Waiting to Exhale

Last week we finished working with all of the timbers for our house - 42 purlins; 8 trusses each composed of 6 members: two top cords, one bottom cord, two struts and one king post; 16 posts; 44 braces; 16 girts and 20 splines. Every piece is sanded, sealed with Skidmore's Liquid Beeswax, fitted and waiting under a tarp for the moment it will stand together with its brothers and sisters as the frame of our house. All around the building site you see blue and silver tarps covering pieces of our house. Scott reminds me that some people put cars on blocks in front of their houses. We have put pieces of a house on blocks in front of our car.

I've returned to Logan to resume my part time work at Utah State University, but Doug, Shanna and Scott have continued preparing for the raising of our timber frame. The tractor (named Orangejello) proves to be the useful tool we had hoped it would be, especially now, as it is instrumental in making piles of dirt disappear into the holes left behind following each excavation.

In less than a week, despite day after day of rain, they have even erected the core of our Tempcast masonry heater. Here's a tour of their work.

The pieces are laid out.

Doug applies mortar in preparation for the next part.

More mortar...

More mortar...

Scott custom cuts a hole for the flue.

It begins to look like a masonry heater instead of just a pile of cement blocks.

Another course...

The last two courses are the heaviest pieces weighing in at 126 pounds. This requires a scaffold assist.

Scott stands beside the almost completed heater.

Scott and Doug contemplate the last piece.

The last piece...











The heater is not really finished. This is just the core. Once the walls of the house are up, and we are happily whiling away our time with finish work, we'll add an attractive facade which we haven't yet decided upon.

The fitting of all of the timbers has taken place in two dimensions on the ground, so we don't REALLY know that our grand plan will work. We are tired. We are anxious. We are excited. We are waiting until our mentors from Teton Timberframe arrive next Tuesday. It will be a big day (or several). We are ready to move on to something less demanding. Maybe that will be the strawbale walls. We are waiting to exhale.

The Last Hole

We plan to heat our house with two systems: a Tempcast masonry heater and radiant heat flooring powered by solar-thermal collectors. The basic idea behind the solar-thermal system is to collect the sun’s energy with water-filled evacuated tubes on the roof and store it in a large thermal mass - a lot of water - enough water to store heat from sunny days through cold cloudy days. When we figured our budget for collectors and tanks, and our likely heating needs, 500 gallons turned out to be the required amount to efficiently run the system.  Initially we could only find room for 300 gallons to be stored in a huge water tank in our bedroom closet. This would have taken up half of the closet space. We were not at all satisfied with this idea because our sweaters and sneakers were going to be displaced by an ocean of hot water. We hoped a better plan could be devised. We heard about an exterior underground storage tank used in a Wasatch Front house. Wayne, our architect, investigated that system, and Phillip, our plumber and solar thermal designer, drew up the details. Our better plan arrived in Torrey yesterday.

Dura-Crete, Incorporated is a precast and custom concrete manufacturer located in Salt Lake City. To store our ocean, they built a 21,000 pound custom concrete box-within-a-box insulated with reflective, woven fabric to store our 500 gallons outside of the house. This was preferable on four fronts: it was no more expensive than the closet storage option; we regained our closet space; we were able to get a more efficient amount of thermal storage and it got all of that water outside of the house...which is good plan for a straw building.

Why a box within a box? We will only need to have one hole dug to contain our entire system. The inner chamber will store the 500 gallons as well as three copper heat exchangers fabricated by Phillip. A smaller chamber (inside the big box but outside the inner water box) contains pumps that move  the water through the solar collectors and into the house, plus sensors that control the system.

The link below is a slide show that will give you an better idea of what happened...everything from the moment Tyler began digging the hole to house the water tank with his backhoe to the moment Phillip climbed inside the manhole to install the pumps.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/34651952@N04/sets/72157624577201284/show/

Hooray!  The last hole has been dug and will soon be filled. It is wonderful feeling to know that everything that happens from now on will be above grade.

Rebates

A few years ago we subscribed to Natural Home Magazine.  Their subscription page states that they give, “...an up-to-date outlook on current trends in sustainable building and wholesome living. Natural Home gives today’s eco-conscious homeowners the information they need to live in nurturing, healthy homes.” It sounds pretty new-agey, but the magazine really does have some good information. In fact, my only complaint rests with the homes they often feature. These are typically 4,500 square foot plus homes with green denim insulation or inspired landscaping. To us, it seems like most of the homes are structures that require the homeowner to have vaults full of money that enable them to build a “sustainable and wholesome” home.

Scott and I don’t have money like that. We feel like regular folks who hope to live in a home that allows us to exist in harmony with our planet. Yes, we’ve got our own eco-slant, but we really would like to build our house using local resources, work with folks who will be our neighbors and, when we are finally moved in, have completed a project that didn’t violate our commitment to taking care of Mother Earth.

Budget plays a large role in our decisions. I’ve been keeping track of our expenses in several spreadsheets: garage construction, house construction, site preparation and landscaping, things we would have bought anyway and tools. (It’s astounding how much money goes into tools!)

After receiving bids for windows, a roof and the garage, we noticed everything seemed to come in increments of $30,000. When I mentioned this to my dad, he chuckled and said he and Mom had observed  a similar phenomenon when they built their house in the early 1980’s except they worked in $10,000 increments. That’s inflation for you.

The $30,000 plumbing bid really came as a shock to me even though it included all of the plumbing for the house, our radiant heat flooring and the solar thermal hot water system. Still, with bills like that, how would be ever be able to build a house for under $250,000? Maybe the good news we were soon to receive would help.

One day after Phillip delivered that staggering plumbing bid, Larry Wilkins of Tempcast, sent us information about an income tax credit offered through the state of Utah for renewable energy systems. The investment tax credit for residential systems offers a 25 percent credit for qualifying equipment and installation costs up to a maximum of $2,000. The design of our house includes technologies that qualify for this tax credit, so Scott immediately filled out the application and sent it off.

The site entitled Incentives / Policies for Renewables and Efficiency also proved to be very useful as did this Financial Incentives site. If we receive all of the state and federal grants and tax credits we've just applied for, our $30,000 plumbing system will become a $23,000 plumbing system. Hooray for rebates!