I thought about starting a blog, but a blog is something that is usually tended to daily, and it invites comment from others, and would require that I spend time each day answering questions or adding comments.

No, a blog just won't work for me, I've got too much going on all the time.   

So I'm calling this page "Greg's Scoop".

This will be a place where I can post current thoughts and crazy new ideas.

So here goes . . . . . .

Post #1, 11/22/08 - Dumb Carpenters and Solar Water Heating

Derek Foster has been with our company since 1997.  He is loyal, hard working, and smart; and he's that once-in-a-business-lifetime employee that all of us business owners hope to find someday.  I dare say that Derek is the only other person I know of who knows about as much as I do when it comes to building super-insulated homes.  It is a regular occurance for us to be riding in a truck together on the way to work, haggling over the best way to insulate, airtighten, heat, ventilate, flash, erect, cover, finish, frame, seal, align, etc... a house.  We call ourselves a couple of dumb carpenters.

Not too long ago we were riding along talking about active solar water heating.  The problem with these systems, we surmised, is that they are expensive and they don't provide all of the heat and hot water needed for a home, therefore there is a need for a backup heating system.  Actually, it's really not a backup heating system, because it will be used much of the time to heat the home, and it needs to be efficient, quiet, durable, sealed-combustion, etc... a real nice heating system.  So the customer is looking at the cost of the solar heating as a complete extra on top of the cost of an expensive heating system.

If the solar water heating system could do the whole job, there would be no need for an expensive backup/primary heating system.   The initial cost of the heating system would simply be the active solar system.   What a beautiful thing!  There must be a reason why this isn't, or hasn't been done.  Do you know of any home in Maine that gets 100% of its heat and hot water from the sun?  We don't.  So why not?   Can it not be done?

What if I told you that a couple of dumb carpenters, riding to work one day, figured out a way to build a solar water heating system that can provide 100% of the heat and hot water needed for a Maine home?  You might be fairly impressed by that, or you might think we're a couple of dumb carpenters who don't know what we're talking about.

I can't tell you for sure, but we think we've got it figured out, and we'll be working on the calculations and the system design over the next few months.   Heck, building is so slow right now, we've got the time to cook up something this special.  Meanwhile, if you're at all interested in having a new home built that is completely 100% solar, please drop me a line and let me know.  I'll pass it along to Derek.  We'd love to hear your thoughts, it will give us something to chatter about on our next ride to work.

Post #2, 11/22/08 - Is too much ever enough?

Here I am, just four days since posting my first post to "The Scoop" and I just had to post again.  Derek and I insulated an attic today.  This attic is in a new home we're building in Montville.   It's a small home, about 1100 square ft., one-level, built on a Monolithic Insulated Slab Foundation with radiant floor heating, and it has a perfect attic for insulating with Cellulose insulation (my favorite insulation).   I got to be the attic crawler today and Derek loaded our machine.

I had calculated that at 30" depth, and 1.6 pounds per cubic ft. (the settled density of cellulose), that we would need 155 twenty-five pound bags of cellose, or about 3875 pounds total.  So maybe it was late at night when I was doing the calculations, because I'm sitting here right now doing it again, and I come up with 4400 pounds needed, which would explain why we needed to have more bags delivered!  RRRRRRR!

As Derek fills the machine, one bag at a time, he keeps track of how many bags he's gone through, and up in the attic, I'm keeping track of what percentage of the attic is complete.  About 1/3 of the way through we both realized that we were not going to have quite enough insulation to keep the depth that we wanted.  This is when "The Discussion" started.

"Should we order more"?  "Can we even get any more, they must be pretty busy today, the day before Thanksgiving"?  "Do we really need to get any more, couldn't we just put a few less inches in and make it work"?   "How much less would it be"?  Derek - scribbling calculations with a pencil on the attic access box (standing on a ladder with his head stuck up through the hole) while I'm crunched over in the dusty attic, on the phone with our supplier.  "No, they can't deliver, they're already behind schedule with deliveries".  I call another supplier.   "So what would other builders do at this point"?  "How much insulation do you really need in an attic anyway, I mean isn't there a point where there's too much"?  They can deliver some to us in a couple of hours.  "You know how many times I've heard that once you get beyond 12" of insulation you're just wasting your money"?  "Great, I'll take it, send me thirty bags as quickly as you can".

