Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
Originally Posted By: Archeon
This system has a high startup costs...
If you don't mind my asking, what did your system cost?

About 38.000 euro, of which 12.000 euro for the drilling alone. But the government was kind enough to subsidize about 9000 euro of the total, so it cost me about 29.000 euro. This could have been 3000 euro less even if I had been smart enough to have a heat-loss calculation done beforehand. As it is now, our heat pump is a 12Kw model. I'm pretty sure though that, because of the good insulation we had installed, a 6Kw model would have been sufficient. This 6Kw model is 3000 euro cheaper.
Also. This system is heating about 320 square meters of space.
Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.

Also, what are the climate conditions where you live, how cold in the winter, how warm in the summer?

Summers have temperatures of up 35 to 40 degrees - 95 to 105°F (40 being rather exceptional), winters go from minus 10 to minus 15 - 15 to 5 °F (again, 15 being rather exceptional). The humudity is also pretty high here, making the heat in the summer pretty unbearable.
Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.

My system was very expensive to install, but most of the expense was labor since it was replacing impossibly costly to operate electric baseboard heat, which meant that they had to knock holes through walls and floors/ceilings, and install many hundreds of feet of copper pipe, make more holes to run the wiring for the thermostats, etc. All of this in a 20-year-old house while people were living in it. Ugly... And that Buderas furnace wasn't cheap, either. But there really was no option. Had I continued with electric resistance heating, the house would have been literally unsalable. I saw the real estate crisis coming and knew I had to get out before the crash, and in Alaska nobody would even look at an electrically heated house.

My installation, parts, labor, and repair of demolition required for running the pipes came to about $23,000.

I don't know how long it's been since you had that 'upgrade' done, but I can tell you take the cost of parts has gone up tremendously since the year 2000. Most things have doubled in price, sometimes even tripled. Same with the labour costs. Some of those workers are not ashamed to charge you 50 euro/hour ex. VAT! At those prices, if they show up with two, work 8 hours and have two days of work, they easily charge you MORE than most people make in a MONTH! In labour alone! I don't think this is very reasonable anymore, but what can you do? I do know that people won't be able to cope with these ever increasing prices much longer. At the rate this goes, my kids will not be able to build their own house any more (unless they do everything themselves).

And Buderus is really a high quality brand. They make heat pumps as well, but we decided to go with Nibe instead, since heat pus are Nibe's core market.
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Riocar 80gig S/N : 010101580 red
Riocar 80gig (010102106) - backup