August 2023
Exciting news! My homegrown corn tasted amazing this year – I forgot what real vegetables tasted like. Grown without chemicals or fertilizers, it was twice as tall as commercial fields near me and ready to eat weeks before everyone else’s. As someone who supplies Geothermal Aquaculture and Agriculture heat pumps to farmers, I’d love to hear feedback on how their crops progressed this year in the Northern hemisphere. Some use my heat pumps to heat and cool the air in the green houses and some use my geothermal and air to water heat pumps to heat and cool the water inside the green house for the Aquaculture and Aquaponic pools. Let’s keep working towards sustainable and delicious produce! Now I am also ok if you just want to use my swimming pool heatpump to make the pool the perfect swimming temperature and just buy some store bought corn for the grill and invite me and my family over for an end of summer swimming party. Well I guess I can bring my corn and giant pumpkins to help out too.
Be safe out there. I am thinking of you guys.
Best,
Marcus Miller
President Green Planet Supply
Heat Pump Suppliers
Cell 360 348 7574
Winter and Christmas for my Northern hemisphere friends will be here soon, and it’s almost time to close down your pool to get it ready for the next season. My Southern pool buddies can ignore this in Florida, Texas, Arizona, California, Nevada, Georgia and To ensure your swimming pool equipment remains in good shape, here are some important steps to take. Remove accessories like the skimmer baskets, cleaners, ladders, steps, etc., from the pool. Clean everything and store them for the winter. Clean the pool and adjust the chemicals. Start by draining the filter pump and pipes that might freeze and then make sure to remove any water from the heater that could freeze and damage the heat exchanger. A wet vacuum or leaf blower helps with that. Put as much equipment inside as you can. Don’t move heat pumps as they are designed to be outside all year if properly drained. Plug lines so they don’t fill with water. Putting some pool grade antifreeze in the lines and equipment is a good idea too. Put your winter chemicals in the pool. Some people depending on location drain some water from the pool until it is below the skimmer and use a winter cover on the pool too. That is for inground pools. There are a few extra steps for above ground pools with hoses. Read your manual or talk to your pool guy or gal to be safe on anything that I said as I am more if a heater / heatpump guy than a pool guy. 🙂 Watch some YouTube videos on pool closing for your area to get up to speed faster too. There are some great local pool techs out there that know what’s best for your climate. Use them if this seems like too much of a pain.
Taking these steps will help you avoid any costly repairs come springtime. Stay ahead of the game and get your pool ready for winter today! I have a lot of my customers waiting for the last minute to close the pool too because they have my cold weather heatpumps In Washington State and Long Island New York last year we had pools at 86 degrees F in late October. Nothing beats a ghoulish tropical swim at Halloween in a cold weather state. If you are really a hardcore swimmer. I have geothermal heat pumps to get you through a winter in a cold weather state. The easiest way to use geothermal on your pool is to have a well that will pump 15 gallons per minute for a 5 ton heat pump. If you can’t do that you can bury HDPE coils and pump antifreeze through the lines. There are lots of YouTube videos on how to lay pipe. For some brands of heat pumps for January deliveries I can have your warranty start next May so you won’t lose any time, will get this years price and can start swimming as soon as the weather gets nice again and you won’t have to stress about finding an electrician or have to wait for a delivery.
PS BTW that is a Raypak / Ruud /Rheem gas heater courtesy of Raypak. That is one of my favorite brands of gas heaters if you absolutely can’t use a heat pump.
