Great progress, ...Do you have a pipecutter? saws introduce swarf into the pipe (potentially), but I suppose it can be blown/washed out before final connection. Go easy on the fingers...you can only do that so many times you know
Great progress, ...Do you have a pipecutter? saws introduce swarf into the pipe (potentially), but I suppose it can be blown/washed out before final connection. Go easy on the fingers...you can only do that so many times you know
My Biggest Fear Is When I die, My Wife Sells All My Stuff For What I Told Her I Paid For It.79 SB threads and 32 IB Threads across 4 rigs 111 threads Crunching!!
Ouch! That looks like a mean knife, too. The kind that would push old ladies or eat your pancakes when you're turned away.
I'm really looking forward to the photos of the excavating and "hose-laying" process, all this is completely new and totally hardcore to me. Great stuff man!
Holy mother of god. I'm with CptDreadFlint, Jesus wants his blasphemy back. This is nuts, and I thought a 9x120 rad was xtreme.
If you were willing to redo a lot of the stuff you already buried, to reduce pumping power requirements you could get several Y splitters, and cut the tube into sections. That would really help flow a lot. If you are thinking of adding any tube, you could hook it up in parallel, and that would also help. If I were to do something like this (I wouldn't lol) I'd start with something like a piece of large diameter ABS or PVC pipe, and putting several holes into it, and running maybe 5 100 foot sections, or possibly even more. Just think of how your typical radiator has something like 10+ tubes in parallel.
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Yes, I splurged on one for working under the house. It doubles as a nice tube and hose cutter too. Only the reservoir tube was cut once with a band saw.Originally Posted by OldChap
Great progress, ...Do you have a pipecutter? saws introduce swarf into the pipe (potentially), but I suppose it can be blown/washed out before final connection. Go easy on the fingers...you can only do that so many times you know
It was a gift from an engineering practice called "Obsidian". Their logo is a obsidian knife, hence the color and the gift idea.
I'm going to lug the SLR around for the dig and take plenty of pictures. It's going to get a little messy Wednesday with rain/snow but we're still planning on getting it done this weekend. The return/supply trench will be left open so the (newly bought) water piping can be insulated whenever the foam tubing shows up.
The end is near! (Although the success of the project can't truly be judged until late summer or early fall when the ground temperature peaks.)
Enjoying the sheer epicness of your endeavors, Romir! Truly facinating stuff!
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Excellent work Romir.
It all ways the way, it's the last one that you need to do that either cuts you or it not until the last one you pick that you find the one you have been looing for.
As you havn't layed any pipe yet and there is still time.
I would think now is an Excellent time to up-grade to the 100' roll of 3/4 pipe.
For $30 bucks it's not worth kicking your self later once it's all buried in the ground, with the, would of, could of, should of, If only!!!
Do it NOW!!!!
Plus a bit like what Serialk11r said.
You could also easily lay two or three full length runs on top of each other with say 8-12" of dirt between them in layers in the same trench.
What do you think???
Thanks, I hope the finale this weekend doesn't disappoint.
My thumbnail saved me from having a much deeper cut into the full side of my thumb. I'm thankful today that evolution wasn't able to get rid of them.Excellent work Romir.
It all ways the way, it's the last one that you need to do that either cuts you or it not until the last one you pick that you find the one you have been looing for.
As you havn't layed any pipe yet and there is still time.
I would think now is an Excellent time to up-grade to the 100' roll of 3/4 pipe.
For $30 bucks it's not worth kicking your self later once it's all buried in the ground, with the, would of, could of, should of, If only!!!
Do it NOW!!!!
Plus a bit like what Serialk11r said.
You could also easily lay two or three full length runs on top of each other with say 8-12" of dirt between them in layers in the same trench.
What do you think???
I bought the roll, two more couplers and clamps for $35 last night! This pipe is even tighter on the couplers and will definitely need to be heated with a propane torch to get them on. Its not going to leak, and I don't need to worry about damaging it (thinner wall) in my shallow trench that will be shovel filled. Plus it'll be protected with insulation as well.
I was going to do two layers at first so I wouldn't "lose" the cooling from having a straight return line going down one side. But the excavator won't have any problems digging whatever length I need. It can start at the supply trench and dig backwards however long it needs to. The coils didn't need to be so aggressively overlapped, but it's really stiff that way and will be easy to set in the ground.
If the clouds clear later today I'll try to finalize the coiled section get get the final length. Then I'll take a picture of it from the houses second story.
