RREAL addition II

The side walls are installed, and the crew is now building the outer walls. They will be dense-packed cellulose instead of SIPS panels.

underground air exchanger

Wayne has been busy with a prototype of an air exchanger that utilizes the ambient ground temperature for the preheating of air for the SPARC. It will consist of 10 tubes 30' long for the outgoing air, and 10 tubes 30' long for the incoming air. We are still refining the design, so look for more updates.

HUG and RREAL were honored today with a surprise visit from some VIP's. A delegation from congress made its way through the campus. Here are a couple of photos of the esteemed dignitaries.

Retrofit - Week 11

It was a little light this week with Shawn gone on his honeymoon. Still, plenty of stuff to write about.

Big news this week: Insulation in the attic, windows in the basement, and wires, sheetrock, and the start of cabinets in the kitchen.

Attic insulation:

Sam had fun with the thermal camera as he found and plugged a number of warm air leaks into the attic on a cold morning.

Later on, Sam had filled a bunch of the attic with a good 30 inches of cellulose. Near the north edge, the insulation has to stack super high in order for the insulation to match up with the old roof line. Pictured here is the insulation dam around the whole house vent.

Kitchen:

This week started with some wiring and a positive inspection.

Then some sheetrock. Because it would all be covered up, I only did one coat of mudding, which was challenging to my sense of craftsmanship.

And some paint.

And then, some cabinets!

-Basement windows came along. This is just a great picture of the fine, skilled carpenters at work.

After the windows were in place, a phantom was seen appearing in multiple windows.

And finally, Peter is pictured here after putting in the first basement window winding up the week by cleaning up.

Retrofit - Week 10

Very good week. In fact, I believe this makes it ten for ten!
First of all - Obligatory chicken picture. This awesome chicken portrait was taken by Paul. I just might have to post this image to Facebook. Darn chickens did some serious pecking at the pink foam around the foundation. I'm torn between hoping they suffer from that stupidity and hoping they aren't toxic to eat, now.


Now that we got past that, we are into putting things back together again. Here we see the giant vent covers that Wayne so skillfully crafted up. We finally put them into the wall to terminate the air exchange tubes. Last week there was a picture of the perforated tubes wrapped in poly film. We, instead, decided to splice the perforated ends below the ground level to non-perf pipe inside the wall.


The North wall has been full of utilities that we've had to figure out how to install in this wall. Above is a picture of a sewer vent, and an electric box for communication conduit and wires.

Below is Wayne working his magic, again, in the form of a mini, super insulated damper for the combustion air intake for the fireplace.


In other news, as the roofers cut in the ridge vent, I got a chance to check on the settling of the insulation in the spacer trusses. When I blew it in there, I filled it to the top, counting on it settling a few inches to leave a ventilation space. This is what sweet success looks like.


Another success this week was breaking into the old flues from the basement utility room. One came along nicely. The other abhorrent and ill-constructed flue from hell took more work, but was eventually re-appropriated for duct duty. It was a relief, once I saw it, to know that I never actually used it as a flue while we have been in the house. These two flues will serve to bring fresh air up into the bedrooms and to bring hot air from upstairs down into the basement.


One totally awesome pre-rinse faucet arrived. It's huge. It's the big-gun in my dish washing plan. It provides tactical support for the stainless sink and stainless counter top.


The two biggest achievements for the week, though, are the completion of the dense-packing in the walls, and the beginning of the window installation. After months of speculation about what we would use to fill in between inner and outer windows, we were pleased to find that these windows will work nicely immediately adjacent to each other. This is largely because of the fact that both sashes slide and are removable. The big triple sash windows may be different, though. We're still looking into this.


We went through much discussion on how, exactly, to flash and seal the windows and handle the spaces between them now that we're doing a gap between the siding and the drainage plane.
So, on Friday, we went on a window installing rampage. We got all but 4 of the outer windows installed! (not counting the basement windows).

Here is a picture of some very beautiful windows. That amount of south windows should be effective.


And at the end of the day there were several proud carpenters in the house. And right after that, Shawn took off on his long awaited honey-moon. We're hoping to get postcards.

The biggest problem with the windows is that I should've ordered them with a clear sealant instead of plain wood. So I bought some polyurethane and with the help of Sean Muller we got a good start at sealing the wood this weekend.


