Category — musing

On the one hand, we’re hopefully building a house that can manage (maybe with some smart sensors and actuators, and a few well-positioned trees and seasonal shades) to use passive airflow to cool and maintain a livable temperature throughout the year.

But Hurricane Ike is reminding me that we need to consider humidity as well. One of the difficulties of maintaining old books, let alone artwork, is keeping mold from encroaching. In our case, many of the books are already moldy to some extent, and we plan over years to do conservation on them.

So we should think about whether there’s a “dry room” in the basement, or whether air conditioning will be enough to dry the internal house air, or whether we want some sort of special plan for the library or the storage section in the basement.

I don’t know the answers, I admit. But the northeast wind right now reminds me, by plastering the windows with heavy rain.

[cross-posted to Notional Slurry]

We’ve made a lot of progress on the Nudge project recently, and it’s time to think seriously about potential applications. Infrastructure is in place for automatic discovery of structures, algorithms, patterns, models, equations… but when you’re building a tool it’s all just play-talk until you consider some interesting challenges and see if you can frame them readily as something your tool seems useful for.

At breakfast yesterday Barbara and I spent some time riffing on various “hard” design and optimization problems that it would be nice to solve. And since we’re thinking of our ubiquitous and time-stealing house, her thoughts went towards HVAC.

In particular, the esoteric (but economically important) calculation of how to size air cooling equipment for a building. The standard — that is, the Standard — is spelled out in Manual J, now in its eighth edition from the ACCA.

Here’s how it works, in principle: You want to build a house? You’ve got it designed, with floorplans and siting and what most folks think of as “design” done? Well, how large does your A/C system need to be?

A good salesman or contractor, especially one who doesn’t really care how much money you spend after you leave his care, he can pick something he’s familiar with that’s “big enough” to manage temperature control and ventilation and such, regardless of whether your house is super-insulated or what fancy-dancy windows you’ve got. Heck, that’s easy: the biggest you can afford.

If you press a professional contractor that this kind of approximation isn’t exactly what you had in mind when you set out to save energy costs and create a “smartish” house and save in both short and long-term, he can turn to Manual J to do a “proper” calculation.

Manual J is big. I haven’t seen the copy I’ve ordered from the library yet—and even that’s the abridged version—but I know that there’s a complex algorithmic calculation. The required cooling load calculation of a house depends on the size and position and material of windows, the overall envelope, the insulation, position, geographical location, foliage cover, exposed foundation, ceiling heights… loads of stuff you might consider “design variables” if you weren’t already holding a finished house plan in your hands. As far as I understand it, the contractor enters this information into an ACCA-designed spreadsheet, Excel stuff happens, and out pops a slightly less salesmanlike estimate of the HVAC needs of your house. And then you can refer to Manual S to pick out equipment.

Now looking at the ACCA description of the work, I’m seeing things like this:

MJ8 also accommodates homes that have exceptional architectural features and life style accessories such as:

• Dwellings that have limited exposure or no exposure diversity
• Homes with large south-facing glass area or rooms with unusually large glass area
• A thermally isolated solarium
• Customized internal load estimates
• …

And so on, for 561 pages, nominally.

Now you might be able to see where I’m heading by now, and you’d probably be right: That’s sounds like a nice place to slap a pattern discovery system.

And so I think we will.

But what I’m sitting here thinking about is the ACCA itself, and the social process that goes into eight consecutive editions of this sprawling empirical model. There must be reams of data… somewhere, and there must be reports and whitepapers and supporting evidence that makes clear the design process underlying the Manual J model (let alone everything up the Manual S (which is the highest-lettered I’ve seen so far).

As an indirect customer of the ACCA, I have to say it would be nice to have access to that data. To try to determine whether a simpler, clearer model might be more accurate and robust than this spreadsheet. A history of the models, a public record of how things are done. Oh, hell, maybe a conversation about what might actually be going on.

But I’m a dreamer, surely. Somebody has to pay for all that data collection. Not everybody is trained well enough to manage the complex calculations underlying the first-principles models or the empirical analyses. What would happen to standards of quality if anybody could chime in and criticize or amend something as important as these calculations?

After all, the goal of the ACCA is to make “the industry more successful.”

Nonetheless, I’d like to be considered a part of that industry, speaking as a technically astute consumer who pays their bills. I’m more successful whenever expertise is not masked by obfuscatory gravitas, when decisions can be clearly justified, when data can be re-used and expanded at will. When people can see what’s going on inside, and participate.

So I’m increasingly tempted to reach into the building trades, specifically through their multitudinous standards organizations, and start chipping away at some silo walls.

Probably the biggest expense item after the structure and the systems is the flooring. All I can say for sure is that I want hardwood in most areas, with perhaps something a bit more water/weather resistant in the entry-to-mudroom hall and the baths.

We drove out to the Chelsea Plank Flooring Outlet last week and got their current price lists (always dependent on availability, of course) and looked at their current line.

We really liked the Red River Birch (pictured at the left — ~$7/sq. ft.), and the “character” cherry (about the same price).