"Why can't I do it, Derek, why can't I just let it go and spread out the insulation that we have and call it good"?  "OCD" Derek says.   Yup, OCD I guess.  But heck, I'm right up there, with the machine all set up and we're blowing a bag a minute into the attic.  Why the heck not put all that insulation in there?  At this stage of the game, it's so easy to do, that it just makes sense to me.

You just have to try to imagine what 30" of cellulose looks like in an attic.   It's impressive to say the least.  I've actually been called crazy for using the amounts of insulation that I do.  The general thinking in our industry is that 12" of fiberglass is adequate for attics.   Ridiculous!  That's not even near enough!  12" of fiberglass is rated at about R-38, but that doesn't take into account the dirty little secret that the Pink Panther doesn't want you to know about, that the R-value of fiberglass actually drops when cold air gets into it.  Imagine, the insulation you're counting on to stop heat loss in your home actually declines in performance exactly when you need it the most!  Don't use fiberglass. . . . . I'm getting a little off topic.

So I like to use tons of insulation.   I realize that there is a point where there actually can be too much; that there is a point where the payback for the money spent on the insulation takes too long to realize.  But I don't think that happens at 12", or even 24".   What if fuel oil goes to $5 per gallon?  What's the amount of insulation recommendation then?  And do I expect all my customers to have to run out and find someone to crawl into their attics and add more insulation because the price of fuel went up?  Ridiculous!  No, my customers will NEVER have to even think about adding insulation at a later date.   They won't have to spend time discussing it, researching what the proper amount should be (provided of course by "experts"), look for an installer, get a home-equity loan to have it installed, etc...  Nope, the homes I build are going to have enough insulation so my customers don't have to worry about it at all.   I hope others out there still call me crazy, it means I must be doing a good job.

By the way, the use of gobs of insulation is not a new development for me due to recent fuel cost trends.  I was promoting the use of R-100+ ceilings when fuel oil was 79 cents per gallon!

Post #3, 1/30/09 - Thirty Below, Eighty Above

Back a few weeks ago, the temperatures around here really plummeted.   The coldest morning at my house was 26 below zero F, at least that's what the thermometer on my truck rear view mirror said as I headed over to the Montville job.   When I got to Montville, the mirror said 30 below.   I walked inside the nearly complete new home that we were working on, and the inside was an expected 69 degree air temperature.  No surprise there.

The heating system is a propane fired hydronic boiler with radiant floor distribution in a monolithic insulated slab foundation.   The radiant floor is a "constant circulation" type of system, meaning that the water in the floor is circulating all the time, and there is a relay that turns on via the Tekmar control, and that turns on another circulator which brings hot water from the storage tank, through a flat-plate heat exchanger, which injects heat into the constant circulating radiant loop a little at a time.  What this means is that the temperature of the water going through the floor is maintained at a near constant temperature, only fluctuating slowly (over many hours), by half-degree increments to compensate for inside and outside temperature fluctuations.  So when you see the water temperature of the floor in this system, it is what it is.  It's not sporadically low or high because the heat was cycling on or has been off for a while, the water temp in this system is telling you what is needed to maintain the current air temperature, based on the outside temperature.  See what I'm getting at here?  You will.

I walked over to the hydropanel to see what the water temperature was, and to my great delight, and astonishment, the temperature was a steady 80 degrees!!!   Now I know that some of you reading this will probably not understand the significance of this, but some of you will.  This is remarkable.  This home, which isn't even one of our super-insulated homes, is able to maintain a 69 degree indoor air temperature (unoccupied), with 80 degree supply water temperature, when it was thirty below zero!!!   I have to use exclamation points for this!!!!  

