SARANAC LAKE — Giant machines drilled six 500-foot loops into the Earth at Northern Lights School on Wednesday, as crews installed a geothermal heat pump system at the Waldorf-inspired, nature-based school for youngsters.
All around the machines, a thick gray water flowed over the dirt. Matt Desmarais, the founder of Troy-based Energy Catalyst, which was the primary contractor on site, said this was groundwater colored by liquidated rock.
“It’s like you’re grinding the stone into a rock flour,” he said.
After the holes are dug — each slightly more than the length of one-and-a-half football fields — they send heat exchangers down into the Earth. These are long tubes that circulate water. The tubes contact rock and groundwater.
In the winter, the tubes pull warmth from deep in the ground — where it is consistently 50 degrees. In the summer, heat from the school building is pumped back into the ground.
To raise the temperature high enough to heat the building and provide hot water in the bitter cold winters, the water circulating through the ground passes through a refrigeration system. This system uses a refrigerant, which gets compressed by a heat pump, raising its temperature. In turn, the circulated water then transfers that heat to air or water, which gets circulated through the building.
Read the full article in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise.