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Valued Customers,

Hurricane Ian left our central headquarters for Symbiont Service Corporation without water, internet, power, or cell phone service. Several parked vehicles were damaged, signs were torn down, and water damage to some office spaces. The roadways out of Symbiont are blocked by fallen trees or flooding, and gas for our vehicles is in limited supply. It is difficult for some of the employees to report to work as their homes are also damaged.

Our East Coast Florida team is available for service if we can dispatch the service information to them. We are working on a plan through the weekend to set up partial operations by Monday, and we ask that you be patient with our response time. We value our customers and want to help as soon as possible.

My cell number is 941-716-8217; I am in the Sarasota area and currently have cell service.

I appreciate your understanding and hope you and your families are safe.

Take care,
Sandy King

Open Post

Recently, we hosted a presentation all about ESOPs. Employee stock options are crucial so that we all share in our company’s success. Michael Miller, the Trustee of our ESOPs, stopped by to explain how they work and benefit you. 

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Have you considered GeoThermal pool heating, but aren’t sure if it’s the right fit for your needs? Does the scale of your heating requirements have you concerned about whether GeoThermal can do the job? If you feel this way, I’m here to let you know you have nothing to worry about. However, don’t just take my word for it. Today I’m speaking with Laura Voit about how she implemented GeoThermal heating throughout the city of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. They have a long tradition of being a big swimming town, so proper heating year-round was crucial. 

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Are you considering switching from propane to GeoThermal pool heating? This article from the Six Lakes Country Club is a must-read.

Skyrocketing propane costs caused Six Lakes Country Club in North Fort Myers, who uses propane pool heaters, to consider other heating methods. Since meeting Board Treasurer Tom Goldsmith at an HOA tradeshow, we’ve been working with the Six Lakes Board of Directors on a plan to exchange their propane pool heaters for a GeoThermal pool heating system. The board carefully weighed the costs of propane vs. GeoThermal. They concluded that the GeoThermal system will pay for itself in three years or less and continue to provide energy savings in the future.

Mr. Goldsmith wrote the following article, The GeoThermal Solution, to inform the Six Lakes HOA members of the reasons behind the board’s decision to go GeoThermal. The article provides a brief but excellent overview of GeoThermal technology, as well as an authentic cost comparison of GeoThermal and propane pool heaters. In presenting the benefits of GeoThermal, we couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

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Sandy King, President of Symbiont Service Corporation, received a state proclamation from Melanie S. Griffin (Secretary, Florida Department of Business & Professional Regulation).

Melanie and her staff personally delivered the Proclamation and honored Sandy during a visit to the SSC Englewood Headquarters, Monday July 18th. During the visit from state officials Sandy gave them a tour of our facility and a brief presentation about SSC accomplishments that her and its employees have performed over the years.

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Our two core values are to do the right thing and maintain a symbiotic relationship with our clients. Today we want to urge you not to procrastinate installing your GeoThermal pool heaters. We want to ensure you’ll be ready to heat this winter and let you know what’s going on so you can make an informed decision.

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CES-Suggested Hurricane Preparation

How Can We Help You? Contact Us Today

The 2022 Atlantic hurricane season has begun. As we have done in past seasons, we want to share some resources that will help you prepare your pool and spa equipment for a storm.

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It’s time for part two of our side-by-side comparison of all your different Florida pool heating options. If you missed part one where we covered the pros and cons of electrical resistance heaters and natural gas/propane heaters, check it out here. This time, we’re focusing on the air source heat pump and the PH90 GeoThermal pool heater. 

The air source heat pump has an evaporator coil that is susceptible to damage from the salt air. If you have a pool on the coastline, you may not want this type of pump. However, it is a pretty efficient option.

Here’s how it works: It takes in air through the coils, sucks the heat out of the air, ejects the heat through the coil, and the condensing coil has a titanium tube heat exchanger that produces about 150,000 BTUs per hour. For every dollar you spend on heating, you’re getting six dollars worth of heat. To heat your average pool, it only costs around $1,300 to maintain 84 degrees. That’s much lower than the $6,000 average for pools heated with natural gas or propane systems.

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We’re here in the boneyard today to go over the different types of heaters that you can use to heat your pool in Florida. There are four different types of pool heaters that we’ll cover. We’ll go through the pros and cons of the first two today, show you how they work, and detail the maintenance costs of each.

We’ll start with the electrical resistance heater. It has two heating elements that stick down into a reservoir and heats water as it flows through. As you apply power to the coils, they glow and heat the water. 

They are very susceptible to chemical imbalances, however, so they end up having to be replaced quite often. They produce 37,000 BTUs per hour and a coefficient of proficiency of 1.0. That means for every dollar you spend, you get one dollar’s worth of heat. It’s not a great choice for bigger pools; it’s better for spas.

Next, we have the natural gas and propane heaters. It produces 400,000 BTUs at 84% efficiency. That means you’re only producing 336,000 BTUs per hour. It has a small footprint, and it’s not affected by the outside temperature no matter how cold. 

A weakness of this is that as pool water flows through the cuprohttps://symbiontservice.com/pool-heating-in-florida/#gasnickel heat exchanger, it’s also very susceptible to chemical imbalances. When the pool water gets to a saturation point, it will stain your pool surface with copper. You have to be extra careful with this one. In a typical residential pool, to heat the pool year-round, it will cost you $6,000 per year for natural gas but $14,000 per year with propane. It does have a small footprint and provides a lot of heat

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We installed GeoThermal heating systems for a 1,700-square-foot home and an 8,000-square-foot pool, and we want to show you the layout of this installation.

The first question we have to answer any time we install a geothermal heating system is how we use the earth to heat the water, and there are three main options to do so:

• 1. Closed loop in the ground
• 2. Closed loop in the water
• 3. Wells
  

For this job, we went with the third option. At the beginning of the video, you can see me standing outside the home by the supply well where we have a pump submerged in the ground that’s regulated by internal controls.

As we move into the garage, we find the controls for the water we’re bringing into the home from the well. There are several items to take note of here. The first is the variable frequency drive, which controls the speed of the well pump and ensures there’s no unnecessary energy consumption and the home gets the gallons it needs for the air conditioner, heating of the pool, or both.

Next to that is the intermediate plate heat exchanger—a stainless-steel device that separates the well water from the air conditioning system. Underground water is very unstable, and geothermal heating not only saves energy, but it also protects the unit from underground water.

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