What we’re looking for is flooring in reddish tones, and maybe finishing each floor so that each level up is a lighter color. So we’d start in the basem lower-level with a brick-colored concrete (through-color or stained or both), and then use the same species with different finishes in the rest of the house.

However, CPF only offers pre-finished flooring, so that little design fillip might not work. (Nothing saying we have to use them.)

Alternatives to cherry (since I recognize that it is pretty soft): ash (~$5/ft reg, overstock at about 75% cost), red oak (>$5/ft).

Lyptus and bamboo (not offered by CPF) are also possibilities. The “Green” tradeoff here is sustainable growth vs. sourcing locally.

In any case, we’re looking at “character” grades, not select. Something with some life in it, that won’t make me feel bad when we walk across it.

After the reddish floor, I’d like maple cabinets with a natural finish (sort of yellowish).

It’s not exactly the “last minute” but as we’re getting closer to signing off on the preliminary plans, we’re double-checking that the various spaces are going to be like we envision (such as our non-vision vision will allow).

M’s bath

I sat M down and went over her suite. “You know there is no door between the bedroom and the bath, don’t you?” (This is not the first time we’ve discussed this.)

“What do you mean, no door? Why not? I never imagined there would be no door to the bath,” she responded.

Eventually we worked out that even though she’s been saying “whatever you think is best” what she means is “whatever you think, as long as it isn’t weird or too non-traditional.”

Therefore, we need a door to her bath.

Lower level

If we move the bath to the hallway near the stair, we don’t really need to have the hallway going east. The storage area can merge with the mechanical area (saves some wall space and a door). There may be space then to put in a darkroom behind the bar. (A darkroom needs power, water and ventilation, and enough space for a 3×3 enlarging table and a 3×6 wet area. I don’t expect to build the darkroom now — and any water/ventilation could be tied into the bath and/or bar.)

Fireplaces

All fireplaces should be raised-hearth, whether or not there’s a hearth there (I’m thinking of zero-clearance fireplaces).

I started playing around with the SketchUp model Bob sent the other day. It’s rough (for instance, there are no windows) but it gives us a good idea of the proportions of the various parts of the house — especially the exterior. As you can see, we’re working with a moderately-pitched roof (6/12 pitch) with longish overhangs. This is typical of midwestern farm houses (at least according to some of the books I’ve been looking at ) The jut out in the back is the screened porch underneath a roofed deck. The exposed rafters will probably have something translucent on them to let sunlight reach M’s private living room. To the east of the jut out is the main solar space (it’s protected from the harsh western sun but gets the nice southern rays).

When I was zooming and panning on the outside, I learned I could pretend to be a ghost and start walking around inside. After a few false starts (flying through the roof was interesting to say the least), I ended up in the kitchen. Ignoring the colors, I can start to imagine what it will be like standing in the dining area looking into the kitchen. I can see the stairs (good) and the laundry (not so good, but there’s a door, so that makes it good). At this point, the kitchen seems small, and will seem smaller once the upper cabinets are put in, but the size is deceptive — that’s about 19 feet of base cabinets (plus 11 ft of 12 inch deep cabs) and more than 22 feet of countertop (some 3 feet wide). The rounded end of the countertop is shown only as a line, and the refrigerator is shortened — it’s to the left of the mudroom doorway.

Next for me is to try to figure out if I can visit other rooms in the model. I find SketchUp to be really hard to use, and it doesn’t help that it keeps crashing whenever I try to do anything more than pan and zoom. I may take a few screen shots and color them up in Photoshop so I can start planning basic surfaces. We’re getting some ideas (more on that later), but it always helps to have something to look at.

Barbara’s been reading what sounds like a continuous stream of worrying “people stole stuff from my construction site” anecdotes. Copper wiring, copper plumbing, electronics, shingles. All kinds of stuff.

I know there must be insurance for that sort of thing, but since we’re building a smart house I find myself thinking more about tech: a few web cams and motion detectors scattered around the construction site would be fun.

But that begs the question: How would a wireless web cam stapled to a 2×4 in a framed house actually talk to anybody? Would we need to get cell service and burst images out when things are happening? Or could we get cable or phone service to a bare foundation? What about ham radio packet networks?

Interesting thoughts about “wild” ubiquitous computing. It’s easy in the suburbs, in the city. In the country, it feels like an open question.

When we first discussed having a library with Bob, he was dubious that what we really wanted a room full of books. “Most people who say they want a ‘library’ usually just want a couple of bookcases next to a fireplace.”

“No,” we said. “Have you seen Henry Higgins’ library? That’s what we want.”

(Though now that I see it again, I realize that his books are mainly on the second floor, with study space on the first. No matter, it’s the feel that we want. Without the piano.)

We have a lot of books. Really. Many of them are in crappy condition, to be digitized and moved on. Most, however, are not. There’s a mix of old and older books — and not so many new books because we’ve run out of space and really like the public library — in numerous categories. We’ve got art books and kook books and novels and cook books and gardening books and travel books and science books and technical books and… you get the picture. When we carted our books to the Netherlands, the books took up about half of our shipping container.

