Is the heating and cooling equipment you’ve specified for your client’s rooftop high quality? Can it stand up to the abuse placed upon it by extreme weather conditions? It's torture on HVAC equipment between snowstorms and blizzards in the winter, spring rain storms, lightning, hurricanes, and tornadoes in the summer.

It could be said the highest-quality HVAC installation would outlast any other. It would be the one that doesn't have any HVAC equipment on the roof or outside the building anywhere. 

 I recently saw some great images posted on LinkedIn by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority showing new solar panels neatly placed on a rooftop, leaving just enough room for the HVAC equipment. How many more kilowatts of capacity would have been gained if they had that extra area taken by the HVAC equipment on the roof? How much longer would the HVAC equipment last if it was not on the roof but rather completely housed within the conditioned area? 

The fact is that the best rooftop a building can have includes the fewest roof penetrations and equipment possible. A rooftop free of equipment needing monthly maintenance will have fewer chances of becoming damaged and then leaking. It would be perfect if it were filled with solar photovoltaic and thermal collectors.

Heat pump equipment is the solution to decarbonizing buildings. But it can quickly become an eyesore, as you can see in Figure 2. Even in the best of circumstances, outside condenser units can affect the ambiance — visually and audibly. Outdoor equipment can be noisy, messy and ugly. With a geothermal solution, you have a permanent heating and cooling solution everyone can appreciate.

Take a look at all the hidden benefits of applying a geothermal HVAC system. You'll notice that the elimination of outdoor equipment (Figure 3) is only one of several remarkable assets. I would submit to you that each one of these hidden bonuses for geothermal systems has equally significant benefits of their own:

• They improve building comfort and performance;
• They increase public health and safety;
• They provide greater energy efficiency; 
• They eliminate boilers and cooling towers;
• They enable water savings (cooling tower applications);
• They increase the longevity of equipment;
• They eliminate combustion heating (C0₂ or greenhouse gas emissions);
• They are compliant with local, state and federal mandates for decarbonization.

The next time your clients are considering an upgrade to their old fossil-fuel equipment to decarbonize their buildings, or considering a new build, make a choice that is a permanent heating and cooling solution. Choose a ground-coupled heat pump system and eliminate the headaches associated with outdoor equipment.

Find out how you can eliminate HVAC equipment from the rooftops and outside of your clients’ buildings. Attend a webinar and get CEUs.