Breathing Easy

Dear Tree-Huggers,

One of the issues that super-insulated buildings have that conventional buildings don't have to deal with is indoor air quality. Simply put, if your building doesn't leak, the air inside will eventually grow stale and toxic. Trouble is, if you simply vent the bad air, you're also losing energy because you're expelling the heated (or cooled) air, and you'll have to spend energy heating (or cooling) the makeup air. This is why traditional bathroom fans, kitchen vents, and laundry vents aren't energy efficient. They simply push the air out of the house, and with it, your precious heat.

So how do we replace the stale inside air with fresh air outside without losing the heat? This has to be done mechanically, with a great system called a heat an energy recovery ventilator (ERV). It's sort of like a combination of a super-efficient HVAC and a heat exchanger. I like to think of it as the "lungs" of the house. They breathe fresh air in, exhale the stale air, and they maintain temperature and humidity levels.



After much discussion and research, we decided to install a dedicated ERV rather than a combined HVAC/ERV. This is partly because we're doing radiant heat in the floors, and partly because a dedicated system will exchange the air quickly and more efficiently. The best system available is made by Zehnder. We worked with the fine folks at Zehnder, who designed our system based on the house plans we sent to them. They sent us the ERV units and all the necessary parts, and we had the pleasure of installing them ourselves. (It was terribly difficult to find an HVAC contractor willing to meet our exacting standards at a price we could afford, so yours truly spent vacation days doing the job).

My trusty assistant helping to run the air lines.

I did have help. First, the electrician helped me drill a bunch of 4" holes. Then, my dad and my husband (on different days) helped me to run the supply and return lines to each room. These were like very long wet-vac hoses. Each room in the house gets designated either a "supply" or a "return" room. For example, bedrooms will need fresh air, so they get supply lines. The bathrooms and laundry need to expel air, so they get "return" lines. Each line feeds back to a central location. This was quite labor intensive.  Good news is, the outlets are small and unobtrusive, so the finished look will be really clean.

After the install was completed, the insulators went to work, and then sheetrock covered the whole mess. Next week, a Zehnder rep will make a site visit to balance the system, which involves starting it, programming the machine, and making sure the controllers work properly. Fingers crossed!

Greenly Yours,

Parker

Staying Warm

Dear Tree-Huggers,

So it turns out, the way you heat your house is a big deal.  Not only that, but when you build a super insulated home, you should have an efficient system that doesn't give you more than you need.  The most efficient and most comfortable way to heat a home is with in-floor radiant.

Our lovely mountain town has harsh winters - it snows a lot and temperatures regularly fall below freezing.  Therefore, it's particularly important to stay toasty.  Conventional construction usually defaults to a forced air system.  This has its advantages: first, there is only one set of ducts and you can run warm air or cool air through them depending on the season; second (which is related to the firsts since you save on materials and labor), they're the cheapest.

We are, if you haven't already realized this, totally unconventional. And I think forced air sucks.  It's not efficient and it's not comfortable.  It heats the air in a space but not the objects in a space.  Have you ever stood in a room that's measuring 70 degrees by the thermostat, but still feels cold?  Yeah. That's what forced air is like.

Radiant is just superior.  Image courtesy of www.bobvila.com

Green construction usually heats with radiant for a lot of good reasons.  So that's what we're going to do.  Yes, it's more money to install, but over time this type of heat saves money on utility bills.

We had the opportunity to demolish the slab and start again, using a blanket of both rigid and soft insulation with a total R-value of around 12.  On top of that, the plumber lays polyethelene tubing which will be hooked up to pumps, manifolds, and a boiler:

No popsicle toes allowed!

Once the pressure test is completed, the concrete trucks will arrive and pour the slab.  This is what we've been waiting for all these weeks!  After we have a floor, the framers can get to work and we'll really get a sense that things are progressing.

Oh - and I ordered a camera.  It's a time-lapse construction camera that I'll be hanging up at the job site.  Once the shell goes up, I'll be able to upload a quick movie and y'all will be able to see the thing take shape in minutes!

Greenly Yours,

Parker

The Windows are the Eyes to the ... Front Yard?

Dear Tree-Huggers,

It's been a long time.  I know, I know.  I'm a terrible person.  Not really, but I have gotten very behind on writing posts.  Anyway, the progress on the house has been slow.  After the demo, they dug footings.  Yay, footings! You know, those concrete things that hold up the foundations, and therefore the rest of the house?

