Re: Canadian well construction.

[Cheeseman]

Probably a bit late to add to this discussion, but I think the confusion here is in the translation; Canadian or Provençal Well is a direct translation from the French. The English term is Ground-coupled heat exchanger.

Basically it’s a means of ventilating a building with cool air in the summer and relatively warm air in the winter. If the system is well designed and you go down to 3 or 4 meters in France, you’ll get a year-round temperature of about 10 degrees. That’s good in summer, but will still need to be heated further in the winter, so either you’d have to block it off in winter or have a really well insulated house, with the air inlet as your only ventilation and then heat that air as it comes in, rather than drawing in colder air through a diret inlet.

In any case, you need to draw the air through the pipes with a fan operated ventilator. In summer the air in the pipes, being cooler than in the building, will stay below. In winter, I’m not sure that your heating would be enough to draw without a ventilator. My interest here is to install this system to keep my cheese stores at a constant temperature of 10 – 12 degrees year round.

You can download a pretty good guide (in French) here:

https://www.cetiat.fr/fr/publicationsveille/servezvous/guidesgratuits/index.cfm

or have a look at this link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_cooling_tubes

Hope this helps

A+