I have been looking at some Lofts in down town salt lake city utah. I currently am making 33,600 a year. I have a 06 audi that is paid off, I don’t have a cell phone payment or health/car insurance (my parents hook that up) So my bills are basically Rent, food, gas, and entertainment. My paychecks are usually a little over a thousand every 2 weeks. The place that I am interested in was listed for 238,000 and then they just dropped the price to 198.850. My question is how low of an offer do you think i can make? My parents are giving me a down payment of 80,000 do you think that i could get it at 175,000 or 180,000? This way I will only have to borrow 100,000 and my payments will be (i think) affordable. The HOA on the building is 160 a month that includes water, internet, cable, covered parking, building insurance, and geothermal (some system where they take the earth heat to heat and cool the building so no heat or air conditioning bill) With all of this said do you think i can afford to buy a place? I will be commuting about 90 miles a day so i will be going through alot of gas my car does get 30mpg though.

I used to live in Colorado and at tat time I learned in Ecology class, geothermal power plants were illegal because, ” they are unfair competion for conventional power plants”.
Conventional power plants were; coal, natural gas, petrolium, powered plants.
Have the laws changed?

House #1: A 20 room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms), heated by natural gas. Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house, all heated by gas. In one month this residence consumes more energy than the average American household does in a year. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2400. In natural gas alone, this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home. The owner paid more than $30,000 in combined electricity and natural gas bills for this estate in 2006. This house is not situated in a Northern or Midwestern “snow belt” area. It’s in the South.
House #2: Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university. This house incorporates every “green” feature current home construction can provide. The house is 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on a high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat-pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F.) heats the house in the winter and cools it in the summer. The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas and it consumes one-quarter electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Surrounding flowers and shrubs native to the area enable the property to blend into the surrounding rural landscape.
HOUSE #1 is outside of Nashville, Tennessee; it is the abode of the “environmentalist” Al Gore.
HOUSE #2 is on a ranch near Crawford, Texas; it is the residence of the President of the United States, George W. Bush.
An “inconvenient truth”.

I’m considering geothermal heating for my home, but worry about the high price and don’t know much about performance. For those of you who have geothermal systems or know people who do (or just know a bit about them): Are you satisfied with your choice? How much did the system with installation cost, and does it seem possible to come ahead financially in the long term?

How about geothermal, for every 100ft you get an average increase of 5 degrees.
Read about the Comstock mine, at 3000 ft down you have a temp of 200+ degrees. A hell of a place to work but if you’re looking for geothermal heat it’s a great example. Now the temps will vary based upon geography but if you go down far enough you’ll get plenty of heat.
Just drop in a coil on the end of two pipes, fill it full of some liquid that is not going to breakdown or corrode the pipes. Hook up a circulation pump and plug in a heat exchanger on the top end and vola, you could then place the heat exchanger into an existing forced air system. Should work as well as a heat pump, system would have to be pretty hefty for colder climates. I would guess that a good deep well drilling rig could reach those kind of depths.
Should save a great deal of energy, all you’re paying for is the electricity to run the pump and you might be able to go solar with the right array setup. I would suppose you could use the same system for hot water. Just make sure you’re using a submersible heat exchanger.
You know the same system would work for cooling also. You would just make it a shallow system, were the temps are in the 50 degree range.
I’ve got a schematic for the system laying around someplace. Let me know if you’re interested.
I’ve been meaning to use a similar setup under my driveway so I don’t have to shovel the snow off of it in the winter. Ah, another for the to do list.
Free heat free cooling.

Ok here goes:
Air exchange heat pumps use R134a refrigerant as the working fluid mostly. R-134a boils at -15.3 deg F.
This is where heat pumps get their reported efficiency. If R134a boils at -15F then if it is 50 F outside then 50F looks hot to a substance that is -15F at room pressure. So the more R134a you can boil the more heat it absorbs in going from a phase of liquid to a gas at 50F
When that 50F gas gets to the compressor it is squeezed back into a liquid and in the phase change it gives up all that heat it absorbed when it was boiled plus the heat from the compression by the compressor.
So the hotter it is outside the higher the efficiency of the heat pump because it can boil more R134a quicker and give the heat back off when compressed.
So an air heat pump might be 400% efficient at 60F.
The problem is when the temperature outside starts dropping. In this first case if outside air is 60F and R134a boils at -15 that is a temperature differential of 75F , so there is a lot of excess heat to boil the fluid (compare it to boiling water on a stove–you can boil the water on medium heat, but it boils a lot faster on high setting)
Anyway, when the temperature outside is only 25F then the temperature differential of the R134a fluid and the outside air is only 40 degF so the R134a boils very slowly. In fact the cycle of where the fluid is allowed to boil takes so long that the heat pump switches off the heat pump and switches to electrical resistance heating which is 100% efficient heat conversion.
So the heat pump goes from 400% efficient at 60F to 110% efficient at 25F., so of course there is no reason to wear out the heat pump for that little bit of gain (10% maybe).
With geothermal, the air problem is solved..The ground temperature is what is boiling the R134a and ground is between 55-60F year around.
So with geothermal you get that 400% efficiency all the time during heat season, plus you have no air radiators to get all clogged up and maintained, and also no noise of that big fan.
In summertime, when you reverse the pump, the coils in the ground become your cold sink. When you compress the R134a in the summertime you want the fluid as cold as possible because it has less pressure (remember it boils at -15F) so the colder the fluid the easier it is to compress. The cold in air conditioning comes when you allow this fluid to expand and the temperature drops to that -15F at the expansion valve.
In an air exchange heat pump if it is 90F outside and your turning on the heat pump that R-134a is also 90F at it’s coldest. It might exert 200 PSI at that temperature so your compressor has to out compress that 200 PSI back to a fluid and give off it’s heat to an exchanger that also is at 90F. This is tremendous work for a heat pump , and there is no efficiency gain for a air heat pump in summer, it is just a plain air conditioner.
But in the geothermal version the heat pump shines in the summer.
The R134a is at ground temperature of 55F so it might have a pressure of 50Psi so is much easier to compress this gas now. And now the heat of compression is exhausted to the ground heat exchanger which is also at 55F so the R134a condenses back to a fluid very easily in comparison to the air exchanger.
So the geothermal heat pump might make 300 % efficiency or better in the summer (requires 1/3 the electric of a normal air conditioner)
Geothermal is so superior in both directions, heating and cooling.
In fact I wouldn’t even consider an air exchange heat pump because that reported efficiency is at such a narrow range of air temperatures it’s not practical for all those moving parts it has.