CKEnergy: How Geothermal Heat Pumps Cut Energy Bills With Stable Ground Temps

Thanks for tuning in to Hartzell’s Heat & Air — your trusted HVAC experts in Oklahoma and beyond. From Kingfisher to coast-to-coast consulting, we design, install, and maintain smart, efficient systems that deliver year-round comfort.

We’re employee-owned, family-run, and powered by 48+ years of experience. Whether it’s AI-powered thermostats, geothermal systems, or classic tune-ups, we deliver upfront pricing, expert care, and warranties that back it all up.

🛠️ Book Online:
https://book.housecallpro.com/book/Hartzells-Heat--Air/4a569038b3dc460daf2d5f6497b18351?v2=true
🌐 www.hartzellsheatair.com
📞 (405) 375-4822

🚛 Trane Comfort Specialist • Mitsubishi Diamond Dealer • ClimateMaster Elite
 🛡️ VIP Comfort Club • Remote Monitoring • Extended Warranties

📲 Follow us for tips, updates, and real-world installs:
 YouTube: @hartzellsheatair6003
X: https://x.com/HartzellsHVAC
Facebook: facebook.com/hartzellsheatair
LinkedIn: Dave Hartzell

Built on trust. Backed by warranty. Designed for comfort.

Transcript

The Ground As A Battery

SPEAKER_01 0:00

If you uh if you walked out to your yard right now, like today, and just dug a hole maybe six feet deep, you would actually find a hidden thermal battery. And according to the sources we're looking at today, tapping into that specific layer of dirt just a few feet down could act as a permanent cheat code, you know, to slash your home energy bills. Like operating with efficiencies pushing past 500%.

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Aaron Powell Yeah, and it is entirely counterintuitive, right? I mean, most of us just look at heating and cooling as this brute force mechanical problem. We basically just buy a bigger metal box to fight the outside air. Yeah. But the reality is uh it's far more elegant than that. It relies heavily on physics and geology rather than just, you know, raw electricity. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

It is exactly what we are getting into today. So welcome to the deep dive. We are on a mission to basically uncover the hidden science, the really surprising economics, and the extreme weather engineering behind how we actually keep our living spaces habitable. And we're using two highly specific kind of boots on the ground sources to do it today. So, first, we have the technical and service materials from Hartzell's Heat and Air. That's a 15-year-old employee-owned local business out in central Oklahoma. And then paired with that, we have the April 2026 utility remake documents straight from the Seek Energy Electric Cooperative.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

Yeah, and I know those might sound like uh really hyper-local sources, but they actually offer a perfect microcosm for this stuff. I mean, Central Oklahoma is basically the ultimate crucible for HVAC technology.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 1:31

The extremes of that specific climate force engineers to just well, to completely throw out the standard playbook and get incredibly precise. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

The Two Loads Heat And Moisture

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Okay, let's unpack this because uh to understand why a local utility cooperative is throwing just massive amounts of money at a geological solution, we kind of have to look at the actual environment they're battling out there. It's not just that it gets hot, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

It is the sheer volatility of it.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

Aaron Powell Precisely. I mean, let's just look at the raw thermodynamics of a central Oklahoma summer. You are dealing with temperatures consistently hitting like 100 to 210 degrees Fahrenheit.

SPEAKER_01 2:05

Right.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

But the real issue is that this massive heat is paired with relative humidity that frequently just sits above 80 percent.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

Ugh. So breathing the air out there just feels like you're drinking it.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

Exactly. Yeah. And that combination creates a massive thermodynamic challenge. Like in engineering terms, we basically have to address two entirely different energy loads at the same time. You've got the sensible load, which is what exactly. That's the raw temperature, like the actual heat you could physically feel on your skin. But then you have the latent load, which is the humidity, the actual physical mass of water vapor suspended in the air.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

Oh, okay. So if you take like a top-of-the-line air conditioner that was engineered for a totally dry, arid climate like Phoenix or Denver, and you drop that exact same unit into a house in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, it's gonna struggle, right?

SPEAKER_00 2:56

Well, it will fail completely.

SPEAKER_01 2:57

Because it might be great at dropping the temperature, but it wasn't built to like wring out that heavy moisture.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

Aaron Powell Exactly. Removing water from the air, what we call dealing with the latent heat of condensation, requires an enormous amount of energy. The air actually has to pass over the cooling coil slowly enough, and that coil has to be cold enough for that water vapor to actually reach its dew point, you know, to condense into liquid and drain away.