I am making up excuses lately instead of dealing with the brutal truth. Also it seems my wife and I are not communicating too well about food issues. I bought a new refrigerator and had it delivered and set up at my house while I was out of town visiting a geothermal heat pump factory to make sure they were doing everything right. That was a month ago. The refrigerator looks very nice and has some great features. It makes ice cubes and dispenses water too. I enjoy pure ice water. It is my favorite refreshing drink. I put the cubes in first and then the filtered water. When I just took water from the dispenser, I noticed that it didn’t seem very cold. My excuse was that probably the fridge doesn’t store water inside to cool it, and it is just passing through, & I am just drinking tap water at the same temperature as the kitchen faucet. Hey I am a refrigeration guy who has repaired 100’s of residential and commercial freezers, refrigerators and walk in coolers, so I should know better. I would take leftover food out to have a snack and my wife would smell it and throw it out before I could eat it. I can’t smell very well anymore. Maybe because I repaired too many ammonia refrigeration systems in 90 year old hockey rinks and dairy factories? Yes, they are still out there. Probably ammonia is better for the ozone than freon, but it is brutal on the nose when they leak. That was the second clue that I missed thinking maybe my wife nose was too sensitive and the food might have a few more days. I don’t drink milk much so I also didn’t know my wife was throwing the milk out after only a few days. She was thinking that my daughter might be leaving it out too long. Finally after being asked to buy milk too many times I saw the light & looked at the thermostat and saw the refrigerator was set close to 50 Fahrenheit. That is a tropical 10 Celsius for my friends outside of the USA. I adjusted it lower and now we enjoy 37F food and drink just like regular people. Reminds me of all the swimming pool and spa heat pump, geothermal, aquaponic, hydroponic and aquaculture service calls that I took where the only problem was the thermostat was set wrong or the heat pump was turned off. I hated telling people that news as then they feel stupid and that isn’t a good feeling as you write a bill for your labor. Now I know firsthand what that feeling is. Then I thought maybe I am slipping a bit in my middle kinda young old age? No that couldn’t be possible. I just installed a really quiet inverter variable btu condenser on my 18 year old Rheem Ruud heatpump split system. I squeezed into a nook in the crawl space next to where the air handler and a-coil was jammed with no room for my 182 pounds and changed the expansion valve and metering piston on the indoor coil so I could use 410A freon and stop using 2005’s Freon 22. That worked out pretty well so I must still have some diagnostic skills. My electric bill dropped too so I am happy.
Keep an eye on symptoms. They are your friend. 🙂
Best,
Marcus Miller Cell 360 348 7574
I don’t need your &$@?!%* resume. That is what a potential customer wrote to me this week while I was trying to help him. He had written to me asking for a delivered price of some swimming pool heat pump equipment listed on my website. To get him the most competitive shipping quote, I wrote back asking if he needed a commercial or residential delivery with a liftgate truck and another question to make sure this would be suitable for his application. I always do that because if someone gets something that isn’t proper for their project, then nobody is going to be happy. I then said that I once worked in his area so that I was familiar with his conditions and weather. Soon I received an e-mail back from him with a one line response saying that he only wanted a price and not my resume. So because he said that I didn’t give him either and now unfortunately everyone loses. Funny in way too as his LinkedIn profile was attached to the e-mail with all his business information. It was actually someone that would have been a good business contact for me as I need his type of services. Needless to say he is now the last person I would reach out to if I needed that type of service. I don’t know if something negative is in the air this week more than normal, but I then I followed up with someone who had asked for my free advice to help them plan their large geothermal heat pump project. I innocently sent them a text asking how the project was going? I was doing my job following up and caring about people who have reached out to me for advice. Then, I got back a text saying, “Stop texting me.” Now I have a pretty thick skin and have seen much worse in my time on the web, but this week’s hostility surprised me a bit. Half of my business is educating people for free about swimming pool, aquaculture and geothermal heat pumps. Most people disappear because they never do the project, it is not in the budget, their circumstances change or they pay much more and buy locally. That is fine with me. Tom Hopkins taught me years ago that if you make one sale in ten calls, then each phone call was one step closer to the ten. Hey, it can’t hurt to be polite though. I buy lots of stuff too. If you seem nice, have a good reputation and are knowledgeable about your product then I am an easy sale. Especially If you have your profile on LinkedIn, then it is in your best interest to be nice. If you engage me and I am trying to help you then maybe just say thanks for the information and then disappear. We are all in this together and at the end of the day experiencing a little courtesy makes it all worthwhile.
