Retrofit - Week 1

Allright!! kick off time. We got the project started Monday morning the 11th of July, by convening the team around the drawings and figuring out the plan of action. The Key players are:

Peter Lofstrom of Loftstrom Construction near Brainerd. He is the site supervisor and main go-to guy when it comes to figuring out how to make things really work. He is energy savvy and detail oriented when it comes to making a tight building. He was also the energy auditor who did the pre-audit and he'll do the final tests, too.

Shawn Beseth -Experienced framer, very local, and luckily for me, looking for work closer to home, even if it is temporary.

Sam Nelson - My brother in law with some good construction experience and also in between projects.

Mike Newbold - Another brother in law, fresh off of helping build his own ARC home, who is actually working for Resilient Properties Management, but this project is his assignment as an experimental deep energy retrofit.

Turns out that because of the schedule for the trusses, we decided to strip the siding for a day or two before Schrupp Excavating was available to excavate around the basement walls.

House minus the siding. The guys made quick work of this part of the project.

Below is 120 sheets of 2" foam and 1000 feet of corrugated poly pipe for the air exchanger.

We'll also put in an experimental, ground tempered air exchanger consisting of 6 corrugated tubes buried down at the foundation level almost all the way around the house.

We ran into a few little issues, like any remodel does. Some pretty good rot under the North and West doors that had to be fixed.

Second, the porch was not made with a foundation, it was slab on grade, which changed the way the way we decided to insulate around it. Then during the excavation, we cut the wire to the garage. Not biggies, just par for the course.

After that, the excavation and foaming went well. Schrupp's guys are awesome.

Around the East side, we had to deal with the cellar door. It had to be pushed out a foot to match the new wall, and it needed a thermal break to the basement walls. So we made a few cuts and the excavator made quick work of it, so the masons could rebuild it.

And this is how the air exchanger tubes look assembled.