geothermal

I hope this is the right term.  I am looking at a piece of land (hope I can get it because I have been looking for this kind of land for more than 10 years)

It looks like I will be able to build a house into a hill!  Looking at a plan for 14 x 40.  The hill gets higher behind the house - I would like to look into running some tubing to use the earth to cool the air during the summer, and to heat (or preheat) the air in the winter.  I think this is called geothermal?  Are there any good "Geothermal For Dummies" kind of websites?  Property is in NE Nevada - likely to have at least 4 feet of earth around it - possibly a foot of insulation under the soil.

I am a geo-dummy.

I think the system you are talking about is also called ‘earth tubes’. I found This Permies post that suggests there are websites giving some calculations. Hope this helps.

Tom, while this is not a website for "Geothermal for Dummies", like Nancy suggested are you looking at earth tubes?  If so this book on Passive Heat Storage might be of interest:

https://permies.com/wiki/50585/Passive-Annual-Heat-Storage-John

I also would suggest that you might be interested in Solar Chimneys and Earth Tubes in this thread:

https://permies.com/t/143626/Solar-Chimney-Earth-Tubes

If this is not what you had in mind may be a better explanation so we can understand.