nhermanson - 11/23/2014 19:14 I did the same this past spring. I hired an hvac friend to do the inside work and I dug the loops. To be most effiecient the loops ideally need to be in ground water. I started with our 330 excavator digging a trench 8' deep. It caved in overnight, so we opted the next day to sink the wheeled tiling machine in as deep as we could 6.5-7' and lay the pipes in and spread them apart in the bottom. I put in a 3 ton, with 3 loops. I think they are 800' total. They just go out and back, in 3 seperate ditches. Some people slinky the pipe to get it in a smaller footprint, but that shoudl ideally be deeper. The more ground you cover the better.

  The pipe is just a fancy hdpe water pipe, but they fuse the fittings because the change in temperature would cause regular fittings to leak. To get around the fusing, we ran all of our loops back into the house.

  You do not want to oversize the equipment. If an AC unit doesn't run for a long enough cycle, it will not remove the humidity. You could install extra loops and increase the equipment inside later as needed. There has been some tax credits, not sure if they are still around, but I think the system had to be operation in the tax year to qualify for them. If I were you, I'd do some serious research this winter on sizing, equipment, etc and buy it when you are ready to go next spring.