Robert Sykora of Prospect Park is an attorney by day, but he is also one of those guys who loves projects. Now, after many months of work with contractors, he and his partner Paul Figlmiller have an operational geothermal heating system.

It can be complicated enough to add geothermal to an existing urban property. This particular project went well beyond adding the new, South Dakota-made GeoComfort system — the installation is part of Sykora and Figlmiller’s ongoing, ambitious renovation of the 109-year-old Franklin Avenue Victorian.

The project, which will bring the house from 1,800 to a whopping 4,500 square feet, includes remodeling, additions, major landscaping, a new garage, many energy conservation improvements, water recycling and a host of other work.

The overhaul of the home includes some other notable features: a gray water recycling system will use shower and laundry water to flush the toilets. The sloping front yard is a buckthorn-removal reclamation project. And, in the backyard, at the foot of a steep hill, they excavated a small bunker in their backyard to hold a 500-gallon cistern to catch stormwater runoff, plus space for overflow. A solar pump will recycle the water back up the hill to flow down the terraced gardens and waterfall that will adorn the new landscaping, once completed.

Of the larger home project, “someday we’ll live in it,” Figlmiller said simply in late May, as he took a break from construction in the half-finished second-floor sunroom.

And if the geothermal system delivers as promised, Sykora will be a happy guy.

“It’s not for the faint of heart, but we’ve had a pretty good time doing it,” said Sykora a couple of months earlier of the geothermal system. “We’re investing in a neighborhood that will only increase in value.”

Geothermal: dig it

Geothermal heating and cooling systems are one of the green technologies supported in the new federal stimulus bill. One late-winter visit to Sykora’s home, neighbors Dan Peters, Julie Horns and their kids joined the tour. Their natural gas heating system is at the end of its life and they are thinking of getting a geothermal system, too. “It makes it a lot more feasible if you get 30 percent back,” Horns said, referring to the federal stimulus program.

Geothermal systems have both environmental and economic benefits. Sykora said he expected the system to pay for itself in 11 years.
Sykora said he is not concerned that having an unusual heating system might make it more difficult to resell the property. Once it is running, it doesn’t require special maintenance, just changing filters as people do with any air handler.
Besides, he said, “We intend to be carried out feet first.”

The basic principal behind geothermal heating and cooling is that, a few feet below the ground, the Earth’s temperature is relatively constant year-round. It’s warmer than the outside temperature in the winter and cooler in the summer.
The geothermal systems circulate an antifreeze-type liquid through underground tubing. When it cycles through the house, heat exchangers either warm up or cool off the house, depending on the season. (See information links at the end of this story.)

In rural areas, the geothermal pipes can be laid horizontally. In urban areas, you drill down. For Sykora’s project, it meant drilling five wells up to 200 feet deep in the front yard. “It is an enormous mess,” he wrote in an email. “It takes a long time. There’s a lot of noise and diesel fumes. The process just can’t be a tidy one.”

The drilling started last July; that’s where some of the inevitable glitches started surfacing. The driller busted his bit on the hard limestone below and that caused a one-month delay. “It [the bit] could only be made by some guy in Utah,” Sykora said.

In one hole, they hit a cave. It might seem like a good thing, less stuff to drill through, but it caused problems. The drill also pumps mud slurry down the hole to act as a lubricant. When the slurry drained into the cave, the drill lost that lubrication, forcing them to stop short of going to full depth on that hole, Sykora said.

They also worked hard to tighten the old, drafty house. The more energy efficient they made it, the less heating or cooling power they would need from their geothermal system. So they added double- and triple-pane windows and lots of new insulation. (This has a double benefit. Because the home is next to I-94 and East Franklin Avenue, it also cuts down noise.) They added in-floor heating where they could. New basement walls are rated R-30. (That’s good.)

As spring crept into Minneapolis, the house was still in mid-renovation. Sykora hasn’t gone over the budget lately. He estimated it cost $15,000 for the wells and roughly $40,000 for a brand new heating, ventilating and air conditioning system. That doesn’t count the energy-efficiency improvements.

“At what point do you call that part of the geothermal?” he asked. “Then it would be really expensive.”

Project delayed — a blessing in disguise

The project took longer than expected. It started working in March, past the really cold season. (The delay is a blessing in disguise. If the system had gone online in 2008, it would not have qualified for the increased payments from the federal stimulus package.)

If he were to do it over again, Sykora said he would do his own heat-loss calculations. He would have measured the surface area of every window, gotten the square footage and R-value of every wall. That way, he would have been more confident that the system was sized correctly to keep the house warm during bad cold snaps.
Knowing what he knows now, would he do it again?

“I will have to tell you after I have stretch of below-zero days next winter,” Sykora said. “If it heats the house as cheaply as I think it is going to heat the house and cool it? Yeah, I would do it again.”

More details on geothermal systems:

www.cleanenergyresourceteams.org/technology/geothermal

www.consumerenergycenter.org/home/heating_cooling/geothermal.html

Read updates on the progress of the project on Sykora’s website.

last revised: June 3, 2009

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