It’s been a few weeks since my last update on the 78 Main St Renovation, and a lot has changed. Don Robert’s crew (Wayne, Aaron, and Bruce) have almost completed the framing of the new roof and walls within the old structure. David Dow (Double D Electric) has a permanent electrical connection to the house [...]
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A friend and colleague of mine, Brad Vietje, is building a straw bale house and will be working with the same solar heated storage tank as I am using for 78 Main St. He, too, has a goal for net zero energy, with solar PV for electricity and using local and sustainable materials everywhere. I [...] Solar Thermal Storage It took a while to get this going but we finally have a time-lapsed video of the building of the solar storage tank. This tank was designed by TSS (Thermal Storage Solutions) with installation help from Murphy Cell-Tech and Greenworks Solar. I set up a webcam to get the time-lapsed photography [...]
Solar heat For our zero-energy building we are using the sun to provide ALL of the heat we will need throughout the winter. After months of discussion, engineering models of heat requirements, heat losses, heat storage and solar heat generation… the team came up with a system. There are three major ingredients: Solar collector My last blog on ‘Sealing the Envelope‘ of our house included a quick description of the basement, outside walls, roof and air barrier for the house. In more detailed discussions with Murphy Cell-Tech, we came up with this set of laying for the basement.
Basement layers The diagram to the right shows the various layers. [...]
78 Main St., back We got the detailed contract from Murphy Cell-Tech on how to insulate and seal our house at 78 Main St. to get to our goal of a Zero-energy building. Before we can use renewable energy sources (like the sun) to heat our house in the harsh climate of New England, we [...] For one more week I am staying with my parents in their beautiful house on Mascoma Lake in Enfield, NH. The bedroom looks out over the lake with sliding glass doors. What a view! But it was really cold in the bedroom the other day … It was 5F degrees outside; so I decided to see [...] My father-in-law has recently added significant insulation to his basement windows and bulkhead. He created some great ways to plug the holes using bubble wrap and insulation in ways that also make it easy to install for the winter and store them away for the warm months. He provided me with data from his oil bill, [...] New Hampshire in the winter is cold. And that cold wants to suck the heat out of my house from every crack. I got a fun new toy for Christmas that lets me point an infrared thermometer at any surface to measure its temperature. So now I know that the temperature around the sliding glass door [...] |
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