Today's update, a pictorial:
First of all, the 5/8th foam shipped and will be delivered Saturday! The 1-wire components should arrive tomorrow so I've been getting the Ubuntu netbook ready software-wise.
The liquid filled hydraulic pressure gauge came in yesterday. 15 PSI, 2.5" gauge, 1/4" MPT fitting on the bottom. I hope it's accurate. The 100' return/supply piping coil was also obviously purchased along with couplers and more clamps.
Where the pressure gauge is going to be mounted. Connecting it to something else like this saves me from buying two more $4.50 5/8th barbs. The compact ball valve allow me to remove the filter element without draining the top of the reservoir.
I went the easy/secure route and didn't mount the temperature probes with copper tube spacers. The T fitting will create turbulence and should keep the water flowing around them. It's not like the loop will have fast changing temperatures, high flow, or large deltas where direct stream contact is important. They are very permanently attached with nearly an inch of J-B Weld epoxy around them. The picture doesn't show it well, but the tips with the sensors do stick out of the epoxied area.
The sensor in a fitting, in the T. It hasn't been assembled so it'll be more compact when screwed in & cemented.
The soon to be 1500w heat stick for graphing the loop's cooling capacity. I thought I had a spare 12 gauge power cord, but didn't, so I couldn't start J-B welding the element into place.
I'm hyped. The 10 degrees Celsius crawl space loop temperature results (before warming up) are very encouraging. Check back in 6 months to see if I stayed under my 20 degrees Celsius peak water intake temperature goal. :p
Crazy cool project. What an undertaking!
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Subscribed! Words fail me in order to explain how epic this really is. Your wife must hate you, if you're married that is.
I don't think I mentioned the Pex piping that's going to be feed off the water hose spigot line. There's around a 40 degrees Fahrenheit summer/winter swing in my house's water temperature because of some shallowly buried piping to the pumping station. A controllable flow of this water through a heat exchanger could be a simple moderating influence on the supply line.
The dew point has become a bigger concern for me after running the crawl space loop through my blocks for the last few days. 24/7 chilled blocks have a lot of potential sweating surface area, even with the PC powered off... That's the scary part. We'll see what happens when it gets warmer and more humid.
(These PC area pipes aren't secured to the joists at the ends yet, hence the sag. I'm waiting on the thicker insulation.)
The last dozen feet of the supply trench has standing water from yesterday's melted winter mess. The geothermal trench is going to be located another 6 feet down from the pictured spot, where the ground levels off. There's going to be plenty of thermal conductivity capacity from this deep wet soil.
Its been sunny all day so I'll be able to easily finish coiling the geothermal piping after work. The total loop length is going to be a little shy of 500 feet with around 17 gallons of water. That's going to take a wee little while to fully circulate.
Nice solid progress on the build
keep it going
And here I am excited over the single 5870 I just ordered haha
This project is sick!
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Excellent work
When you get to testing with the 1500w heatstick I have a feeling that it will take hours before you see any change in the loop temp...Still amazed by the scale of this project ...nothing but praise for you my friend
My Biggest Fear Is When I die, My Wife Sells All My Stuff For What I Told Her I Paid For It.79 SB threads and 32 IB Threads across 4 rigs 111 threads Crunching!!
Been watching this since the start. I love this project, can't wait to see it completed
After some initial rise I'm expecting a very slow increase over a large period of hours. I'm probably not going to have the data logging and graphing ready this weekend. We'll see soon enough though.
Yesterday's 1-wire components update:
The sensors seem to work when ghetto tested. I have Digitemp running on the ubuntu netbook and am slowly getting OWFS configured.
The coiled geothermal loop is basically finished. All that's left is to secure the return line to the side and straighten it up a bit. Before doing that I want to be absolutely sure that there's enough unused piping at both ends. Right now there's about 25 feet at both ends. Half of that be needed to come up out of the deep trench, and the rest will supplement the 50 foot runs of piping in the trench to the house.
Please excuse the camera phone photos and the excessive post processing on the first image.
The last two pictures reveal how long the coiled cooling section is. The coils start at 28 feet and end at 242. So 214 feet of coils, with a final linear length of 32 feet. That's less dense than I expected, but the length is still doable!
I'm going to straighten out, cut in half, and insulate the 100' coil tomorrow. The loop will then be fully connectible, and the geothermal trench ready to be excavated whenever convenient.
Forgive my ignorance, but when you return the water to the house, how will your piping be connected to your PC loop?
Been very interested in this project, but a little lost=P
The initial plan, and how its currently setup, is running the water directly through my PC's loop.
