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.