SPEAKER_01 3:23

It's kind of like, okay, think of a bouncer at a crowded club trying to do two totally different jobs simultaneously. On one hand, he's trying to physically shove the rowdy heat out the front door. Right. But at the exact same time, he's like wrestling with this invisible, heavy humidity that's trying to sneak past the velvet rope. If he only kicks out the heat, the club is still just a miserable, sticky place to be.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

That is a perfect analogy. And uh we really can't forget the winter whiplash either, because central Oklahoma is not a tropical zone. Ground temperatures there can drop so rapidly during a cold snap that a standard, you know, air source heat pump functionally just gives up.

SPEAKER_01 4:00

Wait, let's break down how that happens. Because a standard heat pump doesn't actually burn fuel, right? It just extracts ambient heat from the outside air and moves it inside your house. But I mean, how do you extract heat from air that is already sitting below freezing?

SPEAKER_00 4:15

Aaron Powell Well, scientifically, even cold air contains some thermal energy.

SPEAKER_01 4:19

Really?

When Heat Pumps Hit A Wall

SPEAKER_00 4:19

Yeah. The heat pump uses a liquid refrigerant that boils at an extremely low temperature. So it evaporates. It absorbs whatever trace amount of heat exists in that freezing outside air, and then a compressor physically squeezes that gas, right? It concentrates the heat until it's actually warm enough to blow into your home.

SPEAKER_01 4:37

Okay, but as the outside temperature drops to near zero?

SPEAKER_00 4:41

Exactly. There is just less and less heat out there to scavenge. So the compressor has to work twice as hard to get basically half the result, and its efficiency just plummets.

SPEAKER_01 4:49

Aaron Powell Man, so the climate there is just actively punishing the equipment summer and winter. Given that uh my immediate instinct, and honestly, probably the instinct of anyone living through a 110 degree heat wave, is to just go out and buy the absolute biggest, most powerful air conditioning unit possible. Like just brute force the problem. Aaron Powell Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:09

And that leads us directly to the rule of thumb fallacy. Because that instinct is actually the most common and honestly the most disastrous mistake that both contractors and homeowners make.

SPEAKER_01 5:19

Aaron Powell Wait, really? A bigger unit is worse?

SPEAKER_00 5:22

Yes. Historically, you know, a technician might just measure the square footage of your home and apply this blanket formula. Like, oh, you have 2,000 square feet. Uh you need a four-ton air conditioner.

SPEAKER_01 5:33

Trevor Burrus, well yeah. If the heat is that intense, having a bigger, more powerful machine that cools the house down incredibly fast sounds like exactly what you'd want.

SPEAKER_00 5:41

Aaron Powell It definitely sounds ideal until you understand the physics of what we call short cycling. So remember the latent load we talked about earlier, the heavy water vapor in the air.

SPEAKER_01 5:50

It's a club bouncer wrestling the humidity, right?

Why Bigger AC Feels Worse

SPEAKER_00 5:52

Trevor Burrus Exactly. If you install an oversized, hyper powerful system, it drops the sensible temperature, the actual heat of the house, incredibly fast. I mean the thermostat reads that target temperature in like 10 minutes and just shuts the whole system off.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

Ah. I see the problem. The coil gets super cold. It drops the air temperature down to 70 degrees, but it shuts off before it actually has the time to condense and drain any of the moisture.

SPEAKER_00 6:19

Exactly. The latent load is left completely untouched. And the result is this phenomenon that HVAC technicians call cold and clammy.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Oh, that sounds awful.

SPEAKER_00 6:29

It is. You are literally shivering, but your skin still feels damp. And even worse, you know, over time that trapped indoor moisture actually feeds mold growth inside your drywall and your ductwork.

SPEAKER_01 6:39

Plus, there's more.

SPEAKER_00 6:40

Yeah. An oversized compressor requires these massive surges of electricity to turn on and off so rapidly, which actually wears out the mechanical components years before their time.

SPEAKER_01 6:49

So let me get this straight. You pay a premium for a much bigger, more expensive machine, and your reward is a damp, moldy house and a burned out compressor.

SPEAKER_00 6:58

That is exactly right.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

Wow. So if the basic square footage math is essentially a trap, how does a company like Hartzels actually figure out what size a house really needs?

SPEAKER_00 7:08

Aaron Powell So they rely on the industry's strict engineering standard. It's called the manual J load calculation. And our sources point out that Hartzels specifically performs this exact calculation before any replacement.

SPEAKER_01 7:21

So they aren't just walking around with a tape measure.

SPEAKER_00 7:23

No, they completely abandon the tape measure approach. Instead, they calculate the actual thermal resistance, what we call the R value, of your specific exterior walls and your attic insulation.

