Geo Air heating???

I was wondering if anyone has seen or heard of this concept? I have seen it in action years ago a greenhouse was attached to an old coal mine. The air was blown back in the cave during the day and the fan would be off during the night for the hot stored air to keep the greenhouse warm during the cold nights. Ground temperature is usually around 50F or so up north and slightly warmer in the south. This could be used for both cooling and heating greenhouses.

Geo air is the use of larger pipes 6 inches wide buried around 8 feet deep in the ground pushing air through the pipes for heating and cooling. The air is much easier to move than water and it is said to be cheaper and work just as well if not better. The concept would be to place 5 pipes in a greenhouse that goes down 8 feet then run the pipes 200 feet out and back into the greenhouse. For a total of about 1000 feet. The pipes would need a large fan to push air through the pipes and all the return pipes running back into the greenhouse should push out 52F for me here in Kentucky. This in theory should work to heat and cool a large greenhouse? I am wondering if others has seen or used any heating systems similar to this?

A link of a man who claims this system works!!

http://newenergyandfuel.com/http:/newenergyandfuel/com/2010/01/22/the-missing-geothermal-technology/

At the home shows quite a few geothermal booths.
Not a new technology. Back when I was looking at it (about 11 years ago) some of the systems ran the pipes under water as well as underground. Supposedly very effective and very energy efficient.

i have geothermal in my home. We like it.
hard to say about our savings since we moved and built a different style house . so i can't compare the two homes
but my last electric was under $200 for a 1,900 sq ft home . its a two story also. and this was Nov when temps dipped in the single digits.
we got a discount from the federal tax breaks. so we saved there but its not a cheap alternative and gives it 5 yrs to get your cost back on it in your savings but all in all i think we save about 35 % on our heating
our next heat source is a wood burning stove ! to supplement .
hope it helps

is you entire house electric? (heat, water heater, cooking, etc?)

My daughter in PA seems to think the ceremic heaters are a great way to supplement heating and cost effective --- I don't know anything about the technology.

She had a pellet stove in her last house - it worked well --hopper sort of noisy. Plus the pellets at times were in short supply. The entire time her hubby was in Iraq - she had to get and stock and lift the pellets herself..and so that was probably a burden --but the house (1900 ish) two story stayed fairly warm. She kept her oil furnace on very low and supplemented with the pellets.

we live in 45 acres of wood, so wood is free for us. But yes i do the cutting and chopping.
our neighbors have a pellet stove and yes it is a bit noisy.
yes everything is electric , only thing is we have propane for my gas cook top. other than that its all electric.
i would love to attach a solar water heater for hot water to cut cost.
sounds like a great house she lives in , being from 1900's i enjoy looking at them in our neighborhoods.
don't know much about the ceramic heaters myself , may have to google them

When I bought this home 4 years ago it had a 8'x6' green house, under the GH was a basement, cold cellar. Had to use a ladder to get in and out. It had a two 4" vent into the cellar. ( I found 22 bottles of home made wine in there,)
After the wine was gone, I added a 12; extension to the small GH, one of the vent pipes was inside the addition.
I added a small fan to it to pull air through the cellar into the GH.
Not much help in the large GH but the air is warmer in winter and cooler in the summer.
I'm not sure I could dig a 8' deep trench, here, to lay the pipe, as the rock below would be a problem.

Dwight

Have a friend that will be tackling geothermal heating for his GH/home in the next year or so. I found the link interesting and will forward it to him. Thank you, Bwilliams.

I used wood heat in mine but would like to have run radiant heat thru the floor via a sealed water tubing system which would be heated by the wood heater when used. Seems like the most efficient use of wood/water heat to me.

I currently have a tube system hooked to our out door wood furnace that heats the tables in two of the greenhouses. It works great I keep the tables around 80 and the air temp around 50.
I ran into another article which I cannot seem to find were a larger nursery had built a state of the art system which uses a bit of Geo thermal. I am not sure what they are calling this as it is also used in the system I mentioned above. The large greenhouse has a huge under ground water storage unit that is extremely well insulated. During the summer and even winter days when it is sunny the piping system runs on top of the greenhouse roof indoors and heats up the water to about 200F. This heated water is then stored underground in the insulated tanks and from what I can remember it was over a few hundred thousand gallons. These tanks can hold the heat for months at a time and it produced so much heat that they were able to use the heat for other parts of the greenhouse system. The initial cost is extremely expensive for a system like this. Once payed off though their would no longer be heating bills and much more profit. If anyone knowns the name for storing heat in these underground systems I would be interested to hear what it is being called?