When it came time to do some wiring in the kitchen and actually figuring out what wires went where, Sam and I ended up tearing out a bunch of sheetrock and learning quite a bit about what circuits went where. We only found about 4 abominations that left me feeling vaguely victimized. Not bad. Like so much else about this project, it's so nice to know that those have been fixed. Stay tuned for next weeks progress.

Retrofit - Week 9

The big stories this week are the super damper, insulation, sealing up the attic and the ceiling, and getting the Air exchanger tubes ready.

Below is the super damper and the insulation and 14 inch duct that it will feed into.


Here Sam and Pete are installing the super-damper. It fits and looks good.




Here is the ceiling in the addition and bedrooms. Air sealing is a major challenge and of critical importance. Both Peter and I have seen poly film degraded and brittle after 30 years, so we have adopted a double system. First is the layer of plywood on the ceiling that will help support the weight of almost 3 feet of blown in cellulose. The plywood also has a very low vapor permeability. So we sealed the seams with mastic and then put poly film over it, to boot.


After the ceiling, we had to seal the perimeter to the air barrier on the wall. As a backer for the foam, we put in some fiberglass bits. Here Mike looks like he's butchering some wild cotton candy.


Sam.


Feeding the insulation blower is actually not such a bad job. Here we see Peter doing a not bad job on this not such a bad job.

And Mike had to keep busy making use of the cellulose that kept blowing out the hose.


And we had to prep the air exchanger tube ends. Sam nicely built a foam box around each end to provide enough insulation behind them and to keep any moisture off the wall. We decided to wrap the perforated exhaust tube in poly film in order to further isolate the moisture from the wall framing and insulation.



And we also built a foam insulation box around the dryer vent. This serves to isolate the moist air from the insulation and, also, to provide some opportunity to replace the vent tube.


Not pictured: Plumbing and wiring. I accomplished some wiring in the bathroom and also redid most of the copper plumbing with PEX. The lines are much more streamlined, color coded, and fully insulated, even through studs and floors. It's something I'm proud of in a plumbing geek kind of way, but it is not terribly photogenic. Maybe some pictures next week.

Got the West side done!

And we got more roofing installed!

Retrofit - Week 8

Another fine, fine week. Well, maybe only one fine since Peter was out with his sore foot. Despite that we had productive week learning more about how to dense pack cellulose. All last weekend after trying it out on the east wall I studied dense pack info on the web. So, on Monday morning we did some more experimenting on a small test wall the Shawn and Sam whipped up.

We tried several settings on the machine and a couple different hose ends and a few different techniques till we consistently achieved close to 4 lbs/ft^3. That's a bit higher than we needed, but I'm OK with a little extra at this stage.

Shawn and Sam making a test box.

Shawn and Sam filling their test box.

Sam insulating under a window on the South wall.

By the end of Monday we got the South side enclosed in house wrap. Most of the cavities that are open at the top are still nto filled, though.

On Tuesday, Mike and I worked on finishing the insulation on the East side. Here we see him up on a high plank inserting the tube into each cavity from the top. If my camera was quicker I would've captured some good geysers as the air blowing back would sometimes make the insulation erupt out the top and into his face. Shortly after that he took the rest of the week off for a trip to the cities and the state fair.

Sam and Ethan demonstrate that you can do more then save big money at Menards.

Here is an example of wiring in the dense pack cavity. Nothing special, but it totally met the code about being far enough inside the wall to avoid being hit my nails later.


And here Joel is working on how we'll mount the off-peak meter.

On Thursday our blue steel roof material arrived. Nice. We also got the siding colors finalized and ordered after some confusion with Sherwin-Williams.

Perhaps one of the highlights of the week is Wayne's fabricating awesomeness. He whipped out two of the coolest overgrown duct vents ever for the intake and exhaust of the underground air exchanger. These are going to be great on the side of my house. I will want to paint them, though.

Friday was cold, windy, and rainy. The roofers, rightly, did not want to be on a steel roof when it's damp, but they did get some trim put up.

Not pictured, but still pertinent was a visit by Jim Larson, Nor-Son's building science expert. He was intrigued and very helpful. Once we get the windows in we'll do a building tightness test and see if there are any small leaks we can fix sooner rather than later. He has many years of experience finding the things that went wrong and caused problems and I enjoyed getting a deeper appreciation for that part of "high performance". Another outcome of that is trying to figure out how best to keep my thick blanket of insulation dry in my walls, and how to let it dry if it does get wet. The most likely solution is to leave a 3/8 gap between the housewrap and the siding. So I ordered a couple books he recommended by a great building expert and funny author Joe Lstiburek. More next week.