THE BIG GULP

Well, we had been hoping to foot the bill for everything with savings. We decided to take the big gulp and obtain a loan to get the heating and cooling system that we think is best. That is, we are going geothermal.

Again, we talked to several contractors at the Rochester Home show. We contacted three of the contractors we talked to. One never called me back. The other two were Geotherm, Inc. (Jesse Cook) (www.geothermhvac.com) and Energywise Partners, LLC (David Neale) (www.evanhee.com). We received comparable quotes from both companies and were happy with both people.

We ended up going with Jesse Cook for just a couple of reasons. One of the reasons was that he wanted to put in more piping for the water to flow through and the other was that he also wanted to hang the heat pump from the basement rafters instead of on the basement floor. Dave also felt Jesse was a little on the perfectionist side, a lot like himself. Dave liked that.

We took Jesse's quote to the bank and received a loan for the work. Jesse is also going to supply the duct work and the whole house heat exchanger. Of course these last two things were not figured into our loan so we are scraping together more money.

The duct guy that Jesse uses will be in next week to make the holes where the ducts will go. He expects to be at the house about four hours. That's cool. He will come in later to install the ducts.

Just the geothermal system will be $20,000 plus. Gulp.

As stated everywhere in this blog, we are in this house for the rest of our lives, and God willing, we will have long healthy lives. So, with that said, we are also looking at our lives as we age and retire and want to keep our monthly expenses as low as possible. We should be able to heat our home for about $400 a year with this system.