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We engineer the whole system, and we fit one brand of heat pump: the one built in Toronto.
Geothermal jobs usually get assembled from strangers — a driller, a mechanical contractor, a consulting engineer, and an equipment brand shipped in from elsewhere. When something underperforms, each of them can point at the others. We work as a turn-key contractor alongside a single equipment partner, Polar Bear Water Source Heat Pump Mfg. Inc. of Toronto, so the chain of responsibility is two companies long instead of five.
Design & build
Heat-loss and heat-gain calculation, loop field design, drilling, headers, mechanical room and commissioning.
Total project engineering
Existing plant, existing risers, existing constraints. Retrofits and the awkward half of a building nobody wants to touch.
One equipment partner
Polar Bear water source heat pumps, built in Toronto. Capacity matched to the design rather than to a catalogue.
Service
Including on systems we did not install. Parts are a drive away, not on a boat.
| Installations to date | 1,000+ |
| Service area | GTA & Southern Ontario |
| Sectors | Commercial · Institutional · Multi-residential · Custom homes |
| Phone | 647-914-8114 — answered 24 hours |
Built so it can still be repaired in twenty years.
Most heat pumps are full of proprietary circuit boards. When one fails in year twelve you buy it from the original manufacturer, at their price, if they still make it. Polar Bear uses ordinary relays deliberately over-rated for the job. Beyond the air coil, which has no moving parts, there are no original-equipment-specific components in the machine. Any refrigeration wholesaler can supply a replacement.
Water coil
Closed-loop output falls only 10–20% as incoming water cools, against 20–30% or more for other makes. Clover-leaf tube, up to eight convolutions — if it ever freezes it expands rather than splits.
Air coil
Rifle tubing and lanced fins, oversized from 1 to 10 ton. More surface area raises output and gives real dehumidification in cooling.
Fan
ECM, minimum five speeds, twenty-second soft ramp. Slows deliberately in humid weather to pull more moisture out.
Cabinet
Stainless condensate pan. One-inch acoustic lining, double the industry norm. Electrical controls sit above the pan, so a clogged drain cannot cause an electrical failure.
Circulators
Wilo wet-rotor pumps, stainless shafts rather than ceramic, brass flanges rather than cast iron, Type L copper internally.
Hot water
A 6,000 BTU desuperheater takes heat straight off the compressor into the tank — roughly halving water-heating cost, and free while cooling.
501 Alliance Avenue, Toronto — 275 tons
A four-storey 65,000 sq ft building plus an adjacent 54,000 sq ft structure, converted to geothermal on a dense urban site with no room for a condenser farm.
| Installed capacity | 275 tons |
| Heat pumps | 18 × 15-ton water-to-water |
| Compressors / coils | Copeland · packless water coils |
| Borehole depth | 192 m / 630 ft |
| Drilling method | Off vertical axis — ~10% more field from the same footprint |
| Perimeter | Passive and active ice melt |
| Contribution | 39 of the 80 points toward LEED Gold |
| Provisioned | +45 tons for future load |
315–325 University Ave W, Cobourg
Four floors over underground parking. A shared central heat pump loop with risers tapering from 4″ mains to ¾″ branches, a dedicated make-up air circuit on 40% glycol, and a Clemmer 217 US gallon expansion tank. Plumbing, underground services and the heat pump plant were taken off together rather than split across trades — issued for building permit.
Off the gas grid, this stops being a green decision and becomes an arithmetic one.
On propane, oil or electric baseboard, geothermal is not competing with cheap natural gas — it is competing with the most expensive heat in Ontario. Both halves of the equation move at once: the running cost you displace is far higher, and the incentive is far larger.
Running cost, not rebates
Ground-source space heating runs roughly 69–82% below propane or oil and about 71% below electric resistance — and roughly 41% above natural gas. The case is made off-gas, on operating cost, without needing an incentive to exist.
Sizing is the real risk
Industry practice is to undersize and lean on the duct heater — expensive resistance heat, all winter, on a unit running far more hours than it should. Sized against a real load calculation, the auxiliary heater should almost never run.
How to compare two geothermal bids fairly
Ask every bidder for the heat-loss calculation, the loop design that follows from it, and the estimated annual running cost. A bid without those three is selling equipment, not a designed system, and the prices are not comparable. Then ask who carries the cost if the loop turns out undersized.