It's about 20º and blowing hard outside, so hard that my husband said that when he came back from the barn that it felt and sounded like a jet engine was coming around the house. But, the great thing is ... we aren't burning any oil !!!!!!!!! Not a drop, and that feels soooo good. Especially on a night like this one when the wind hits the windows so hard it sounds like something is being thrown against them. I am so very glad I decided to convert to a geothermal system. I keep checking the thermostat and while the system has been running on stage 2, it has yet to call for electric back up. Our house is comfortable, even though it rattles and shakes from the storm. In years past, it used to get downright cold on nights like this even with the furnace pounding away burning oil as fast as it could. If anyone has any doubts about geothermal, please relinquish them. The system truly does work beautifully. If it can handle my leaky antique house, just think how easily it can handle a new one.
Glad your system is working to your expectations. I was waiting for Winter since ours was installed in August. We are absolutely thrilled with our system. This looks to be the 2nd coldest winter month for us in the last 2 years, with 1034 heating degree days through 27 days. For the last 2 years winter months(DEC, JAN, FEB) we have averaged 3200 KWH each month. This month I am on pace to use 1435 KWH. The house is comfortable and the wife is happy. The agreement was if we installed the system the thermostat would be set to 70 in the winter with no setbacks.
I looked into natural gas briefly about two years ago, until I found out it would be a minimum of $18,000 to bring it to my house from the road. It wasn't on the top of my list, geothermal was and had been for about 25 years, but I wanted to do my homework and check all my options before making a decision. Especially as so many HVAC people had recommended natural gas to me - of course, all of them installed gas furnaces. I know a good gas furnace can be very efficient, but gas is still a fossil fuel and it still has to be paid for each month. With solar voltaic panels, my electric bills are reasonable, and are about to go lower as we are adding on to our existing sv system. I'd actually had nat. gas for years, then we put our house on wheels and moved it back several acres and had to put in all new everything, including a larger new furnace. At the time, our local gas company would not allow anyone to have any larger amount of gas than they were already using, so I switched to dirty old oil. The gas company did finally bring in a larger gas line for the community, but I didn't feel it was worth their exorbitant fee to access it. A geothermal system made much more sense.
