Horizontal
Open land, trenches, then lawn again
Typically several metres down. Needs diggable ground. Cheapest when the acreage is there. A week of mess. Not for a yard you will not forgive.
Learning centre
Teach first. Then decide if we are the contractor.
This is the start of a geothermal knowledge platform, not a blog farm. Every section below is something a homeowner, an engineer, or a property manager can use to judge any quote — ours included. We will not publish a price, a rebate, or a testimonial carousel to fill the space.
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Why the ground, not the air
A heat pump moves heat. On a −25 °C night the air has almost none left. A few metres down, the ground barely notices.
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The four loops
Horizontal, vertical, lake, open well. Your land picks. A contractor who only sells one will find a way to make you need it.
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The hydro-bill horror story
Almost never the technology. Almost always a loop that was never sized to the house.
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How to check the machine yourself
Hour meter, earth in, earth out. The argument that does not require trusting us.
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Design philosophy — repairable in 2045
No proprietary boards. Stainless pan. Oversized coils. The manufacturer’s own document, used here as engineering copy.
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What actually drives the price
Four things. No invented range. No government program as the headline.
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What happens in your yard
The week every other GTA geothermal site skips.
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Products and systems
The indoor range, stated as the manufacturer states it. Capacities we have not confirmed stay off the table.
The physics, without the brochure
A dollar of electricity should buy you several dollars of heat.
A heat pump does not burn fuel. It moves heat the way a fridge moves heat out of the box and into the kitchen — run backwards, that heats a house. Because you are moving heat rather than making it, a dollar of electricity buys more than a dollar of heat.
Government of Canada figures put ground-source systems at about 3.2 to 4.2 on buried loops, higher on well water. Electric baseboards score exactly one. Air-source units, sitting outside, read 2.0–5.4 in mild weather and 1.1–3.7 at −8 °C — before the nights that actually break Ontario houses.
A buried loop is not reaching into −25 °C air. Below the frost line the ground temperature barely moves in a cold snap, so the machine does not fall off a cliff the week you need it most. That is the whole argument. It is also why an outdoor “cold-climate heat pump” and a ground loop are not the same product, even though both are called heat pumps in ads.
Loop types
Four ways to put a loop in the property. One indoor machine.
Ontario describes closed-loop earth energy systems as a sealed circuit of heat-transfer fluid — no water withdrawn — in vertical boreholes, horizontal trenches, or coils in a water body. Open loop is the other family: real groundwater, then returned. Most of what we install is horizontal, lake, or open well. Vertical is the tight-lot tool.
Vertical
Dinner-plate holes, hundreds of feet
U-bend of HDPE, grouted full length. Smallest scar. Permits depend on the loop type, the property and current Ontario rules — we check them on the site visit rather than publish a threshold here. Urban lots live or die on this option.
Lake / pond
Closed coils, nothing taken from the water
Ontario minimum 2 m of depth, setbacks from potable intakes, and the usual shoreline permits. When the water is right, it is the least destructive loop we put in.
Open well
Groundwater as the heat source
Yield and chemistry first. Wells Regulation applies. Taking 50,000 litres a day or more needs a Permit to Take Water. This is the bargain that becomes a headache if nobody tested the water.
The failure mode
If the loop is short, backup heat runs all winter.
That is the hydro-bill story people tell as “geothermal doesn’t work.” The loop was never designed to the heat loss. Industry practice on the cheap is to undersize and lean on a duct heater — expensive resistance heat, all season, on a unit running far more hours than it should. Sized against a real load calculation, the auxiliary heat should almost never run.
How to read someone else’s quote
Ask for the heat-loss calculation, the loop design that follows from it, and the estimated annual running cost. A bid without those three is selling equipment. Then ask who pays if the loop is short. If the answer is you, it was never a design-build.
Verification
Earth in, earth out, hours run.
Almost nothing else in this market lets an owner verify anything. Polar Bear ships an hour meter in every unit and loop thermometers on the cabinet. A flow meter in the return piping is quoted as part of the job. Hours × the cost of an hour is your heating bill. The split between earth in and earth out is the free heat coming out of your own ground.
If a contractor cannot tell you how you will check the system in February, they are asking you to trust a brochure. We would rather be held to the instruments.
Still the right contractor? Call and book the visit.
If this page talked you out of geothermal, that is a successful page. If it did not, the next step is standing in your driveway — not another form.