SPEAKER_01 7:34

Aaron Powell And they also have to account for the windows, right? I mean, a massive wall of single-pane glass facing the West Sun is basically a giant magnifying glass just roasting your living room at 4 p.m.

SPEAKER_00 7:44

Oh, absolutely. The manual J factors in the solar heat gain coefficient of all the windows, their exact orientation to the sun, and even the infiltration rate of the actual building envelope.

Manual J Sizing Done Right

SPEAKER_01 7:54

The infiltration rate, like drafts.

SPEAKER_00 7:57

Yeah. They might even use a blower door test to measure exactly how much outside air actually leaks in through the tiny cracks in your framing. Basically, it takes local historical weather data and maps it against the specific real-world physics of your actual house.

SPEAKER_01 8:12

Okay, so you run the manual, Jay. You get the absolute perfect mathematically verified size for your air conditioner. But even then, aren't we still kind of fighting a losing battle? Because you're still asking a metal box sitting outside in a 110-degree parking lot to somehow radiate heat away into air that is literally already boiling. Like it's fundamentally fighting basic thermodynamics.

SPEAKER_00 8:36

You're right. It is inherently inefficient. You're basically trying to dump thermal energy into an environment that absolutely refuses to accept it.

SPEAKER_01 8:43

Well, here's where it gets really interesting. If the outside air is basically the enemy here, the ultimate hack is to just, well, stop using the outside air entirely.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Exactly. We shift our entire focus from the air to the ground. We exploit the Earth's thermal mass.

SPEAKER_01 8:56

Okay, let's really get into the geology of this hidden battery. What is actually happening six to eight feet under the soil in central Oklahoma?

SPEAKER_00 9:06

So at that specific depth, the Earth is completely insulated from the chaotic weather up above. It acts as an infinite stable thermal mass.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

Meaning the temperature doesn't really change.

SPEAKER_00 9:16

Right. It doesn't matter if there is a 108-degree heat wave raging in August or if there's a brutal 14-degree ice storm paralyzing the state in January. The dirt at that specific depth maintains a constant, completely stable temperature of roughly 59 to 62 degrees Fahrenheit all year round.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

Wow. So a geothermal system like a ground source heat pump, it just taps directly into that stable 60 degrees. Instead of that loud metal fan screaming in your side yard, you bury these high density polyethylene pipes right in the ground and circulate a liquid through them, right? Like water or some kind of eco-friendly anti-freeze.

Geothermal Heat Pump Physics

SPEAKER_00 9:52

Exactly. The liquid absorbs the heat from your hot living room in the summer, travels underground through those pipes, and just effortlessly dumps that heat into the cool 60-degree earth. The earth is basically acting as an infinite heat sink. Then the cooled liquid comes back inside the house and the cycle repeats.

SPEAKER_01 10:09

And in the winter, the entire mechanism physically flips. The system extracts that steady 60-degree warmth from the earth, compresses it to amplify the heat, and warms your home. But uh the part that really blows my mind is how the machine actually reverses itself.

SPEAKER_00 10:25

Oh, it is a brilliant piece of mechanical engineering. It's called the reversing valve.

SPEAKER_01 10:28

How does it work?

SPEAKER_00 10:29

It's basically a four-way sliding valve inside the heat pump that literally redirects the entire flow of the hot, high-pressure refrigerant gas. With just a single electrical signal, it changes the indoor coil from being an evaporator that absorbs heat to a condenser that releases heat.

SPEAKER_01 10:46

And because it's starting with a warm baseline of 60 degrees instead of, you know, freezing outdoor air, the efficiency just goes completely off the charts. Like we are talking about a coefficient of performance that yields 300 to 500 percent efficiency. Yes. You're putting one unit of electricity in and getting up to five units of actual heating or cooling out. That's wild.

SPEAKER_00 11:09

Aaron Powell It is. Because again, you are not actually creating heat. You are merely operating a pump to move heat that the earth has already naturally provided.

SPEAKER_01 11:18

Aaron Powell Okay, but I have to play the skeptic here for a minute.

SPEAKER_00 11:20

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

I can't just wave a magic wand and bury a massive thermal loop in my backyard. I mean, tearing up a residential yard to dig deep trenches, dodging local utility lines, tree roots, destroying my landscaping, that all sounds astronomically expensive. If this is a 500% efficient sheet code that lasts for 50 years, the barrier to entry's got to be the installation cost.

SPEAKER_00 11:42

Well, you've isolated the exact bottleneck. The underground loop is a serious civil engineering project. The initial capital required to physically put those pipes in the ground is definitely substantial.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

So how is any normal homeowner actually affording this? I know our sources show Seek Energy is throwing money at it, but why?

