Buried Pipe Heats And Cools His Shop

Buried Pipe Heats and Cools His Shop FARM SHOP Miscellaneous 17-1-29 John Ricke, Williams, Iowa, uses water flowing through pipe buried under his shop floor to heat the shop in winter and cool it in summer. "It keeps the shop floor warm in winter and works like an air conditioner in summer," says Ricke, who installed the under-ground heating and cooling system five years ago. No outside energy source is required since water is heated and cooled by the earth. Ricke laid 3/4-in. thick tongue-andgroove insulation board on top of the old shop floor, then laid 1-in. pipe in rows 18 in. apart on top of the insulation board. He covered the pipe with 4 in. of sand, then poured a new concrete floor over the sand. He used a tiling rig to dig a 2,000 ft. long trench - 6 1/2 ft. deep - in a big loop and laid 1-in. pipe in the bottom of that trench that connects up with the pipe laid in the shop. Water is pumped from a 50-gal. tank at one end of the shop and through the pipe outside the building, then back through the loop under the floor. The pipe in the floor is divided into four cooling and heating zones - a workbench zone along the south wall, equipment repair zone in the center, parts storage zone along the north wall, and under a 3-ft. wide hall-way between the shop and an adjacent machine shed. Four off-on valves mounted under the tank, one for each zone, allow Ricke to regulate the amount of water that flows to any zone. "The constant underground temperature heats the water up to about 50 degrees in winter and cools it to about 50 degrees in summer," says Ricke. "The insulation board forces heat from the water in the pipes to come up and keeps the cold from coming up off the old floor. In winter we use a wall-mounted propane heater to heat the shop up to 70 degrees, then we shut it off and use an infrared heater mounted on the ceiling to keep it at that temperature. We keep the pump on all day long. It takes 24 hours to heat up the concrete. It really radiates the heat - our feet never get cold. However, by itself the buried pipe won't keep the shop warm enough in winter to work comfortably. We mix methanol with the water in order to keep it from freezing during win-ter." When Ricke laid the new floor he left a gap between it and the walls where he inserted insulation board to keep the walls from conducting cold into the floor. He ran the pipe under the overhead door in order to keep that area free of ice and snow. The old shop had a leaky roof. To solve the problem and to help keep heat inside the shop, he sprayed a 3/4 in. layer of polyurethane over the roof and outside walls, then painted the polyurethane to match the color of the adjacent machine shed. He also sprayed polyurethane on the inside walls. "The polyurethane seals the building and has the same insulation value as 4 or 5 in. of conventional insulation," says Ricke. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, John Ricke, Rt. 1, Box 145, Williams, Iowa 50271 (ph 515 854-2668).

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