Best,
Marcus Cell 360 348 7574
This is a photo that one of my aquaculture buddies took of his Koi pond at a high elevation in Northern California. He is using one of my cold weather heat pumps to keep the fish warm all year so that they keep active, eating and healthy. He doesn’t want the little guys to just drop to the deepest point in the pond with their fins shivering waiting for spring for the water to warm up. Potential customers in California love to ask me for references in the Golden State of happy customers who are using my aquaculture and swimming pool heat pumps. I sometimes give the phone number of a few home owners with pool heaters and even my Koi buddy with an Agricultural heat pump to show an extreme example of a heat pump working in cold weather. It hasn’t seemed to impress potential buyers much though. They want someone in their neighborhood most of the time. I then show the math comparing the cost of propane, natural gas, oil to electricity to document the cost saving of using a heat pump; plus the added bonus that a heat pump can also cool the water too. Sometimes that helps. Home owners with photo voltaic (PV) panels who generate their own free electricity make it a no brainer to use an Aquaculture or swimming pool heat pump. Twenty plus California communities have banned new gas installations, so the state is slowly moving in the direction of heat pumps both Geothermal and air to water. I have never had anyone from California disappointed that they received a swimming pool heat pump from me. I want people to have comfortable water maintained at the lowest cost with the most reliable efficient equipment with the longest warranty. My friends with ponds of pet fish find caring for and watching them relaxing. If the fish hide because they are cold then that doesn’t benefit anyone. My pool heater customers relax by swimming or soaking in warm water. If it costs too much to heat or cool the water then they don’t use it enough. If I can help the country de-stress a bit then I have done my job.
Keep warm or cool out there. Whatever makes you happy.
Best,
Marcus
I have cabin fever. We are living through a weird time. I know that I have it good compared to the rest of the world. I don’t have food stress, I have shelter a job. Still, I miss the old days of just 6 months ago. It is strange going to the doctor with a mask on. I got the feeling today that when I went with my wife for her medical appointment that the doctor didn’t want me in the room as if he was afraid I would give him Covid 19. Impossible to read people with most of their face blocked off. I have to figure out how to express 10 emotions with my eyes I guess. Bizarre going to the bank and them not minding I had a mask and sun glasses on. I have friends that I know had Covid in February that are afraid to socialize with me unless I am 6 feet away and masked up. Lots of geothermal installations still going on. I am happy that I am still sending swimming pool heat pumps to people stuck at home. It makes me feel like I am doing something to make some people more comfortable & happy. I am sending more heat pump chillers out this year to people that usually just put up with pools that were too hot for a month or two. Best year ever for that. My fish people do need chillers to keep the little fingerlings from over heating. Sent 2 heat pump chillers to Hawaii to help a man with trout that needed cool water to be healthy and grow big. I hope my other Aquaculture, hydroponic and Aquaponic people check in with me to tell me how they are doing. I want someone to step up and challenge me to a grow off and see if science can beat me. I will even send you documented 2000 pound possible pumpkin seeds so we can judge whos growing technique works the best.