SPEAKER_00 12:01

So the April 2026 documents from the Seek Energy Electric Cooperative completely alter the financial reality of this. For residents living in their 10-county territory, which, by the way, heavily overlaps with Hartzel's actual service footprint, the utility is offering massive subsidies.

SPEAKER_01 12:18

How massive?

SPEAKER_00 12:19

Specifically a$2,000 per ton rebate for new geothermal installations and retrofits.

Making Geothermal Affordable

SPEAKER_01 12:26

Wait, hold on. Per ton, what does physical weight have to do with cooling air?

SPEAKER_00 12:30

Oh, it is a fascinating historical holdover. So before mechanical air conditioning was even invented, people cooled large buildings using literal massive blocks of ice that they harvested from frozen lakes in the winter.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

Wait, seriously, so a ton of air conditioning is quite literally based on a ton of actual ice.

SPEAKER_00 12:48

Exactly. Early engineers had to calculate the exact amount of thermal energy required to melt a single one-ton block of solid ice over a 24-hour period.

SPEAKER_01 12:57

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 12:58

And that math comes out to 12,000 British thermal units or BTUs per hour. So today, when we say a typical home needs a three-ton system, we literally mean it requires the cooling power of melting three tons of ice every single day.

SPEAKER_01 13:14

Oh, that makes so much sense now. It's just a thermal conversion rate from the 1800s. So at three tons, Seek Energy is basically writing you a$6,000 check right off the bat.

SPEAKER_00 13:24

Yes. And they will actually rebate up to$24,000 for a really large 12-ton residential system.

SPEAKER_01 13:32

Okay, now let's use some deductive reasoning here. A utility company's entire business model is to sell electricity, right? Why would they voluntarily give away up to$24,000 to help me permanently buy less of their actual product? There has to be some larger economic motivation at play.

SPEAKER_00 13:47

Aaron Powell You're right, there is. And it all comes down to the nightmare of what the industry calls peaker plants. Right. An electric grid must instantly match its supply to whatever the demand is. On a mild, breezy spring day, the grid just relies on its efficient, cheap, baseline power plants. But on a 110-degree August afternoon, when hundreds of thousands of horribly inefficient air source AC units all kick on at the exact same time, the power demand just skyrockets.

SPEAKER_01 14:15

And if the utility company can't meet that massive spike in demand, the grid collapses and we get rolling blackouts.

SPEAKER_00 14:21

Exactly. So to prevent that, utilities are forced to build and maintain standby power plants, these peaker plants. And they are incredibly expensive to operate. They often burn natural gas or diesel, and they might only run for like 50 hours the entire year just to handle those few extreme summer spikes.

SPEAKER_01 14:37

Wow, just sitting idle the rest of the time.

SPEAKER_00 14:39

Right. And the wholesale cost of generating electricity during those peak hours is just astronomical.

Why Utilities Pay You

SPEAKER_01 14:45

Ah, I see. So paying me$6,000 to bury a geothermal loop in my yard shaves off a massive portion of my home's actual peak demand. If they can get a few thousand homes to do this, they avoid spending hundreds of millions of dollars building and firing up a brand new peaker plant.

SPEAKER_00 15:02

Exactly. It is vastly cheaper for the cooperative to just subsidize your geothermal loop than it is to upgrade their entire grid infrastructure to handle the strain of conventional air conditioners.

SPEAKER_01 15:14

Okay, so covering the upfront cost is great, but that's really just prong one, right? Because if I'm a homeowner, that big rebate doesn't actually lower my monthly electric bill directly if the system is still using some power. The utility must have a way to incentivize the actual daily usage too.

SPEAKER_00 15:28

They do. And that is prong two of their approach, rate 46.

SPEAKER_01 15:31

Rate 46?

SPEAKER_00 15:32

Yeah. See Kennergy offers a specific, heavily reduced electricity rate exclusively for their geothermal customers. Because your system is actively stabilizing their grid year-round, you pay less per kilowatt hour, period. And over the 50-year lifespan of that underground loop, that compounds into immense savings. And then you add in the third prawn, which is a 6% low-interest loan offered directly by the cooperative to cover whatever cost is left after the rebate, and the map completely flips in favor of the homeowner.

SPEAKER_01 16:03

So let me get this straight. Seek Energy is willing to hand you the capital to bury these pipes, give you a drastically reduced energy rate for decades, and then fully finance whatever's left over.

SPEAKER_00 16:14

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

But uh here is the critical failure point I'm seeing. If the actual person digging the hole in your yard miscalculates the thermal conductivity of your specific soil, that amazing 50-year investment immediately becomes a permanent liability. I mean, who is actually qualified to install this kind of tech?

