The father of geothermal heat pumps?

According to OSU Professor and Director of Engineering Technology Dr. James E. Bose, 200 years ago an Austrian scientist created a technology called the mechanical vapor recompression machine that distilled salt from sea water. The process provided a temperature source that heated water allowing alternate uses.

Bose took the concept one step further to create the ground source heat pump, which can reduce heating and cooling costs by 50 percent to upwards of 70 percent, he said.

“We first installed our first ground source heat pump 30 years ago in Stillwater. The system has a long life. Some solutions are simple.” said Bose.

“There’s plenty of energy underneath your house,” said Bose. “The energy of the sun goes into the earth. About 40 to 50 percent is absorbed, the rest bounces off back into the atmosphere. You don’t even need as much energy as is stored in the earth, just a fraction of it.

“Wind doesn’t blow all the time. The sun doesn’t always shine all the time. I’m sure they can be commercialized and they do cut down on traditional energy use. For so many years, energy was cheap. Why bother to save? Now we have to use everything we can think of.”

According to Bose, it takes about five years to pay for the system.

“The best of both worlds is where you have a need both for cooling and heating,” he said.

“It takes twice as many solar panels to have the same impact of a ground source heat pump,” he said.

Bose said he wonders what people do with the savings, which he said he considers tax free.

“You get to keep all the money you won’t spend on energy costs,” he said. “You can’t depend on utilities which are dependent on stock holders. You do not want to be a favorite customer of the utilities.”

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