Have Drilling Rig, Will Travel: Geothermal Anywhere in Oklahoma

I am Dave Hartzell. 47 years in HVAC, 15+ years running Hartzell’s Heat & Air out of Kingfisher, IGSHPA accredited on the geothermal side. The short version: most HVAC companies in Oklahoma will not touch geothermal at all, and of the few that will, almost none will drive for it. I will.

Have drilling rig, will travel. That is not a slogan for a website. It is how the geothermal side of this business runs.

Geothermal is the one thing I go anywhere for

For daily service work, the calls that need somebody there the same afternoon, I run seven counties: Kingfisher, Canadian, Oklahoma, Garfield, Major, Logan and Blaine. That boundary is real, and it exists so that when somebody inside it calls me on a hot Tuesday, I can actually be there.

The reason is simple. A service call is a same day promise, so distance matters. A geothermal installation is planned weeks out and takes real days on site. Once it is on the calendar, the drive is a rounding error.

How far is far

The honest way to prove reach is not to say “statewide” and hope you believe it. It is to name the map. I have run geothermal work out of Kingfisher, Okarche, Hennessey, Watonga, Dover, Loyal and Cashion, through Crescent, Piedmont, Edmond, Yukon, Mustang, El Reno and Guthrie, out to Enid, Geary, Okeene and Fairview, into Oklahoma City, and as far as Lawton, Broken Bow and Durant.

Look at those last three on a map. Southwest corner, far southeast corner, and the Red River. Hundreds of miles apart from each other, and that spread is the point: not one long drive in one direction, the state.

Drilling work has gone across the state line into East Texas as well. I will not name a customer or an address, because that is theirs and not mine to publish. But when somebody asks whether I really travel for this, that is the answer.

One shop, at 602 S Main St in Kingfisher, and it is the only one. No branch office in Lawton or anywhere else. When the work is at your place, I drive to your place.

Why almost nobody else does this

The phone book gets short fast once you say the word geothermal. Three things have to line up, and most companies have none of them.

• Accreditation on the ground loop side. Geothermal is not conventional HVAC with a different box. The loop is a designed system in the earth, and getting it wrong is expensive and buried. IGSHPA accreditation covers it, and I hold it.
• A drilling relationship. You cannot install a vertical loop without drilling, and drilling is its own trade with its own equipment and its own crews. A company without that relationship already in place cannot build one for your single job on your timeline.
• A crew that has actually done it before. Loop layout, fusion, purging, flow, charge, and the pressure test that has to pass before anything gets buried. All learned by repetition, not by reading it once.

Put those three together and you see the trap. A company that does two geothermal jobs a year is not driving three hours for the third one. The math does not work, the crew is not sharp on it, and they would rather sell the conventional system they install every week. That is what happens when something is a sideline.

Geothermal is not a sideline here. That is why the rig comes to your property instead of nobody covering your area.

What travel actually means for you

I would rather be straight than pretend distance is free. Mobilization is real. Getting the drilling equipment, the truck, the pipe and the crew to a site is real work with real cost behind it, and a long way out it is a bigger line than across town.

Access is the piece people underestimate. Distance decides part of it, but so does whether the equipment can reach the loop field once it arrives: the driveway, the gate, the slope, the soft ground, the turn at the end of the road. That is why the answer comes from a geothermal site analysis, not a formula.

You see the number before anything is scheduled, and the estimate on a new geothermal system is free.

Why a loop is worth driving for

Here is the part I would want explained to me if I were writing the check.

Almost everything else in a house is replaceable on a normal schedule. A loop is not. It goes in the ground once and stays there for decades. Fused polyethylene pipe, no gaskets, no threaded fittings, buried below the weather. That is why it lasts, and why it has to be right the first time.

If a loop is undersized, the equipment fights it for its entire life and you feel that in every power bill. If a bore was not grouted properly, the loop cannot transfer heat into ground it is not touching, and nobody sees that from the surface. If the fusion was sloppy, you get the slow mystery leak described at why does my geothermal loop keep leaking. None of those get fixed cheaply. The fix starts with an excavator.

So the argument for bringing somebody in from further away is not loyalty. It is that a permanent, buried, invisible system should be built by people who build them constantly, rather than by whoever happens to be closest. You are not buying a Tuesday. You are buying the next few decades.

What does not change because you are far away

A job two hours out gets the same sequence as one two miles out. The site gets analyzed before anything is quoted. The loop is sized against a real load calculation, not a guess from square footage, which is what a ton of geothermal actually means. Every bore gets grouted from the bottom up. Everything gets fused into one continuous piece. Nothing gets buried until it holds pressure.

The full walk-through of drilling day is at what geothermal drilling looks like in your yard, and the choice between loop styles is at horizontal vs vertical vs pond loop in Oklahoma.

Geothermal is a premium purchase. It costs more up front than a conventional system, and what it earns back is decades of much lower energy use. I would rather say that in the first conversation than have you find it in the third.

Questions I get from people outside my service area

Do you install geothermal outside your service area in Oklahoma?

Yes. The seven county boundary is for daily service, the calls that need somebody there the same afternoon. Geothermal is statewide. I have run jobs from Kingfisher out to Lawton, Broken Bow and Durant, and drilling work has gone across the state line into East Texas. Call 405-375-4822.

How much does it cost to have a geothermal crew travel to my property?

Mobilization is real and it is quoted per job, so I will not print a travel rate or a mileage charge here. It depends on distance and on access: the driveway, the gate, the slope, the ground, and whether the equipment can reach the loop field. The site analysis settles it and it lands on a written estimate. The estimate on a new geothermal system is free.

Why will not my local HVAC company install geothermal in Oklahoma?

Three things have to line up and most shops have none: accreditation on the ground loop side, an established drilling relationship, and a crew that has done loop work repeatedly. A company doing two geothermal jobs a year will not drive for the third, and will steer you to the conventional system it installs every week.

How much does a geothermal diagnostic cost in Kingfisher Oklahoma?

$348 flat, any hour, weekday or after hours. That is a full performance check with a written report and a quote before I leave. It is the same number statewide, and an estimate on a new geothermal system is free.