What to Expect When Sizing a Geothermal Heat Pump for Your Home

If you’re in the market for a highly energy-efficient heating and cooling system for your Northwest Arkansas home, look no further than a geothermal heat pump. However, make sure you work with a trustworthy and experienced professional geothermal system installer. Poor installation, including improperly sizing a geothermal heat pump, will result in long-term negative consequences.

How It Works

In geothermal systems, an indoor heat pump component – using refrigerant and heat-exchange coils similar to a standard heat pump – works in tandem with an underground (or underwater) loop system. Buried loops of plastic tubing in your yard (or pond) carry a heat-absorbent water/anti-freeze solution that either extracts heat energy from the ground and transfers it inside the home for heating or deposits heat energy taken from the home into the ground for cooling.

Sizing a Geothermal Heat Pump

It’s essential that your professional geothermal installer performs a series of steps in order to determine the right size system for your home. This means performing a heating and cooling load calculation, taking into account your home’s size and layout, along with a constellation of other factors, in order to determine what size system will best heat and cool your home.

If the geothermal system is undersized, it will struggle to comfortably heat and cool your home during very hot or cold periods. It will run all the time, wasting energy, stressing parts and shortening its useful service life.

An oversized system presents serious long-term problems, too. Since the system quickly heats or cools the home, it will turn on and off frequently. This also wastes energy, wears down parts and doesn’t provide the sort of even, balanced heating and cooling you expect. And since the system spends so much of its time between cycles, it doesn’t remove humidity in the summer, a prime function of effective A/C systems.

For help sizing a geothermal heat pump in your Arkansas home, please contact us at Paschal Heat, Air & Geothermal. We know how to size and install these systems so they’ll provide reliable and comfortable cooling and heating for decades to come.

Our goal is to help educate our customers in Springdale, Arkansas about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about geothermal heat pumps and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.

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