Among the many ways HVAC contractors find satisfaction is through the daily opportunities they have to enrich customers' lives through quality home comfort. Greg Miscally, project manager at Environmental Air Conditioning Services, Inc., Jacksonville, FL, company founder Howard Stalls, and the engineers at Indoor Environmental Solutions, Inc. are no exception. They have an overwhelming concern for the customer, and they won't let up until every project is perfect.

It's even more rewarding when the level of customer happiness they bring goes from an ordinary thank you, to an ecstatic, "you're the answer to my prayers" kind of happy.

The EAC and IES teams often work together, and the two entities made it happen again during the summer of 2010, when they participated in a major geothermal retrofit for a luxury home located in Northeast Florida.

The owner of this classic Florida-style home just wasn't convinced that the existing five-year-old geothermal system was providing adequate relief from the Florida heat. The housekeeper provided another important piece of information: the system would trip off unexpectedly, well before the home was fully cooled.

EAC began servicing the home in 2007, and had discovered multiple problems with the existing system. After learning other engineers and contractors couldn't provide a solution, EAC consulted with the homeowner about having Indoor Environmental Solutions conduct an assessment and provide a design strategy.

Steven Griffin, P.E., president of forensic engineering firm, IES, was hired to determine why the home couldn't be adequately cooled, and to design a solution. Having worked with EAC in the past, Griffin enlisted them to help with testing.

They put on their detective hats and began their investigations. Among the signs discovered in the five-story home, was an increase in temperature of about 2F per floor. For a five-story home, that worked out to an approximate 10F difference between the ground floor and top floor.

"With geothermal systems, that's indicative of a high pressure fault," Miscally explains. IES found that temperatures in the water loops of the geothermal system were unusually high, suggesting that they were undersized.

"We ran our load calculations, and discovered that the air conditioning equipment also was undersized," Griffin says.

The existing vertical bore closed loop system consisted of 21 vertical wells, at 200- to 250-ft. deep,which was inadequate. All 12 of the home's air conditioning units became overstressed and damaged because of the extremely high summertime water temperatues of about 130F.

"The system wasn't rejecting enough heat for the air conditioning system to operate properly," Miscally says.

Following their investigation, IES took its data and went into design mode. They devised a solution that would keep as much of the original system in place as possible, to save the homeowner additional expense.

After much analysis and discussion, the team decided on a unique solution. They could make the existing geothermal closed loop system work in conjunction with an open loop and heat exchanger system.

"Occasionally, in cases like this, we can use a cooling tower to augment the heat rejection," Griffin says. "The homeowner's answer to that was an emphatic 'no.' So, that meant there was only one way to reject the heat: a plate-and-frame heat exchanger with a supply and recharge well (open loop) was added to the existing ground loops. You cut the pipes, put the heat exchanger in the condenser water line as it's exiting the ground on its way back up to the air conditioning units, and remove whatever heat the ground loops can’t."

Now, an open loop and closed loop system work together to cool and heat the home as originally intended. Miscally says the innovation has provided some excellent benefits.

"In summer, the open loop and closed loop wells work together. In winter, we don't have to burn energy running the pumps for the open loop wells, because the heat we pull out of the earth is adequate," he says. "We have great heating ability, and we save energy when the other wells aren't running. If anything ever happens with the existing closed loop system, where there is a rupture or piping is damaged, the open loop geothermal system is sized and designed to handle the full load of the home.