Subterranean Heating and Cooling System

[Kaduda]

Ran across this website...

http://www.sunnyjohn.com/indexpages/shcs.htm

Talks about a cheap way to heat & cool a greenhouse...Might be useful in controlling temp in a building...

To put it in a nutshell, hot moist daytime air of the greenhouse is circulated through underground tubing and then back into the greenhouse cooled and dryer. The result is a greenhouse cooled in the day by soil that is heating up, and a nighttime greenhouse that is much, much warmer because of the high soil temperatures. It makes perfect sense, but we never discovered how great it would work until we did it in a number of projects and noticed that because the air is so moist and dropped in temperature, that the phenomenon of dewpoint occurs. Because it reaches dewpoint it "acts" as a refrigerator using the phase change of water rather than the phase change of freon.

Interesting read for myself so I figured I'd share...

[GaryD]

Hi Kaduda,

This one has been around for a while.....and I've heard mixed reports about its effectiveness.

I suspect that the more extreme the climate, the more effective it's likely to be in helping to modify that climate.

Gary

[Kaduda]

I wonder if it would work within a raised grow bed...Say 3 feet high and 8 feet wide and 30 feet long...That should be 720 cubic feet of thermal mass...less piping...