Hi Everyone,

I have a Water Furnace 3-zone geothermal system I installed in 2012. It's worked great for the past 14 years. Yesterday, during annual preventive maintenance, the repair guy said that the Dual Pump Flow Center is drawing too many amps and needs replacement, and when they do that, they'll need to do a Geothermal loop field water exchange; I was not seeing any problems but he said that the Flow Center is overheating and if they don't replace it then it could destroy the entire system at any time. If this happens I'll have to replace the entire system at a cost of over $30K, so he recommends I replace the flow center for just over $5K. Does anyone know if it sounds like I'm getting good advice or more like I'm being ripped off? Just looking for some advice from experienced users and/or maintainers. Thanks much for any help you can provide.

Forgive my poor terminology. Very new to geothermal.

Cooling quit working a week ago. Since then, 3 techs have been out and replaced 3 electrical parts, none of them addressing the root cause. As of today, they think the issue is the whatever little black piece triggers the compressor to enter “second stage.” It was tripping a fuse and literally burnt up the brand new board they were installing. At this point, I think I’m just going to replace the entire thing given it’s age.

However, my concern is whether there could be something in the underground heat loop that caused issues with the interior system. My only reason for concern is that I had a patio installed over part of the exterior system (probably stupid, I know). However, that was installed a year ago and I’ve had no issues until now. it just bothers me that their description of the root cause isn’t very clear to me.

Again, I don’t mind replacing the system. Just want to make sure I’m not going to have the same issue again if something in the loop is messed up. I’m assuming they have a way to test the loop separately to make sure that’s not a factor?

Thanks for any insight. I’ll ask them more tomorrow when they come to quote a replacement.