The unfinished temporary setup:
And before anyone asks, I was out of hose clamps when the picture was taken. Neither the 1/2" or 7/16" ID tubing leaked without them.
Because of condensation in the humid summer I'm not very keen on running chilled water through the blocks 24/7. I might use a brazed plate head exchanger connected to the geothermal loop, in place of a radiator. That way water will only flow through the blocks when the PC's pump is on. It will also cause a loss of efficiency and add extra pump heat dump to lower the condensation risk.
I have a couple other things planned if the water temperature needs to be slightly raised before reaching the pc. Pulling the supply water to the utility closet first and going to PC from there is the first thing to try. There are a lot of ways to get some of the warmer ambient temperature into the loop.
There's always the indoor dehumidifier option as well.
Last edited by Romir; 03-05-2010 at 12:46 PM.
Appreciate the info, I understand it much better now.
I think I'm ready for the big day tomorrow. It might be a bit hard to sleep tonight!
Yes, that's another 100' roll of 160 PSI piping. The previous 100' for the supply/return line wasn't enough! If I'd known I was going to locate the ground loop so far down the hill I would've bought the 500' roll to begin with ($120 + S/H). The colder summer ground temperature should easily be worth the small pressure loss. (There's also room and should be pump capacity to install another buried coiled loop to the right of this one, if desired. :kookoo
Because of the higher than expected restriction, and the lower than expected power consumption of the Iwaki, I'll probably connect the PCs to the loop through plated heat exchangers. Doing that and cracking open the bypass valve should avoid all potential condensation problems.
My loop last summer was more than 5c higher than ambient when loaded so its possible to drop more than 10c off the intake water temperature and stay above the dew point. Going slightly below it isn't immediate doom and gloom either, but that area could be viewed as the safety wiggle room.
A couple pictures:
The pressure gauge and filter valve installed. Now I can remove the filter without spilling out the top water content of the reservoir.
Here's some of what the filter had in it. I wasn't very careful when working in the crawl space. Without the filter I would've had to cap all the tubing when moving it and have kept all the fittings in plastic bags.
Anyone care to guess what the ground temperature will be? 12 feet under, in wet higher water table soil?
The constant ground earth temperature is supposed to be 58 in the coastal area here. So I'm expecting to see a temperature slightly below 50 tomorrow based on these:
"A minimum delay of five days between loop completion and test start-up is
recommended in formations that are expected to have low conductivity [< 1.0 Btu/her-ft-°F (1.7 W/m-°C)] and three-days for other formations."
It looks like the final settled ground temperature will take a little while to get, but I'll have IR readings of the excavated soil tomorrow.
We're going to risk not using any sand as a dressing because of how wet the soils going to be. The coiled loop will need to be lowered immediately after temporarily scooping the muck out of the trenches finalized depth. Once it's down there, its going to float or potentially be raised by mud sliding in from walls. It'll need to be immediately backfilled from a pile of pre-screened soil to keep it in place. All the water should prevent air filled pockets of soil from remaining around the coils. This installation definitely won't need to be filled from a garden hose.
That's the expectations anyway. Only 14 more hours and we'll find out.
woot
it's coming on very well mate, can't wait to see results.
what an awesome project
I thought I posted this earlier but the quick reply didn't go through. I haven't finished the supply/return trench yet but I did connect everything to leak test. So far so good.
I've installed the extra temperature sensor into a conduit pipe and will jam it 5-6 feet into the ground tomorrow. The grounds will still be so soft that walking on it isn't possible. I tested it this time and it's working fine with same ethernet cable.
There's 1gb of pictures to dig through, so more later... I still have things to finish up and photograph.
It's kind of odd running furmark on the stock 5970 and watching the temperatures immediately jump to 13c, and then never change.
Earlier post:
The pits dug and the coils are in the ground. The final connections will have to wait until tomorrow though.
We started three hours late because of an emergency errand this morning. So I didn't finish laying, insulating, and trimming the return/supply lines. I did manage to clean out most of that little trench though. I need to head to Lowe's now to get some PVC pipe to repair a broken water pipe.
The ground was a quagmire so the depth varied from 3-7 feet. The highest point was at the far end where the warm water will go first, and the deepest is where the two trenches meet. Measured soil temperatures were in the low 40s Fahrenheit. My temperature probe unfortunately isn't responding. I checked it before siliconing the connections and securing it the pipe, but not after. Oh well, water in and out are all that matter anyway.
Last edited by Romir; 03-07-2010 at 07:39 PM.
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