diesel_john,
Do you heat with your pond system as well in the winter? How's the efficiency then?
I've lots of horror stories with heat pumps and geothermal but as other people have said here its all in the installation. We have 130' well and then a 100' run into the house and the variation of water temperature is huge from winter to summer. The 100' run is well below the frost line but its definitely colder in the winter and warmer in the summer so I'm always doubtful about trench installations. All these systems work on temperature difference so the closer the air temp and your input temp get the less efficient it gets.
The other stories I've heard is people just pumping water out of a well and running it through a heat exchanger and then dumping it! Ground water is not an unlimited resource and unless you have some fancy system to get it back into the ground(which is probably illegal anyways) most of it will be evaporated. In many areas the groundwater takes 100's or 1000's of years to recharge.
Also I call B.S. on this.
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Example: 3600sq ft house in Nova Scotia (well insulated, but not "super insulated") cost just $68 to heat for the whole winter!
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Is it a summer home with passive solar and someone kept it a 3 Celcius all winter? That is like me selling woodstoves as free heat*
*If you have free wood...
Ian