Stay safe out there,
Best,
Marcus
It is late February and my cherry trees are flowering. I have not seen any bees around yet so this isn’t a good sign. It is still getting below freezing at night and that can’t be too good for this years fruit crop. I wonder how my green house buddies are doing who can more closely control the environment. We send many heat pumps to heat the air and the ground in green houses. Many flower growers in Texas and South America use them so they can grow petunias all year long. It looks like I will be spending a lot of time this spring staring at my trees and not leaving my yard as the first Coronavirus death in the USA just happened close to my town. I have been avoiding traveling and especially airports this year so I didn’t come in contact with other travelers but, now it seems people will be avoiding people from my area. I feel bad for my hotel / motel / campground and resort clients. They are taking a hit and many good people depend on that industry for employment. Not happy with all these markets in China that mix so many different species & foods. I am sure other countries are just as bad and have issues too. Maybe this will be the age of AquaCulture, Aquaponics and Hydroponics where they can control the environment and avoid this type of disaster. We are not living in the middle ages. If you are at your market stall playing on your smartphone then you can make sure you are also able to keep things clean and sterile. I would love to hear from all my agricultural buddies in that field on their views. Looks like there will be more Stay-cations this year. I hope that my pool heaters and heat pumps can help people enjoy their homes more. People with warm pools stay fitter and have great family togetherness occasions. If you need to heat or cool water or air with a gas, electric or heat pump please let me know. If you need to repair your old pool heater we can help with parts and troubleshooting. This months advice is to wash your hands for at least 20 seconds & call your Mom more. She loves you.
Best,
Marcus
There is a storm brewing in the industry. Some companies are trying to make heating and cooling equipment overpriced and not letting you have a factory direct price. Then the payback starts to make no sense. It makes me crazy that some big companies want you to pay double what they are worth. I think that this technology is the future and will help your finances and the earth. Because I can be brutally honest about the industry, some big manufacturers now hate me. Too bad. They loved me 20 years ago when I opened up markets that didn’t exist, but now that they have their own sales people with protected territories, exclusive dealers & high quotas they lost their memory. That isn’t good for your pocketbook. That is why I am still here to help you. I won’t pressure you or give you a pitch from a sales seminar. I won’t take you out to dinner to make a sale and I will pull no punches if you want a heater that has a bad warranty or doesn’t fit your needs. I sell other stuff as a courtesy to my customers but I am not an expert on 1000’s of products except #heat pumps. If you want a heat pump for your home, business, #hotel #motel #waterpark #campground #resorts or #schools then I want to help. This is what I live and write about. If you buy a #heatpump from me you get my cell phone number. My customers are smart and I encourage them to do research. “An educated consumer is the best customer”. I can’t take credit for the last quote as it was from a men’s clothing company. I thought it fit though. 🙂
I am here for you.
Best,
Marcus
I hope that all my aquaculture & aquaponic friends are doing well this season. Even though most consider this industry a science, the results are not always scientific. You can see the photo of my rotten jack-o-lantern that appeared without any help from me. I had it all arranged for someone to water my giant pumpkins in August while I was away from the patch. August is the most critical time in their growth cycle where I live. My watering friend showed up one day and saw that someone else had used the hose near the pumpkin patch for washing something and figured that I didn’t need them to take care of the giants and then they never came back. So all the plants were damaged, and I didn’t get a very impressive crop this year. My failure didn’t affect my ability to earn a living, it just made me upset. That is nothing like my buddies who depend on successful productions for their agroecology, mariculture, fish farming, integrated multi-trophic aquaculture, algaculture, and aquiculture operations to pay the bills. They have to consider heat and cold, bacteria, UV, humidity, and probably 100 other things. When they use my reliable agricultural heat pumps to heat and cool air in greenhouses, heat and cool water for plants and fish, then that will be one less thing they have to worry about. Please keep your fish and plants happy by keeping the air and water surrounding them at just the right temperature with heatpumps to make them grow fast and live a healthy life.
My garden work is winding down this month. The giant pumpkins are gaining the last pounds of the season. Kind of a lame size this year. Not going to hit 1500 pounds. Maybe not even 250 pounds. Ugh! I think that they experienced too much water stress when I was unable to care for them for a few weeks this August. I wish that I have some of my hydroponic, aquaponic and aquaculture buddies near my house so I could share some of my plants with them. I harvested a squash last September in 2018 and kept it on the kitchen counter until about a week or two ago. I didn’t even keep it cool in a root cellar or basement. It never rotted so I wanted to see if the seeds were still good. I cut the gourd in half and buried it in my garden and then forgot about it. Today I noticed about a 100 baby seedlings breaking through the ground. Kind of sad that they won’t grow big because winter is coming. I still have one more 2018 squash left so I will save those seeds for next year. If any of you want some seeds please send me a self-addressed stamped envelope and I will send you some. I would really like to see how some of you make out over the winter growing them in a controlled environment. I have a lot of heat pumps out there in grow houses keeping water warm so that the plants are growing in the best conditions. I am still cooling water and greenhouses in some of the hot states and hot countries too in the northern hemisphere. I wish you the best growing season ever. As always if you can grow a bigger gourd than me with my seeds, then I will send you something cool as a reward.
