Running an Assessment

An assessment answers: what is the ground under this spot made of, and how well will it move heat? It takes about a minute.

Step-by-Step: Run your first assessment

Step 1: Open Geothermal in the left menu, under DATA. You land on the Estimator tab.

Step 2: Fill in Address or coordinates under Site location. There is one box, and it takes either form:

• Typing an address brings up a suggestion list. You have to pick a suggestion - the Run button stays greyed out until you do, because the address has not been resolved to a point yet.
• Pasting coordinates works immediately. Use latitude, longitude - for example 38.8977, -77.0365. The site echoes the parsed latitude and longitude back under the box so you can confirm it read them the way you meant.

Coordinates are the reliable option on rural sites, where address lookup often lands the pin somewhere other than the job.

Step 3: Set Bore depth (ft, optional) if you already have a target depth in mind. If you do not, leave it - the default is 300 feet, and the assessment will suggest a better depth once it has read the geology.

Step 4: Click Run geothermal assessment.

Step 5: Wait for the result. If someone has already run this location recently, it comes back immediately. If it is a fresh location, it queues as a job and fills in when it finishes - you do not have to sit on the page.

Use New assessment in the top bar to start a fresh one, and Recent to reopen one you ran earlier.

What you get back

• Ground properties - thermal conductivity, heat capacity, density, specific heat, and undisturbed ground temperature for the site
• Aquifer flow - which matters if you are considering an open-loop system
• A per-layer table - the formations under the site and what each contributes
• A suggested bore depth - the depth where the design stops getting meaningfully better
• An assessment narrative - a plain-language summary of what the numbers mean

These values are meant to feed loop-field sizing software directly, so you can take them straight into your design tool rather than re-deriving them.

All the numbers are calculated before the narrative is written, so the wording can never move a value. If the narrative and the table ever disagree, trust the table.

Recent assessments

Assessments you have run recently are listed so you can jump back to one without re-entering the location. That list lives in your browser only - it is not shared with your crew, and it will not follow you to another computer. If you want an assessment to persist for the company, save it as a ground-loop design or export the PDF.

Exporting

Use the export button to save the assessment as a PDF. This is the version to send a customer or attach to a bid - it carries the numbers, the layers, and the caveats together, so nobody reads a conductivity figure without the confidence that came with it.

Fair use

The add-on allows 300 assessments per period. You will see a warning as you approach the limit, at 250. This is generous for normal bidding - if you are hitting it, you are probably running a batch process and should talk to us rather than work around it.

If something goes wrong

Run button greyed out?

• You typed an address but did not pick one of the suggestions. Select one, or paste coordinates instead.

Assessment will not run?

• Check the location resolved. A rural address can land the pin in the wrong spot; paste latitude and longitude directly if the map looks wrong.
• Confirm the add-on is active on your account.

Results look thin or the confidence is low?

• That usually means few nearby logs, not a broken estimate. See Reading Your Results.

Related Topics

• Reading Your Results - interpret what came back
• Ground-Loop Designs - turn this into a borefield
• Geothermal Estimator - what the tool is and is not