The Installer Makes Or Breaks It

SPEAKER_00 16:34

Aaron Powell Well, this is exactly where we look at the operators detailed in the Hartzell's heat and air materials. You have Dave Hartzell, who has 45 years of HVAC experience, and his daughter Shelby, who runs the operations. They are employee owned, they've been based in Kingfisher for over 15 years, and they are heavily, heavily credentialed.

SPEAKER_01 16:51

Let's talk about that soil calculation part because you can't just guess how the dirt is going to absorb the heat, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:57

You absolutely cannot guess. The thermal conductivity of dense clay is vastly different from loose sand or solid rock. If an installer miscalculates the soil type and they bury a loop that is too small for your home's heat load, the ground directly around those pipes will eventually saturate.

SPEAKER_01 17:15

Saturate, like it can't hold any more heat.

SPEAKER_00 17:17

Exactly. It's like trying to plant a massive, incredibly thirsty oak tree in a tiny little terracotta pot. The immediate environment simply cannot sustain what the system is asking of it, and the system's efficiency just plummets.

SPEAKER_01 17:31

And kind of addressing my earlier friction about totally tearing up the yard, I assume a skilled installer isn't just taking a giant backhoe to my prize rose bushes, right?

SPEAKER_00 17:41

That is where the actual engineering comes in. Depending on the size of your lot, they can actually drill vertical boreholes going hundreds of feet straight down, which totally preserves the surface landscaping rather than digging massive horizontal trenches everywhere.

SPEAKER_01 17:54

Oh, that makes way more sense.

SPEAKER_00 17:55

Yeah. But they have to backfill those deep holes with a highly specialized thermal grout to ensure the plastic pipes make perfect thermal contact with the earth all the way down.

SPEAKER_01 18:06

Which really explains why Dave Hartzell's specific credentials matter so much here. The source actually highlights his IG Ace HPA accreditation. That's the uh International Ground Source Heat Pump Association. It's basically the gold standard for engineering these loops correctly. And he pairs that with a NATE certification, which is the highest hands-on technical standard in the entire HVAC industry.

SPEAKER_00 18:29

Exactly. He is treating the installation as a strict engineering discipline, and that is backed up by an upfront pricing model that reflects total transparency for the customer.

A Geothermal Future Underfoot

SPEAKER_01 18:38

Yeah, that transparency is huge. I mean, there is really nothing worse than the anxiety of an unknown invoice looming over you when a technician shows up at your house. Hard Souls uses a flat$99 dispatch fee, a$111 diagnostic fee, which is actually credited back to you if you move forward with the repair, and a flat$229 for a tune-up, like absolutely no hidden stacking fees.

SPEAKER_00 18:59

Right. And in a smaller community like Kingfisher, an employee-owned business really survives entirely on trust. Sponsoring the local soccer teams or showing up for the Mason's pancake breakfast means they are looking their customers right in the eye every single weekend. The accountability there is absolute.

SPEAKER_01 19:16

So bringing this all together, what does this all mean for you, the listener? We've navigated the complicated thermodynamics of extreme weather, and we explained exactly why your house feels completely cold and clammy when an oversized system short cycles. Yep. We've broken down the manual J-Load calculations, explored the totally wild history of measuring cooling and literal tons of ice, and we've unpacked how the actual dirt beneath your lawn offers a permanent 500% efficiency upgrade. And we've seen how local utilities and highly credentialed local professionals are making that transition financially viable today. So this deep dive is really an invitation for you to audit your own home's energy footprint. Are you still relying on those brute force mechanical systems that are basically fighting a losing battle against the outside air? Or is it maybe time to look at the real engineering right under your feet?

SPEAKER_00 20:07

And uh just to expand on that for a second, I'd ask you to consider the broader implications beyond just a single residential lot.

SPEAKER_01 20:13

What do you mean?

SPEAKER_00 20:14

Well, if a single backyard can act as a permanent, high-efficiency thermal battery lasting half a century. Imagine the impact of actually scaling this up.

SPEAKER_01 20:24

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 20:24

Right. What if entire new suburban developments or even city blocks were planned from the ground up to share a massive interconnected geothermal network? We could drastically reduce our reliance on those expensive Pico plants overnight. The dirt beneath our feet might literally be the most powerful untapped grid of the future.

SPEAKER_01 20:42

Now that is an idea that fundamentally changes how we view the ground we walk on every single day. So the next time your air conditioner kicks on and you hear it just screaming against the summer heat, I wonder if it isn't time to tap into that hidden battery. Thanks for taking this deep dive with us. See you next time.