Services
The three loop fields
01
Horizontal loops, the estate standard
Where the acreage is, the loop lies flat: trenches six feet deep, pipe looped in slinky coils, backfilled and tracked — the whole field installed in days on land that keeps mowing afterwards. The cheapest metre of heat exchange there is, and the reason the gravel plain’s estates heat for what the old oil tanks used to drink in a fortnight.
02
Boreholes, the small-lot answer
Where the lawn is the size of the house, the loop goes down instead of out: vertical bores a hundred and fifty metres deep, twin pipes in each, thermally conductive grout from bottom to top. The rig is on site three days, the header manifold hides in a hatch the mower rides over, and the front garden comes back looking like a garden.
03
Pond & open loops, where the water is
A pond with the right depth and area is a heat exchanger that already exists: coiled pipe sunk and anchored, no drilling, no trenches, and the best exchange rates we measure. Where the aquifer allows an open loop instead, we handle the permits, the screening and the reinjection — the water goes back where it came from, degrees exchanged and nothing else.
The plain’s ground-source incentive pays a meaningful share of the loop cost, and the paperwork is ours: eligibility checked at the audit, forms filed with the permit, payment tracked to your account. loops@loamline.example · (555) 745-1182.
Rates
The loop sheet
The loop is priced by the metre and the heat pump by the house — the audit prices both together, and the grant lands in the footnote. The number we print is the number after incentive, because that is the only number that is real.
The loop audit & test well$420
Thermal conductivity read on your ground — the design’s foundation
Horizontal loop, per metre$38
Trenched, slinky-laid, tracked and re-graded; seed in spring
Borehole, per metre$71
Drilled, twin-piped, thermally conductive grout full depth
Pond loop, per coil$1,150
Sunk, anchored, exchange-tested before connection
Header & manifold assembly$2,400
Fused, pressure-tested, hatch-accessed for service
Heat pump supply & setfrom $11,800
Water-to-water or water-to-air, desuperheater option fitted
Fusion & pressure certificationincluded
Every joint certified, every test logged to the file
The incentive, filedhandled
Eligibility, forms, tracking — the footnote made real
How it goes
The loop-field year
A ground-source job is a year with a shape: the audit when the ground thaws, the loop when the field is dry, the heat when the house is ready. The calendar below is the honest version.
Spring
The audit & the test well
One small bore, a thermal conductivity reading of your actual ground, and the heating model run against your bills — the two numbers every metre of loop is sized from. The incentive eligibility is checked here, in writing.
Summer
The field
Trenches or bores while the ground is dry and the garden can recover: pipe fused above ground where the joints can be seen and certified, loops laid or dropped, pressure-held overnight before a spade of backfill moves. The field is tested before it disappears.
Autumn
The header & the plant
Loops manifolded into the header, the heat pump set and connected to the distribution that already serves the house — ducts, radiators, or the slab. Desuperheater plumbed if the domestic hot water is joining the system.
First winter
Commissioning in real cold
Flows balanced, entering-water temperatures logged through the first hard weeks, and the performance report that closes the incentive file. The loop’s year one is its hardest; we are there for all of it, instruments on.
The wall
Fields we are still reading
We were spending four thousand a winter on propane and the driver still came. Loamline read our ground, laid the loop in August while we were away, and the first January bill was the delivery charge and the fan. The front field grew back by June — you cannot find the trench, and we have looked, on our knees, with the dog.
The certified-joint guarantee
Every fusion joint in the field is made above ground, pressure-held overnight, and certified to the file before backfill — the pipe itself carries a fifty-year rating, and our certification travels with the property. If a loop we laid fails inside twenty-five years, the excavation, the fusion and the lawn are all ours to make right.
Word of mouth
Three fields, three winters
The village lot is twelve metres square and every other company said geothermal needed an estate. Three bores, one hatch under the lawn, and the January gas bill is a memory we tell guests about.
They pressure-tested the loop overnight with the gauge visible from the kitchen window, and invited us to watch it hold. Twenty years of hiring contractors and that is the first time anyone showed me the proof before burying it.
The incentive paperwork landed as a done thing, not a homework assignment — eligibility letter, forms, and the payment tracked into the account. The quote’s footnote was the invoice’s number, to the dollar.
Fair questions
Doesn’t the lawn end up looking like a trench map?
Not if the field is planned like a garden rather than a ditch: trenches run with the fall, topsoil is stripped and stored separately, and the subsoil goes back in layers before the tracked machine closes it. By the second summer the line is a slightly greener stripe for a few weeks, and by the third it is nowhere.
What happens if the loop leaks years from now?
The field is pressure-monitored from the plant room — a slow loss shows on the gauge long before it shows on the bills, and the certified-joint map tells us exactly which run to expose. Fifty-year pipe rated in the ground, joints certified above it; the twenty-five-year guarantee covers the excavation either way.
Is my ground even suitable?
That is the audit’s whole job: a test well reads your ground’s thermal conductivity, and the heating model runs against your actual bills. Gravel plain, clay, wet sand — each holds and hands back heat differently, and the loop length is priced from the reading, not from a postcode’s average.
Why not just an air-source heat pump?
Air-source is cheaper to install and honest about it — and its output falls exactly when the cold deepens, which on this plain is the week that matters. The loop holds eleven degrees through the whole winter; the arithmetic says the ground pays the difference back, and the audit’s model shows you the two lines crossing on your own bills.
Can it cool as well as heat?
Better than anything with a condenser outside: the same eleven degrees that heats in January absorbs in July, through the same loops and the same plant, with no outdoor unit and no hum at the patio. On the plain’s newer builds the cooling is often the reason the loop gets signed, and the heating comes with it.
The ground has been paying attention. Have we?
The loop audit reads your ground and your bills together, prices the field by the metre, and files the incentive for you. loops@loamline.example