pretty it’s going to look, not how much it’s going to cost to heat.”
Still, Collier has put in about 20 percent more geothermal systems by the beginning of December – 86 – than it did in all of 2004, Caley says. Much of the increase, he says, has come from owners of existing homes who are converting from a conventional furnace system, either because their system has come to the end of its lifespan or they’re tired of high heating bills.
“I can’t give you a number of how many people are converting to geothermal, but it’s definitely up,” he says.
New drilling equipment that allows for vertical underground piping systems as well as horizontal ones is fueling retrofitting, contractors say, making geothermal more practical for smaller, urban and suburban properties and properties without ponds.
“If we can physically drive a full-size truck on the property, we can get geothermal in,” Caley explains. “Before, we had to have a half-acre or acre of land.”
Jay Hammond of Geothermal Design Associates in Fort Wayne says his business also is doing many conversions.
“It’s come to the point that conversions are just as common (as new systems),” Hammond says. “One reason is geothermal hasn’t gone up in price in the last few years, and gas furnaces and all-electric systems have. And they really are a lot less complicated than people think they are.”
Robert R. Brown, director of product development and marketing for WaterFurnace, says other technological improvements have propelled geothermal growth.
“What’s really changed, too, is plastic pipe,” he says. “It’s all thermally fused – the joints are fused plastic, so there are no glues and no clamps, and they don’t leak.” He calls the newer piping “very reliable” and maintenance-free, and says the life expectancy of the pipe “is about 200 years.”
Brown and Kuffner say federal and state programs now available or coming in 2006 to improve heating system efficiency or promote alternative energy sources should cut the geothermal cost for many homeowners and thereby increase its popularity.
Regina Leffers, owner of Synergid Inc., in Fort Wayne, an environmentally friendly building contractor, says she thinks the region is “right on the verge” of major geothermal growth.
“With energy costs of late, people are more sensitized,” she says, adding that in recent months she has been approached about putting together “a whole neighborhood” of geothermal homes in Fort Wayne, building a custom home in the Roanoke area and retrofitting homes.
“It’s beginning to be on people’s minds, now it’s hit on their pocketbooks,” Leffers says of geothermal. “The public has to demand something different.”
