Ground Source Heat Pumps (GSHPs) sit inside your property and absorb their heat from the ground. Using electricity, they compress the absorbed heat into a fluid that gets transferred around your home via your heating system.
A ground source heat pump requires the geothermal pipes to be buried in the garden, laid horizontally or vertically, both of which can take a lot of space to achieve and incur costs to install.
Whilst laying the pipework horizontally takes up a larger surface area of land, it is the least expensive method of the two because vertical installation of the piping requires a bore hole to be drilled.
GSHPs are more efficient than ASHPs and have a higher Seasonal Performance Factor because the pipes are running buried in the ground, where they don’t get the same temperature fluctuations as above ground. This means that during the winter, when the air temperature is cooler, a GSHP can provide the same hot water requirements off fewer units of electricity, compared to an ASHP.
