Thursday, December 20, 2007

Geothermal Iceland - Heating up of the roads and even a beach

The center of Reykjavik has hot water heated tubes heating up the main squares, the pavements and the asphalted roads.

See the central Reykjavik on google maps here!

This may seem as an utter waste of energy.

There is another side to it though.
Icelandic houses are nearly all heated with hot water which comes staight out of the ground.
When the water has heated up the house, it is just dumped out with the sewage, as there is no central heating plant to recieve this tepid water back. "The devil himself does not want this water back, and he rules the underground".

So the best thing to do is to use it to melt down the snow, rather than spending energy on showelling it away and driving it out of the center of town with lorries.
So this is all an energy conserving exersize.



Heated beach!



Iceland probably has the only artificially heated sea beach in the world.



See the beach on google maps here!

And here are some photos of it on flickr, by Croald.



Another lunatic feature. Heating up the sea by a beach. "Those folks up there in Iceland got to be absolutely nuts George!".



The beach is partly natural, but has gotten some help from man.

More sand was pumped up on the beach. Then water from the hot springs underground is sent out by the tons, into the center of something resembling a harbour, flanked on one side by a pier made of heavy wood, and by a landfilling on the other side.



The result is a heaven for sea bathers of all ages.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cool. We will visit in July though...

Unknown said...

Your blog is very knowledgeable.
Hydronic Heating Repairs Melbourne