HYDRONICS
Variety of groundwork keeps Ohio contractor busy
this Ohio contracting firm is on the rise. They’re early adopters, on the edge technologically and ahead of the eight ball. Since its beginning in 1975, the
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business model for Lakes Heating and Air Conditioning Inc. in Akron, Ohio, has been to stay on the cutting edge of emerging technology. “Dad has always been eager to try
new things,” said Brian Cuthbert Jr. of his father. The firm has grown to 25 employees, with a focus on residential and light commercial HVAC work. Named after the Portage Lakes region where it’s located, the company is still family owned and employs all three of Brian Sr.’s children. Though they’re getting into solar
work, geothermal installations have been a steady source of business for 20 years. Most of the ground-source work Lakes does is for high end residential jobs, with about half the exchange fields being horizontal trenching, and the other vertical bore holes. The local soil types vary greatly, so they’ve had plenty of experience with varying types of geoexchange. “Regardless of tax credits, sticker
shock is an issue with many potential geothermal clients,” said Brian, service manager for the company.
“But once homeowners see how quickly the systems pay for themselves, greatly reducing the need for fossil fuels or electricity, it’s not a difficult sell.” Awareness of geothermal
technology has grown considerably within their territory over the past few years. The majority of Lakes’ ground-source jobs come through customer referral. “I don’t think we’ve bid a mechanical system on a single custom home in the past five years where the homeowner didn’t at least consider geo.”
High-end residential systems; lots of geo A lake near Clinton, Ohio, is the
site of several shoreline homes.
ven when the gravity of an economic downturn is pulling them in the opposite direction,
Homeowner Scott Johnston was tired of paying for fuel oil and, before doubling the size of his home with an addition, he wanted to find a solution. After doing some research, he decided on a geothermal system and called Lakes. “We completed the Johnston
The business philosophy of the team at Lakes Heating and Air Conditioning Inc., Akron, Ohio, has been to stay on the cutting edge of emerging technology.
project in two stages,” said Brian Jr. “Once his addition was framed, we roughed in the ductwork, installed the two-ton heat pump for the existing portion of the home and had the drilling sub put in the exchange field.” Because of beams and partitions, the addition couldn’t be connected to the home with one set of ducts. About a month later, when
Johnston had burned up his remaining oil, and the addition was complete, a Lakes installation crew returned to tear out the old boiler and install a three-ton unit for the addition. The new living room has high, vaulted ceilings and large windows looking out over the lake. “This system has more that cut my utility costs in half,” said Johnston.
“I’m paying a lot less for utilities now, with double the square footage. I didn’t have AC before, and I’m still paying less!” The ClimateMaster systems that
Lakes installed in Johnston’s home have all the bells and whistles. Both have desuperheaters and are connected to two 80-gallon Bradford White electric water heaters. They also incorporated ClimateMaster’s ClimaDry dehumidification system. Because the home is completely surrounded by hardwood forest, indoor humidity is a key concern. “No other ground-source heat
pump manufacturer has anything like the ClimaDry system,” said Brian Jr. It’s hot gas generated reheat, which uses one of the biggest
advantages of a water source heat pump, the transfer of energy through the water piping system. ClimaDry diverts condenser water through a water-to-air coil placed after the evaporator coil. If condenser water isn’t warm enough, the internal “run- around” loop increases the water temperature with each pass through the condenser coil. The exchange field consisted of
four bore holes. The larger unit uses two; one is 225 feet and the other is 235. The smaller unit is connected to a 150-foot hole and a 160-foot hole. “Yoder Geothermal, out of
Sugarcreek, Ohio, is our drilling sub,” said Brian Jr. Depending on the application, Yoder trenches or drills the exchange field and fuses the piping back into the house. For vertical installations, all bore holes are filled with bentonite grout. “We’ve used ClimateMaster heat
pumps exclusively for the past 10 years. Dave Meadows is our inside sales manager at Virginia Air Distributors. He introduced us to the systems and has been great to deal with ever since. We also work with Mike Murphy, ClimateMaster’s southeast sales rep. He’s a wealth of information too. Together, they’ve enabled us to tackle some challenging installations.”
Light commercial, with a twist In the past year, Lakes technicians
have taken on two unique light commercial projects, each with a very different set of challenges. Mushroom Shack, a startup
e Continued on p 56
phc october 2011
www.phcnews.com
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