Heat Goes on First Time and other details

The temperature dropped below 62F inside for the first time this year. A combination cloudy weather and lack of cooking drove the fall in temperature while a sick kid, and a wife raised near pineapple farms, drove the raising of the thermostat..........ok, but just one day. A warm weekend is forecast.

I'm continuing to fail getting a whole house electric meter working. The Blue Line Power Cost Monitor is supposed to be fastened outside on the electric meter and then read and transmit wirelessly to a indoor station. Why? Because we can....or thought we could, but so far we can't. I had hoped to be able to nail down what the hardwired and 220V appliances were using (dishwashers, dryers).

The average 12 month oil usage pre-construction was 1300 gallons between the two units.
The June 2008 - June 2009 oil usage was 738 gallons. This was the construction year that started in October and included full removal of roof and siding and windows and doors, and contractors trapsing into and out of the house. The insulation itself was not completed until mid-January. This year should be better, because it couldn't be worse. If we are able to upgrade our heating system with a smaller unit, it could be much better. We'll keep you informed.

Mass. Dept of Energy Resources Commissioner Philip Giudice took his first tour of the house (see VIP link to right for photo)

Testing the Heat

With temperatures dipping below 40 F for the first time this year, we experienced our first heating events.
Unit 1 has an oil fed steam boiler which produces both heat and hot water. The hot water component has never shut down, but the heat has been effectively off since March. The thermostat dropped low enough to kick on the steam heat for the first time October 14.

Unit 2 has an oil fed steam boiler, but since November, hot water has been moved to a tankless in-line system. Without it's hot water component the boiler has slept since March. Boilers hate that. The Unit 2 is thermostat driven, but it's been manually shut off as well. Today we turned the unit on for a test, not entirely sure that the boiler was going to be in the "mood" to be "on"........but our worries were misplaced.......our lovable boiler jumped to action and pumped out 30 minutes of heat. We switched the unit back off, hopefully for a few more weeks.

We'd like to keep the heat off until sometime in November.
Temperature October 16
Outside: 35 F
Inside: 65 F

The final buttoning up

So many tiny projects to finish up. Can you bear with me as I just quickly run through them? They may look small, but they still included contractors tromping through the house to use the bathroom.

New back steps new back trim........who likes to paint?

Drywalling all 3 basement entrances (1 for each unit + the exterior entrance) covering the spray foam......because we're worth it.

Installing the two new Velux skylights into the holes which had been roofed over since October 2008




Adding lead to seal the chimney. I love lead ! What the heck did we have instead of lead for the last 10 months. Probably best not to ask.

Enclosing the ugliest deck roof ever.



Rebuilding the entire front entrance with new cylindrical columns and Ipe decking that won't splinter. We have some Ipe guilt (comes from some warm place), but somehow we convinced ourselves that it was the way to go. Wait until you see the finished job.

And the beginning of the clean up.

Huffed and they Puffed.....

After months of insulation working through one of the worst winters in memory, we come to where the butter hits the toast. Sort of. We are performing the blower door test to see how tightly the house has become.

Larry Masland arrived from the Department of Energy Resources, Gary and David arrives from Synergy Construction, Kohto arrived from Building Science Corporation, plus two guys from Conservation Services Group which will be performing the blower door test.




For the blower door testing, we closed all windows and doors, put these lovely red frocks on the back doors, engaged the fans inserted within said frocks, and started sucking the air out of the house to reduce the internal pressure. For those of you concerned about such things, the fan was not of a power to make us gasp for air, boil our blood, bulge our eyes, or make us float around the room.......which would be more of a gravitional problem.....ANYWAYYYYYY

Here's what the test looked like.




How'd we do?
Here are the results.

The results are not official, but the house is around 60% - 65% tighter. The walls and the roof were not really serviceable. They were as tight as they were ever going to be. But air still flowed into the basement, and therefore somehow up into the house through the basement ceiling. With the fan drawing, with some smoke pens, with a few cans of insulation foam, we should be able to walk around the basement, and then track and kill each tiny ceiling leak. But this was not to be, as everyone's schedule would not permit. Big disappointment.

UPDATE: To answer the comment from Jerry Marin: "So what was the cfm? Enquiring minds want to know."
With the basement door open the leakage was 2825 CFMs (cubic feet per minute)
With the basement door closed the leakage was 2275 CFMs
(Explanation: These leakage rates are during a highly de-pressured test, not during normal usage.) The original pre-project leakage rate in August was 7800 CFM (more or less until I track down the exact test result).
The team was very pleased with the results, but I know that we can do better. I am confident that with 60 minutes we could bring that result south of 2000 CFMs. The disappointment here is that the basement ceiling is completely at hand and reachable. I will attempt to get some sort of de-pressurization using the building's 2 kitchen fans and 3 bathroom fans, get some incense "punks" (are they called "punks" anymore?), armed with a can of foam. Only problem is that we will never have a new reading of the results.