I could go on and on here about the detailed work that went into this house that resulted in this kind of performance, and why there is such a difference between a DCC home and all the other "well insulated" homes being built out there, even though they might look just the same, and have similar specifications and prices, but I'll save that for another time.  What I would like everyone to think about right now though, is how easy this home would be to heat with solar heated water!!   Also please consider how calculations are currently being done to figure how large a solar water heating system has to be, based on homes that do not perform as well as the Montville home, and how that would impact the size and complexity of the solar heating system . . . . . And you begin to realize why, as we're driving along to our next job, Derek and I have this nagging, common-sensical feeling in our backs, as we ponder how easy it should be to heat one of our homes with solar.  100%.

Post #4, 2/3/09 - Back To Solar

With fuel costs down, there seems to be less interest in alternative energy again.  When will we learn?  We haven't made much progress on the calculations, but I did have an hour long conversation with my friend Pat Coon from Revision Energy.   They were right in the middle of moving, so he wasn't able to use the new modeling program they have yet.  He did however throw some figures at me.  

Based on the Gatewood Home fuel usage; which is 550 gallons of propane annually for all heat and hot water for a 2000 square ft. home with lots of glass, 9' ceilings, two occupants, super-insulated on one of our monolithic slab foundations; it would take 300 evacuated tubes and one to two thousand gallons of storage!!   Now, that's a BIG system!!  For what it's worth, Derek and I don't think this is accurate.  Pat was just throwing that out there.  He based it on another system which was producing 650btu's per day per evacuated tube, and I think he was figuring heat only (he backed out some for the domestic hot water).   He said he'd have to do more calculating to see if that was even close.   It seems huge to us.  

Both Derek and I really think that there's a lot more btu's available IF (and these are the IF's) you have enough storage, and IF that storage offers a good Delta T.  We really question the figure of 650btu's per day per tube.  How was that figured?  What kind of a system was really in place that produced that?   It seems to us that the amount of heat you can get out of a tube would depend a lot on the Delta T of the exchanger.  If you're heating a 100 gallons of water with a panel of evacuated tube collectors, the water temp is going to come up pretty quickly.  It stands to reason that the heat transfer from the hot solar water to the tank water (via the exchanger in the tank, or the coil) would be greatest in the begining, when the tank water is coolest, and then the transfer rate would decrease as the tank temperature came up closer to the solar water temperature.   This is the Delta T (difference in temperature)that we're talking about.  But if you had 1000 gallons of water, it would take a lot longer to bring the water temperature up, and the transfer rate would stay much higher for much longer because the Delta T would be much greater for much longer.  This would have a significant impact on the overall efficiency of the system.  We're not sure if this is being taken into account with the modeling programs, or the real-world information that is currently available.  

Consider this.  If most homes out there need 100 or 110 degree water through a radiant floor to maintain indoor air temperature when it's very cold outside, that would mean that the water in the solar storage tank would need to be maintained at or above those temperatures.  Whereas in a DCC home, the temperature needed is only 73 - 80 degrees, the temperature could be maintained much lower.  Not only is this easier for the solar water heating system to maintain, but it means that there would be a greater difference between the tank temperature and the solar water temperature (Delta T), resulting in even greater efficiency of heat transfer, which means the solar heating system wouldn't have to be as big.

These are the types of things that keep us chattering on our rides to and from work every day.  Our common sense tells us that there must be a way to economically build a solar water heating system that can provide 100% of the heat and hot water in a Maine home.   A DCC home of course!!!

I suspect that even after all the calculations are done and we've talked about this til we're sick of talking about it, that in the end we'll need to find a customer willing to gamble some money on one of these systems, and let Derek and I loose on actually building one to see how it performs.  There would be no better way to determine how our ideas would work than to just do it.   Anyone out there game for this?

What's the topic of my next post?  Check back and see.   I'm thinking maybe we'll look into South facing glazing and whether it's a net heat loss or net heat gain.   : )

Or, we'll explore how Mass affects heat loss . . . . or does it?

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