Best,
Marcus
In May I saw a squash plant growing out of some decorative stones in front of my house. It was growing from a hostile environment of only sand and stones and nothing really to support a big gourd. I didn’t plant it so it a small animal or bird must have dragged it there from the garden last fall. I don’t like to kill plants that appear in impossible situations so I am letting it grow. I overwatered it and over-fertilized it to pretend that I had a mini Aquaponic farm with one plant. The sand is always dripping wet and the plant is thriving with many small zucchinis growing from the many flowers that keep blooming. I would love to send some seeds to all me Aquaponic and Aquaculture friends and see who can grow the largest gourds. Just send me a self-addressed stamped envelope and I will get them in the mail right away. If you can grow bigger ones than me I will figure out something cool to send you. Maybe giant potential 2000 pound pumpkin seeds or giant sunflowers? Also, I will take $100.00 off an aquaculture heat pump to keep your fish and plants comfortable and healthy growing like crazy. My heat pumps also cool the water for the critters that need to chill to be happy.
I hope to send out lots of seeds this year to see what my greenhouse, Agroecology, Algaculture, and Mariculture, buddies can create.
We are on your side. Have a great growing season.
Best,
Marcus
You have a perfectly created environment for your fish and plants that depend on electricity and mechanical equipment to maintain them. Mechanical equipment and or electricity will fail at times. That is why it is always good to have a plan B.
Make sure you had a licenced electrician check to see that all is up to code and you are not overloading the electrical system in the facility. Have back up heaters and chillers in case one of yours fails. Then you have a window to repair the equipment before the temperature is critical in your tanks. Have a generator on the property with a few days fuel to bridge the gap while power is restored. If you are worried about the water getting too hot and have no back up kill the lights for as long as you can. Usually, the benefit of the lights is not as important as the water getting too warm for some species. You know your situation better than me here. Maybe consider a solar or battery powered fountain to help evaporate the water to cool the tank or pond. Maybe a battery powered air pump to get some oxygen in the water too? You don’t want to have set up a bicycle connected to a coconut pump like Gilligan from Gilligan’s Island might do. 🙂 Maybe oversize your filters to give a little extra time when the system goes down? Put battery-powered monitors to alert you if there are any issues. The faster you know about a problem the faster you can work to resolve it.
I am on your side. I want happy healthy fish and little creatures out there.
My Northern California Koi breeder buddy that lives in the foothills, is keeping his fish warm all winter with one of my cold temperature breeder heater aquaculture / aquaponic heat pumps. The Koi are healthy and eating like crazy. No dormant sad, bottom dwelling fish here. Even though there is snow on the ground, the heat pump is keeping his pond warm. It will keep heating down into the high 30’s Fahrenheit or about 2 to 4 Celsius outside temperature. He is spending about 1/6th of what he would pay for a electric element or propane (LP) heater to operate and his fish don’t go dormant in the winter and not grow. Also in the summer it will chill the water so that the fish won’t get stressed by water that is too warm. So come on all you hydroponic / aquaponic type people out there. Make this a year of happy fish and plants. I know that if they could talk, that they would thank you. If you get a aquaculture heat pump, It would make the little creatures and me happy too, and I will thank you. 🙂
Best,
Marcus
Stay warm and safe out there.
