Guide
Ground source heat pump borehole cost: a different job, priced per metre
Updated
People find this site asking about heat pump boreholes, so here's the straight version: it's a different job from a water well, done by the same kind of rig, and the price is still metres times rate, but the metres are set by your heating load, not by where the water sits.
How it differs from a water borehole
- What goes down the hole
- A sealed loop of pipe carrying heat-transfer fluid, grouted in place, no pump, no screen, no water drawn. Because nothing is abstracted, the 20 m³/day abstraction licensing question doesn't arise for a standard closed-loop system.
- How many metres
- Set by your building's heat demand and the ground's thermal properties: a typical house needs one or more boreholes commonly totalling one to several hundred metres of collector. The heat pump designer's calculation, not a driller's guess, fixes the number.
- Who quotes it
- Usually the heat pump installer, with drilling subcontracted or bundled into the system price. Drilling rates per metre are broadly in the same territory as water-well drilling; get itemised quotes so the drilling metres and rate are visible rather than buried in a system total.
Getting it priced properly
- Get a heat loss calculation for the building first; the collector length, and therefore most of the drilling cost, follows from it.
- Ask for the drilling shown as metres and rate in any system quote, exactly as you would for a water well, so you can compare like with like.
- Check access the same way as a water bore: rig size, distance between boreholes and reinstatement of the ground all show up in the price.
- If you also want a water supply borehole, ask contractors to price both while the rig is mobilised; sharing one mobilisation is a genuine saving.
This site's cost data covers water supply boreholes; heat pump collector sizing is the heat pump designer's job and figures vary too much with building and ground to quote a fair typical total here. For a water supply borehole alongside or instead, get quotes from drilling contractors covering your area.