Inspector-In-Chief

Yeah.  It's important to get those right.  But they're pretty boring to look at.  And the bad news is that weather delays mean that it's unlikely we'll be moving in by June.

After the footings got dug, inspected, poured, dried, and backfilled, they brought in the plumber for the rough.  It only took a day to rough in the drains.  I don't have any pictures of that.

Now, we're waiting on the radiant heat guy to show up and do the install.  Toasty concrete floors are a must, and radiant is the greenest way to heat your house (aside from passive solar gain, of course).  I am looking forward to seeing how all seven of those zones get laid out!

In the meantime, we're finalizing the window order.  We'll be putting in triple paned European windows from an outfit called ZOLA.  They are custom sizes (they can make really big ones), they are built in a factory in Poland, and they're going to make the house look SWEET.  Are they expensive?  The answer is you'll have to sell your firstborn.  Just kidding.  But close.  You'll have to sell their future by spending the college fund.  But it's totally worth it.  These babies not only look good, but they perform!

R-11 Glass, for a total U value of 0.14.  That's tight!  Image courtesy of zola.com

Since most of the heat in your house escapes through the windows, it's going to save you money to have well-insulated, well-made windows.  Standing next to a standard double-pane window installed in a standard wall, you will notice a draft on a cold day.  This means your house is leaking.  By contrast, standing next to a Zola UPVC window feels like standing next to a wall.  It doesn't get drafty.  You don't lose heat.  Which means you're saving money and you're helping to save the planet.

I recently heard a report on the radio that the air in Salt Lake City is one of the 10 worst cities in the U.S.  Most of that pollution is caused by cars and by coal (power plants and mining).  But some of it is caused by our heaters in our homes.  And the less I have to run ours, the better I'll feel about preserving the air in Park City.

The windows will take 8-14 weeks to arrive after they're ordered, so I'll be posting about them again after the arrive, and then again after they're installed.  Installation will include a double-height atrium in the front of the house, and a 12-foot high, 30 foot long lift/slide glass wall out the back.  It's going to be pretty rad.  Check back for awesome pics!

Greenly Yours,

Parker

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Dear Tree-Huggers,

I don't know if I've shared this with you yet, but our goal with this house is to move in by June.  Well, fingers crossed!  But since we're still waiting on our building permit, it may be a fairly ambitious goal.  Time will tell whether it's TOO ambitious:

Demo:  See how they raze that roof.

In the meantime, I'll be posting about the demo process.  Since we bought a house that was designed in the seventies to the standards of a party-house-cum-ski-chalet (think Hugh Heffner goes skiing in the swiss alps), we have decided to demolish most of it and start again.

But here's the rub:  Demolishing a house with a wrecking ball and dumpster would result in a huge amount of trash, and putting stuff in landfills is really bad for the planet.  In fact, construction waste accounts for approximately 40% of consumer waste in our landfills.  That's too much by anyone's standards.

So, to square this project with our sustainable ethos, most of our old house is going to have a second life in someone else's project.  We are doing good, and also doing well (because we get a nifty tax credit out of it).  To accomplish this gorgeous act of re-incarnative sleight-of-hand, we've engaged the Daniel Salmon from The ReUse People.  They're good people, the ReUse people.

Daniel and his team will take the house apart, piece by piece, and donate it to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore.  The bits that can't be salvaged will end up in a dumpster, but that's only a small percentage of the overall.

Panoramic view - the upstairs rooms (before they're removed completely)

So each day when I drive by, the house is less and less of itself.  First, the finishes got taken out.  The furniture, the artwork, the odd and dated kitchen crockery, and the mirrors packed up and hauled away.  Next, the cabinets, the light fixtures, and the plumbing fixtures, got taken down and hauled away.  Then they took out the boiler, the furnaces, the laundry machines, and the pool heater.  Finally, they took each piece of wooden trim away from the windows and doors.

When the first layer of re-usable stuff was taken out, they rolled up the carpets and peeled back the sheetrock.  That stuff got tossed into a dumpster - I guess one can't reuse it no matter how much one wishes to.  Then they stripped out the wiring and the plumbing - any metal or plastic was sent to the recycling center.  The wooden studs were removed, nails taken out, and the 2x4's stacked for reuse.  The windows were removed carefully and stacked against a wall.  The fireplaces in the upstairs bedrooms had their fascias removed and were taken out whole - destined to heat another's home.

