Closing in on Closing in

WIndows arrived, clients moved in, weather’s been good and we have gotten a lot done on the little house. Here is a quick summary of the latest progress. The window bucks are in (they are the rough openings within the rough openings, they bridge the space between the two walls so we can seal around the windows and keep insulation from later leaking out), interior walls are built, at least the one’s that don’t have some finish cabinet detail that integrates with them, temporary stairs are in all the way to the roof, so it isn’t such a chore or a hazard to move between floors. The loft is framed, but due to its interaction with the finished walls the deck on the loft is partial and temporary. Most of the housewrap it on, we are still waiting on the roofers to put the membrane in before we finish the wrap. The grading around the house is done, making the future work of siding easier and safer, and opening up the exterior site work like driveway, walkways, bottle wall and pizza oven.

The bottle wall and pizza oven are just teasers, we’ll talk about them later. Since I wrote that first paragraph the weather has changed for the wet, and really what I feel like I have been spending my time doing is sweeping the water off the plywood roof deck after each rain and shopping for obscure plumbing parts and energy-efficient appliances and fixtures. The plumbing parts and efficient appliances are actually related, and I will get to that, the sweeping of the roof is just my 15 minutes of anti Zen, where I scream in my head about roofing material that is apparently lost in Utah.

Refrigerators and Bidet seats

The master bathroom in the house we left last year had a bidet. If we were to compile a list of the things that have been missed living in the rental and especially those that have garnered comment the bidet would be very high. The small house doesn’t have space for a free-standing bidet, leaving a bidet toilet seat as the only option. Bidets that are added to toilets have a wide range. The simplest are essentially kitchen sprayers tapped to the supply for the toilet that one uses manually to wash, with cold water. At the other end are add-on bidet toilet seats that cost over a thousand dollars and have remote controls to direct such things as the opening and closing of the lid, the desired style and temperature of spray, the temperature of the seat and a fan to blow warm air to dry one’s self. I am sure it is amazing, and a level of luxury that would make me feel both sublime and sheepish at the same time, but the sticking point for me with the high-end bidet seats was that the warm water for the wash is generated in the seat in a little boiler, a little on demand electric water heater dedicated to washing your bottom. Since the design for the bathroom where the bidet top is going would have me sitting literally 18″ from 100 gallons of water heated by the sun the idea of heating cold water with a 1800 watt boiler was unconscionable. Simpler bidet seats are available, non-electric and typically cold water only. Cold water only, though, was, for some in the household as much a non-starter as little boilers. The solution came with a mixing valve placed in the wall near the toilet. Hence the search for obscure plumbing parts.  Hot water from the water heater, is mixed with cold to a temperature readable in centigrade (by us it will be done by feel, how hot is 45 deg celsius anyway?). The top is made in Italy, but available (kind of) in the US, is reasonably attractive, and best of all doesn’t require an electrical rough in for the toilet (how did we get there, unless, of course for composting toilets).

This is the point in the job where any decisions about finishing items that haven’t been made need to be thought about seriously. Being contractor, designer, and client gives us a little leeway, shortening the communication loop considerably. But even with these added advantages, now is the time so we have been busy finding appliances and fixtures and tile and other stuff. With one of our goals being achieving net zero, and the efficiency through insulation and other building envelope components set, my focus has shifted to the items that use electricity in the building. Here is an embarrassing admission, I have bought a lot of things for a lot of houses and as much as I have considered the efficiency of the structure itself I haven’t paid much attention to the efficiency of what goes in the house. The rubric on this project though has forced me to consider every use of power, not just the big things that are built into the house, but the many things that plug into the wall or hang from the ceiling and use power day in and day out. Things like bidet seats and refrigerators.

Early on in the design our strategy for refrigeration was a fridge only upright placed in the kitchen like any standard fridge and a chest freezer hiding under the island to provide freezer space that would be accessed by rolling the freezer out and sliding it back when we were done. When I type this out it doesn’t sound like a great plan, but it has its merits. Using standard appliances the combination of a 20 cubic foot fridge only and a 7 cubic foot freezer provides a lot of cold storage, especially freezer space, with an annual energy consumption of around 500 kWh. Compare that to an efficient 25 cubic foot side by side which uses about 650. If you substitute the standard fridge for a super efficient one like a Sunfrost, you can get the total consumption down to about 400 kWh, but that combo costs about $2500 more, ouch. For that same 400 kWh of energy a 21 cubic foot fridge with freezer will provide a little less storage for about $900. No ice maker, no through the door water. After considering all these different options we chose the 21 cubic foot fridge with a top freezer, adding to the energy and cost savings of that choice, eliminating the chest freezer under the island allows us to wring a little more storage out of the kitchen.

Why are we are quibbling about 100 kWh of electricity, which costs about $12? Because our goal is to balance our electrical generation with our consumption and the small PV array that will fit on the roof will only give us about 3000 kWh per year. So 100 kWh saved is roughly 3%,  but going through the house item by item the difference between an efficient appliance or fixture and less efficient ones really starts to add up. 100 kWh for the fridge, 100 for three ceiling fans, 400 for a dryer (in this case a heat pump condensing one), bath fans, a TV, vent hood, washing machine (where you have the opportunity to choose to save water as well). It is pretty easy to shave 1000 kWh a year off the household energy use, and in most cases it doesn’t cost any more. The heat pump dryer is an exception, that costs more, but like heat pump water heaters the jump in efficiency is so huge it is hard to justify not doing it. The Energy Star website makes quick work of looking for efficient appliances; it’s not perfect but is a good place to start, and it has listed some things that I would never have found otherwise.

For us the 1000 kWh saved might just let us squeak by in meeting our goal, but 1000 kWh saved for say, a million US households, would shift the arrow in the right direction to meet goals way more important than our little flight of fancy.