Hi,
I am Adrian from Romania. I am building my own house and came across this forum and the Trenchplanner / Flowplanner apps which are really great (thank you to the creator). I admire the knowledge you Austrian people have gathered around the geothermal heatpumps topic and therefore I am kindly asking for your advice on my drawing using the Trenchplanner to design the geothermal heatpump circuit for my new house.
Details of the house:
- huge house 474 square meter of interior space (without terraces), 830 square meters perimeter (terraces included).
- the walls: 30cm thick clay brick + 20cm thick basalt wool insulation, aiming for near passive house standard (difficult).
- I have contracted a specialized passive house consultant who calculated the energy necessity for the house both in heating for winter and cooling in summer. The result is that I need a 16.1kw pump with
COP 3.
- since technology is more modern, I will use a better COP geothermal pump: either a Nibe SB1256-18KW or the NL-G6SII/R32 (I saw a discussion on a thread here and it seems that it's good). I have to check exactly which is best for my project, but the price difference makes me incline to go with 2 Nulite pumps in cascade for redundancy.
- the technical room is right in the middle, where the heathpump is.
- I have a lot of walkways around the house as you can see in the drawing.
- at the bottom of the drawing you can see that I have a backup land (I want to keep it for my children for future), so if you think that I need to extend my heatpump circuit, I can do it but I prefer not to.
- garage is at the top of the property
- a greenhouse is at the bottom right
Drawing details:
- URL:
My Trenchplanner project urlTrenchplanner project url
- I have combined horizontal + vertical trenches (where space is limited).
- On some sides, I am using vertical trenches and I want to plant some trees near them. I plan to use root barriers to keep the tree roots away from the circuit. Would that help or is it a mistake to plant the trees there?
- I tried to keep the 1.5m distance to house/garage/property-limit except where it's not possible.
- some horizontal are small not sure if they are ok
- I plan to collect rainwater from the house (to wet plants) to a collector that I want to place on the right side, next to where the sewage enters the property. In the same place I have want to create a deep drilled shaft (100m deep) to get water from below the ground and use that if needed for drinking/watering plants. That place seems to be the best.
Questions:
1. Is the circuit OK?
2. Is the 17.2kw circuit good enough for the house? Should I aim for more power extracted from the ground? I could extend it down to the southern greenhouse, but the gains are minimal (300W) because I have a full driveway there.
3. I accept suggestions to optimize it. Can you please help with this?
4. I am not sure where to put the sewage to enter the house. It enters the property on the right side. From there I need to direct it to the house, ideally on a straight line but that would disturb the heatpump circuit. Any suggestions?
Disclaimer: I will hire engineers to work on the project but before that I want to know if my ideas are OK or not.
Thank you in advance for your time and patience.
All the best,
Adrian