The photo was taken when I was at a fish hatchery looking at new hatchlings and eggs that were almost ready to hatch. We love anything to do with Aquaculture, Mariculture, Algaculture (the cultivation of Algae) and Fish Farming. We have shipped many swimming pool heatpumps and Aquaculture, Aquaponic heat pumps to Nairobi, Kenya. People forget that even in countries that are hot all year, we still need heat pumps to keep the water comfortable for humans and fish. Sometimes we heat the water, and sometimes we cool the water in Kenya. One hotel where we have 3 pool heat pumps installed is saving 80% of their heating budget over using an LP gas (propane heater) or an electric element heater. We do that with Aquaculture / Aquaponic fish farms in Africa too. In Nairobi, it never gets much below 60 degrees Fahrenheit (16 C ) at night, and the pools still cools off below comfortable swimming temperatures. I remember when I was at a high end hotel in Belize, spreading the word about pool heat pumps in Central America, and I didn’t get a very warm welcome from hoteliers at hotel, motel, theme parks and resorts. The hotel where I was staying had a pool that was only 72 F, (22 C) because a rainy cold front had just come through the area. That is not a fun swim for me. My wife took a video of me all alone shivering in the deserted pool, even though the hotel was completely full. Sorry, only available for you to see if you visit my office. 🙂 Now I hope that you will help me spread the pool heat pump word so I can make the world a more comfortable and happy place without me having to change time zones so much.
Here at Green Planet Supply we pride ourselves at well….being green. Our heat pumps heat and chill Aquaponic and Hydroponic farms using much less energy than almost any other method. We also love to save hotels, motels, campgrounds and resorts money heating their swimming pools and spas with heat pumps. I was being happy with my family at Disney World, (the happiest place on earth) when I saw some of their guests trying to be green by hanging out their laundry on their hotel room porch. For some reason that didn’t make me happy. I know Disney generates lots of their electricity from solar panels to help their high air conditioning load, and they are doing what they can to be green. If you ever get a chance to take their private tour backstage at their aquaculture, hydroponic and aquaponic showcase please do it. They have done amazing things there raising huge healthy produce and fish using heat pumps to keep the water at just the right temperature. If you have solar panels and heat pump like they do then you have the best of both worlds. They can cool the water with the sunshine. Amazing. They say that their aquaculture area is has no negative environmental impact, and that they recycle 100% of their waste. I know that they made me recycle my wood toothpick. I wonder where that one will wind up? I hope not for someone else to spear their cucumber slice with? I am off topic though. Please dry your clothes in your room where I can’t see it, not outside at 90% + RH in Orlando, FL in the summer. That is the green thing to do in this case. It works better too. My room dried bathing suite proves that. Martha Stewart approved. For all my agricultural type people out there, I will send free Giant sunflower seeds to anyone in the USA who will send me a photo of your giant gourd in October. The photos is of big healthy coffee plants. I will try to grow then as soon as my Aquaculture system is set up in the barn.
Have a great summer
I love heating aquaculture and aquaponic farms with heat pumps. I have found that most applications can benefit from using heat pump technology over other methods like solar, gas or electric element heaters. Air to water, Water to water geothermal and air to air heat pumps are usually 4 to 6 X more efficient than propane or electric heaters and 2 to 3 times more efficient than natural gas. Also with heat pumps you have a titanium heat exchanger in contact with the water that has a lifetime warranty and can’t hurt fish. Many other types of heating methods use copper and that is poisonous to many fish and plant life.
Please call to let us know about your unique heating or chilling needs. Heat pumps are not always the best choice. Maybe 5% of the time we suggest other methods if we feel that you won’t benefit from heat pump technology. If you don’t have access to source water or ground area to bury pipes and if your climate is too cold for a traditional air to water heat pump we might point you in another direction. That is very rare though. 95% of our clients and friend see an immediate improvement in there heating costs and also the comfort and health of their aquacultural product.
Best,
Marcus Miller Cell 360 348 7574
President Green Planet Supply
Hydroroyal Agricultural heat pumps.