It boggles my mind that people think 10 years is a long time. After installation, you pay each month (including financing) about what you were already paying anyway (probably less). You do it for 10 years, (especially with all the new government incentives, rebates, and low-interest financing now available) and after 10 years you're paying a ridiculously paltry amount for heat. Of course it makes sense. Think of the payback over 20 years once that loan is paid off! Even if you only end up paying even 1/2 of the normal cost over that period (including the cost of your system and electric), you're still saving substantially. I know not everyone lives in a home for that long, but seeing low energy bills does increase home values. I've seen homes sold almost immediately with their main advertising point being their geothermal system even in our horrible present climate while others still linger on the market. Not only that, but why not decrease your monthly bills slightly (before the loan is paid off)? Slightly lower bills, a higher sales price which will pay off the rest of that loan - still makes sense. We had someone come out to our house and they specifically calculated everything from current estimated heating costs, heating/cooling with geo, then savings/payback period. This was a full service option, including thermostats, etc. Finding that should not be difficult. One argument I saw above made no sense. If it really is worth insulating your home to use a normal system, it is a no-brainer to insulate your home using geo. Whether you decide to use geo or not, you can't say, "Well, normal is better, because we insulated, too." That makes no sense. Insulate either way. Then compare. The financial analysis does not make much sense, either. Yes, it would be wonderful if we could just stop paying the oil company, live without heat, and invest that money! Realistically, while you could want to put away the whole $25,000, you really are still using it for heat either way over those 14 years as projected. Geo, with the loan, electric, etc, will cost about the same each month as heat before the loan is paid off, so you can't just pretend that money could be invested elsewhere. Use it upfront with geo, use it over several years with oil, it makes no difference. That money is being spent on heat. Should it be spent on something worthwhile, or just, at the end of 10 years, have you still spending the same amount on more heat with oil? Geo will typically initially cost you a little less (including the loan and electricity) per month than you would be paying otherwise, then suddenly drop dramatically to only the cost of using the system as soon as that loan is paid off. That's money you would have spent anyway each month with your normal system (even though some of it went to financing, it is still less that what you would have paid for oil). Then suddenly, once the loan is gone, you actually DO have perhaps $1,000 a year in money saved that you can invest if you wish over 10 years. If, with financing costs, it does cost more per month than your normal heating system, that's one thing; but if not, the argument that it is wasting money is not valid. You're spending it anyway. Might as well spend it on something that will, in the future, save you tons of money. (Not just a little, a lot.)

I am trying to understand your priorities and thought process. You want the most efficient unit to save money, but you don't seem to mind spending the extra money on an oversized unit. You are very concerned about having to use the back up resistance heating, but you say you won't occupy the cottage during deep freezes because the setup has been designed with limitations. You have a reasonable electricity rate of 0.10Cdn per KwHr (mine is .18US$), so I would not be very worried about running the heat strips to supplement the heat. I think your strategy of getting a 5 ton unit is wrong. The most efficicent units are in the 3-4 ton sizes. I am also skeptical the contractor will install new duct work which will handle the air flow (2000CFM) for a 5 ton unit. If the duct work is insufficient you will have a system which will operate below the rated efficiency and noisy. Ideally you want a static air pressure in the range of 0.5-0.6. This becomes more difficult as the unit becomes larger. My advice is to install a properly sized heat pump which is sized for the AC cooling load. You should add the required heat strips to provide enough heat for the cold days. Ideally the heat strips are staged. You don't have to limit yourself to a single stage unit. The better products units are typically 2-stage. If you do get a 2-stage unit then get a good 2-stage thermostat.

If you can lower the water temp and still have enough heat that will help, and better yet, install an outdoor reset so it is automatic. Also with continued air problems and excessive noise once all binding areas and metal to metal contact on the glides have been addressed, most likely you are over-pumping your system with too large of a circulator. too big of a pump is a common cause of the rapid expansion producing the additional noise beyond normal. 1-3 GPM per loop is plenty for most BB systems. Smaller pump(s), lower speed(s), circuit setters or balancing valves to slow down flow should do the trick.

Sorry rgreen48. No conflating going on here. Light is energy. Heat is energy. No one is saying that one is equal to the other. What I'm saying is that you can convert one into the other readily, and the amount of each is measured in the same way. Let's use watts x time as a measure of that energy. Works for both light and heat. Solar radiation is not just light and heat, you say? Maybe some fairie dust mixed in? It's energy, and it is *all* light (unless you're outside the atmosphere, and you're getting rained on with solar protons). It is ultraviolet light, visible light, and infrared light. A tiny bit of x-rays and radio waves. The solar constant is all light. Many flavors of light. When that light shines on something, and gets absorbed, it heats it up. You say that much of that radiation cannot be converted for any use, light or heat? Nope. It's *all* light. And if it is all absorbed, it is all converted into heat. That which is reflected is not absorbed and doesn't heat things up. That may or may not be of use to you. By the way, "heat" isn't radiation. Heat doesn't shine. Heat is a property of a material. If you put your hand next to something hot, you feel it because that something hot is shining infrared light on your hand, heating up your hand, or it is heating up the air by conduction, which flows over and hits your hand. Now, I'm smelling a problem here with the word "light". I fear that to you, "light" is just what our eyes can detect. Physically, that's incorrect. Our eyes are cable of only seeing a certain flavor of light. When it is absorbed by material, an ultraviolet or infrared photon works just as well as a visible photon in heating things up. About 30% of sunlight is visible light. About 70% of it is not. Converting energy into action and action into energy isn't called perpetual motion. It's called conservation of energy. If light doesn't hit something and get absorbed, it stays as light, perpetually. If action doesn't encounter any friction (which converts energy of motion into heat) it stays as motion, perpetually. Can light be converted to heat? You bet. With 100% efficiency. Every solar photon that lands on your house that is absorbed is heating up your house, and the petrochemical companies can't do anything about it! That being said, you have to paint your house pretty black to absorb every photon of light. To reiterate. A watt is a watt. I can take a watt of light and have it absorbed, wherein it is converted into a watt of heat. That's just a fact. A 100 watt light bulb, stuck in a bag, produces 100 watts of heat. Conservation of energy. We can go on and on here, but I recommend you do some reading about thermal physics or talk to a thermal engineer who you trust. P.S. One calorie is the amount of energy you get out of 4.184 watts in one second. Just another unit of energy.