More winter work

Here is some detail on the HVAC work (Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning).  Primary heating is through radiant water tubing in the floors.  This got complicated in several places.  We also put in a full forced-air furnace mainly for the AC, but it is also nice to use as heat at times.  Radiant is great for the winter, but it is slow response, as you have to heat a slab of concrete for example, before you really get heat out of it.  If the days or nights are just a little cool , as typically happens in the spring and fall, you might not want to run the radiant for just one or two nights but need a little heat.  A forced air furnace is great for this.

I will say upfront that I greatly underestimated the required time for ductwork.  I lucked out though in that I work with a guy who used to be an HVAC tech around the cities.  He has done the whole thing for me, and it has come out much better than it probably would have from a commercial outfit as we could discuss items as they came up, and at less than half the cost.  It took him a lot of time, but I had too much else to do in the same time and there is no way I could have done this too.  Plus not knowing some of the key details in how this is done would have hurt a lot.  He has a couple details he is finishing up this weekend (4/12/14) and we will wrap up final inspection on that early next week.  Then we move onto full drywall work.  All other inspections are complete for now (rough electric, rough plumbing, insulation, framing).

Here is the temp heat.  AKA The Dragon.  I took out a window and made a makeshift air vent to feed air to the dragon, plus a minor platform to hold the dragon.  It runs off natural gas, so I plumbed in the gas line to feed it (the large black hose).  You can see the gas regulator and valves in the second photo.  A temporary setup.  Now that it has finally warmed up this is not being used much at all, so it is probably time to give it back to the rental place.

You can see some of the main ductwork runs here, including after insulation.  Lots o' ducts.  They foamed under all floors as it fills in easy and helps keep the radiant heat going where it should.

We did a lot of foam insulation to seal things up well.  Here is a shot of the foam in the attics where they sprayed 2" of closed cell foam on the ceilings to seal everything up nicely.  They did a very nice job of this.  I was very impressed with the insulators overall- very good and professional.  This was a very tight space to work in so it was all the more impressive what they did.

Let's talk radiant...  The primary heat will be radiant heat.  In the basement we buried the tubing in the slab.  The main floor will be covered in detail below.  The upper floor was done with a technique called staple-up.  You basically staple the tubing to the bottom of the floor from below.  You use thin aluminum plates to help distribute the heat and hold the tubing up.  This is a hard way to do radiant but works OK for small areas, like the upper floor in this plan.  This was a full weekend of work for two of us.

 

Now for the main floor.  This one is a bit different as we are doing it on top of the main floor deck.  The techniques is to put the tubing down between 2x4 sleepers and the fill the space with concrete.  then you put a subfloor of plywood/etc on top of that to ready the place for the finished floor.  The house design was adjusted for this extra height.  We had to wait on this as a lot of other things had to be in place first, but we have now knocked out the main level in just a couple weekends.  Layout and the head scratching took some time, but once we figured out how we wanted to do it, it came together pretty quickly.

Here is the progression of the great room. 1st step - layout and figuring it all out. Nothing nailed down yet.

 Starting to layout tubing.

 A couple pictures of the completed great room.  I still need to do the intermediate sleepers in between the main ones shown, but that will happen this weekend.  Then we will be ready to pour concrete there some time soon - in the next couple days.

Part of getting insulation done was wrapping up drywall on those ceiling areas that needed to be insulated, so I'll show that next as that is all done.  The main drywall work will be starting in early May as I have hired a guy for that.  I have too many other things to do, so that one needed to get hired out.  I had planned to do more of the drywall but there just isn't enough time.

The Winter of Our Discontent

For those of you in the upper Midwest, you know how bad this winter has been, but frankly it is off-the-charts-insane.  This has been, by far, the worst winter I have ever seen - in Western NY growing up, or here, in the 22 yrs I have lived here.  We have had more below zero days than anytime since the 1800's, and who knows how accurate those records really are?  And then snow storm after storm dropped inches upon inches of fluffy, white Global Warming on us.  And since we have had only about 3 days above freezing since Dec 1, it has all stuck around, all winter.  Below zero in March is basically unheard of, but here we are. Unreal.

What better time to build a house?

When November started turning into crap weather my friend Brook convinced me to get a temporary construction heater set up.  I got that set up the day before Thanksgiving, and it was already way colder than normal.  Come Dec ~4, it turned nasty and has not let up all winter.   This is pretty much unprecedented in anyone's lifetime that is living now.  Every winter has ups and downs, so we always get some melting in there and some big snow, but apparently Mother Nature has it in for me.  We started this project with a crappy spring and summer in 2013, and the winter of 2014 will go down in the record books.  I really just can't win with the weather.  So I soldier on.

I had been hoping to move into insulation before it got too cold this winter, but the delays over the summer were too much, all the work took too long, and the weather turned too bad, too early, so we could not get to spraying foam at that point.  And since it has stayed ridiculously cold for so long, plus the weather making all my work harder, we have not been able to get there yet...until now.  Foam is now scheduled for the end of March. But Spring is breaking out (I think) and we are getting there.  It has now turned a bit of Spring and the weather is warming dramatically (and suddenly...but then going back to Jan-Feb temps a lot too...can't win).  But still, this is a very welcome sign that I was not too confident would happen this year...

Enough about the crappy weather...  The time from  Thanksgiving until early March was taken up with utilities work, for the most part.   We also spent some time in  late Jan early Feb moving the tools and equipment from our current house into the new shop.  That is pretty well setup now, but I do not have dust collecting set up yet.  It will be a while until I can get that going.  On some of the worst cold days, I spent time getting the shop set up rather than freezing my butt off in the house.  I keep the construction heater set low when not there to save money, so it takes time to heat back up.  Hardly worth it for a couple hours in the evening when it is -15F out.

So here is a look at the electrical and the HVAC duct work. A lot of time went into all that.  I did all the electric and low voltage wiring, and a guy I know from work who used to be an HVAC tech did all the duct work and furnace install.  I can say for sure I underestimated how much time the duct work would take.  Were I to do that myself, I would not yet be up to the point of being ready for insulation.  It is good to have help.

So some pics of the mechanical work.  It takes a lot of time. Pulling a circuit may not seem like a big deal, but it takes at least 30-60 min, which adds up when you have 40-some circuits.

In mid -late Nov. I finally got the electric hooked up to the house.  Here is the distribution panel feeding off the meter for it.  This is  very silly way to do it given the circumstances and NEC code, but it is what the state and the inspector wanted...

A look at some of the early rough wiring in the house.   Another thing you see here is plastic over all the doors and windows.  Very early in the winter I was having huge frost issues on the woodwork of the windows and doors due to the stupid-cold temps so we had to cover them up to fix that.  It did work, and has some other benefits like protecting the windows from dirt and minor damage.  Plus we have to cover the walls with poly for vapor barrier at some point, so we did as much of that as we could at the same time.

Before the big wiring push you can see the main switch box array in the hallway.

Starting to get wires pulled in place.  Lots of labeling to keep it all straight...

 A look at the wires in the basement.

 And a look at the panel once it was fully finished.  I figure it is good to have someone look at it since the dingbat inspector never even took the smallest peek at it.  What kind of an electrical inspection doesn't even look at the main panel?  All he cared about was if I had an outlet within 6' of any corner or door.  Never looked at the main panel or any wiring methods.  This inspires confidence. ...NOT! And of course this is one of the main reasons I won't let anyone else wire my house. I know I will do it right, even if the inspector doesn't check anything...

 The big hallway switch array...before...

 And after....

 And "after" by the screen porch...

... And by the kitchen deck