And then they went to work on the roof.  They brought in a genie, and started pulling off the shingles.  As for the decking - who knows?  It's pretty old and rotten.  At the moment, they still haven't started deconstructing the pool or the huge fireplace in the living room - those are going to take special attention, I would imagine.  And so it goes.

And then ... the indoor pool.  Welp, that bad boy didn't even fit through the door, so:

It's like, hot tub sized!  But destined for the dumpster.

We have a meeting with the builder and the architect tomorrow - perhaps we'll have the building permit by then!

Greenly Yours,

Parker

PassivHaus: Good for the Planet

Dear Tree-Huggers,

We're still in the demo phase, and it's coming along.  The permit has been granted to take the house apart, but we are still awaiting final approval on the construction permit.  Until we start actually building, I will post about our design process, which took all of last year.  After hours of meetings, hundreds of emails and phone calls, and conversations that went from fun and easy to tense and angry, we have this plan:

Thar she blows.

We chose Park City Design Build because of their experience with super-insulated, energy efficient homes.  We are fans of green building, and we love our earth, so we want something that not only looks good, but feels comfortable and doesn't have a huge carbon footprint.

PassivHaus began in Europe, and grew out of the philosophy that our houses should not waste energy to heat or to cool.  Because the typical American home is not only too big, it's also constructed inefficiently, this means reforming the way we build.  Passive houses tend to be smaller, but they also have to be oriented to take advantage of the sun as a cheap and plentiful heat source, they have better windows, and they have to be super-insulated.  Of course, a total seal on a house means that no air can get in or out.  Which means they also have to have an energy recovery ventilator, or "ERV," which works to exchange the stale, dead air from inside the house with fresh air from outside.  In doing so, it also recaptures the heat so we don't waste excess energy.

Getting a home PassivHaus certification is difficult and expensive, so we won't be pursuing certification.  However, we have been researching green building practices for a long time, and are adopting many of the PassivHaus methods for our build.  Many of these practices have become mainstream in the last 20 years, like in-floor radiant heating.  Others, however, are still fairly new to home builders.  There are many, many ways to make a home more efficient, but at the end of the day, the budget constrains us.  We can only do so much, and we have to pick and choose the features that we'll include.  At the moment they are these:

• concrete floors with in-floor radiant heat
• triple paned windows with super efficient seals (they're called "tilt/turn")
• energy recovery ventilator (ERV)
• exterior solar shading

In addition to the requirement that we build green, we also gave Andrew one big constraint:  We are NOT going to totally knock down the house.  We are going to use the foundation and the first floor, and all of the major structural wooden beams that currently exist.  This means using the existing footprint of the house.  There are some downsides to this plan - mainly that the southern exposure, which is the best one for passive solar gain, faces the neighbor.  However, being budget constrained we are saving a lot of money by doing it this way.

It's cute, right?  I am anxious papa at the moment, as this has been an extra long gestation (think elephantine) and now it's finally about to come true!

A shot from the road.  UEA Break!

Greenly Yours,

Parker

Demo Shots

Dear Tree-Huggers,

I feel like making a mostly pic-oriented post.  Which is great, because I just so happen to have LOTS of pics to share with you.  And they are ... (drumroll please) ... the house DURING demo!  Please to enjoy.

from the street

from the northeast

from the northwest

from the west (check out the awesome backyard!)

back of the garage

front of garage

front entrance

wow, right?

just, wow.

why can't we just burn this place down and save some money on the demo budget?

an example of the fabulous Santa Fe inspired decor

the fun and funky kitchen

the fabulous swim spa

... aaand there you have it.  I hope you had a nice time.

Greenly Yours,

Parker

The Beginning

Dear Tree-Huggers,

Welcome to Parker Place.  Here, I'm going to be blogging about the renovation of my new house.  We have worked with Park City Design Build for the past year to create a design.

We acquired this property last year, and rented it to skiers whilst the design was gestating.  It was originally built as a retreat house for a corporation called CDR.  The best way to describe it is that it ... was a party house. Downstairs was the standard kitchen, living and dining, but it also came equipped with a giant custom fireplace, a heated swim spa, and a pool table. Upstairs was divided into four separate hotel suites, each with their own kitchenette and bath.  The good news is that it has VIEWS all around that are TO DIE FOR.

The clients.

Yeah.  It's gonna be a project.

I plan to blog as often as I can about how the construction process is coming.  Check here for updates and photos.  And if you're lucky, I may invite you to the housewarming party. (Will it happen in June?  Who's to know!?)

Greenly Yours,

Parker