Ground source heat pump owner here in the US. The original system was installed in 2007, and the loop field was designed to "best knowledge at the time". Well in the 20 years since then, NREL changed guidance on how far apart and how deep loops need to be installed. Rightly so, because our circa-2007 is "short looped", it's not sufficient for the house loads, but there is nothing we do about it other than putting on more expensive pumps, more expensive antifreeze and live with heat pump compressors dying pre-maturely because they are working at their design limits. All this makes it as expensive as traditional system (and if we tried to go net-zero with solar, the amount of solar required (because it runs so inefficiently) is larger than our roof area.
So I'm looking at a backup gas boiler to take load of the heatpump/ground loop (house has radiant heat).
And they are not quiet. 5-Ton water to water compressors are not quiet.
And the control system (HDX) and amount of expertise required to keep the thing running is a major barrier to getting low cost maintenance.
Maybe a 2026-designed system will work better and actually live up to the hype you talk about, but there are decades of poorly designed and discarded ground loop heat pumps that have "poisoned the well" if you will.
Out of curiosity, has the demand stayed the same? I'm asking because you see the same with electricity grids, designed in a different time with much lower demand.
Sorry to hear this, it seems like a great system to me but you have to have the capacity right. I'm planning on getting one in the next year but the drilling will be more than we need and we opt for no glycol (yet) as that also gives us headroom
Does the ground source heat up (or cool down) over time, making it less effective? The deep ground is very well insulated, which is why after a century of operation the London Underground is 10 degrees warmer. I wonder whether GSHP users need to balance their load by (say) consuming more heating than they actually need in winter so that summer cooling remains effective.