The use of near-surface geothermic has increased a lot over the last years. Opportunities to use near-surface geothermic for heating or to the thermal use of the ground for heating or cooling of residential and office buildings are meanwhile discussed, checked and implemented as a matter of course by planning teams when preparing building processes. They involve them into their construction projects but also when it comes to energy restorations of existing buildings.

Near-surface geothermic has arrived at the German market. It looks as if the reservations on the side of building-owners regarding the use of geothermic or a geothermic use of the groundl have been reduced remarkably, particularly with middle-size and larger building projects. This is a clear indicator that near-surface geothermic / thermal use of the ground is efficient and that the trust into the plant technology has increased.

Due to the low susceptibility to failure, the long service live but also the frame conditions of entitlement procedures (e.g. in Berlin, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Hanseatic City of Hamburg), mainly closed geothermal heating source systems (geothermal probes and energy piles) are implemented regarding near-surface geothermic.

The company H.S.W. GmbH Rostock together with its partner has been working for 6 years intensively in the field of planning and functional building management of geothermal plants (e.g. energy pile plant Silo 4 + 5 in the City Harbour of Rostock, office buildings Berlin Spreedreieck, NCC Hanoi) and has accompanied or executed 40 GRT in Germany over this period.

Because of the currently increasing numbers of implementations of larger geothermal probes or energy pile plants, the demand for geothermal response tests has remarkably increased as well. This led to our decision to purchase an own modern measuring unit to execute geothermal response tests. Resulting from an extensive evaluation of the response tests carried out so far, a controlled heat inlet was implemented into the new development via programmable logic controller (PLC).

The planning and installation of the new, mobile GRT-unit was done in 2005 in co-operation which the engineering office igf Rostock that is specialised on the construction of measuring devices and automated environmental measurements.