One thing Bob has mentioned a couple of times about the current plan is that we can change the size of the library, since it’s a separate room on its own foundation. (Possibly over a crawlspace, but given the amount of mechanical space we need, we might add basement. That’s a different issue, so I won’t go farther with it here.)

Well, how much space do we need? We need enough room for most of the books. I imagine there will be some fraction of the gardening and cooking books in the kitchen/dayspace, and M. will have her own (freestanding) bookcase, and the books-to-be-scanned will be in the basement lower level.

Right now we have about 100 feet of overcrowded bookshelves in our family room, and about 30 feet of overcrowded bookshelves in the living room, and about 15 feet of overcrowded bookshelves in our home office. Given the piles of books on the floors in each of these rooms, I’d guess there are another 30 feet of books that could go into cases if we had the wall space. (This is not including any of the DP books. ) Some of the “good” books will get sorted out, though the ones in the family room have been culled recently, so no space savings there.

Let’s say we’ve got 160 feet of keepable books. These are just the ones that are in view. There are more. Most of the cookbooks are packed. All of the kook books are packed. All 1500 vintage SF paperbacks are packed. Travel, science, folklore — all packed. Technical books are packed. And don’t get me started on the magazines. Our best guess is that about 2/3 of our keepable books are in storage. This means that we’ll need at least 450 linear feet of bookshelves in the library, probably more.¹ We will also need room for bound vintage newspapers, laid flat. We want to be able to highlight some of our special books.

We’ve been talking about how we’re going to arrange all these books. In our current house, we did it topically, and then alphabetically by author: fiction, art, gardening, and cooking in the family room; sf in the TV room; travel in the guest room, etc. This is convenient, but it takes up a lot of room. It’s more space-efficient to sort books by size, so within reason, that’s probably what we’ll want to do in the new library.²

I’m imagining that if we get enough wall space for the bookcases (setting aside some for a zero-clearance gas fireplace), we’ll have plenty of floor space for any desks or furniture we decide to include in the room.

I’ve been poring over the kitchen in E1, and also looking over lots of kitchen related magazines and websites. I think the size and the scale are going to work very well, but I think there will have to be some rearrangement of the appliances.

For instance, the cooktop in the open counter. It’s very handy for the cook to see the table, etc., but I don’t think that a downdraft vent will be able to handle Bill’s cast-iron-generated smoke and spatter. If it’s on the back wall, then we can use a chimney-type vent. Since it’s somewhat closed in, there’s less risk of cross-currents dragging crap over to the sitting area.

In addition, I’m envisioning the counter to be smooth — which means absolutely a drop-in range. Having it on the back wall means we could possibly use a free-standing stove, though that’s not what I’m showing in the sketch. Just in case we have a cooktop (still trying to see if induction is useable), I’ve added an oven/microwave cabinet to the west end of the wall cabinets. The fridge is on the east end — I’ve put in a cabinet-depth one. I recognize that I’m losing some wall cabinets, especially if there’s an oven cabinet, but remember the ones that are there are going to be really high.

I was browsing the Jan/Feb 2008 BHG Kitchen and Bath Ideas and saw a picture of what the back wall could look like (for form, not for finish, and ignore the front counter). The space is a bit longer (16 feet), so the free counter space would be about 1 foot less on each side of the cooktop.

This leaves the sink in the big counter to the south. Awesome setting-down space But where to put the sink? If it’s in the middle, there’s a possibility of collisions between someone at the sink and someone at the stove. So far, I’ve got it near the eastern end, centered between the fridge and the stove. Nice, tight triangle. Unfortunately, that leaves the oven/microwave way down at the other end of the space. Not quite sure how to handle that yet. Might be nice to find a similar-format kitchen somewhere to check this. Perhaps a trip to a kitchen design store is in order.

Considering one of my wishes is a space (not a breakfast bar) in the kitchen so I can chop and load cookie sheets and so forth while seated, I took out a bit of cabinetry at the eastern end so there’s knee space. This may not be the ideal place for it — I’ve also thought about maybe at the west end, but then it’s far from the sink.

Bill and I have been interested in tankless water heating ever since we lived in The Netherlands (this house is also the source of our desire for a deep tub). We had a small heating unit on the third floor which supplied the heat for the radiators as well as the (endless!) hot water for the bath and kitchen sink. The washing machine heated its own water and we didn’t have a dishwasher, so the hot water requirements outside of bath and space heating were really quite minimal.

Now, however, we’re looking at three and a half baths, an American-style washer, and a dishwasher. Only one tub, but it will be used daily assuming we keep our current schedule. Here’s the water use:

• Tub filler: 5-15 gpm (depending on the filler, which depends on the size of the tub)
• Shower: 2 gpm each (×3)
• Lavatories: 1 gpm each (×4) (maybe more, if I put a darkroom sink and a potting sink in one day)
• Washer:
• Dishwasher:

I’ve been reading about whole-house tankless systems, and I’m concerned that we won’t be able to find one that can handle two showers and a bath at (nearly) the same time. Or if it can, that it can handle just one lavatory sink (it seems that there is a minimum flow rate required for the thing to turn on).

We are also very interested in solar-heated water. We have an unobstructed view south (one of the reasons we chose the lot), so any collectors will be ideally situated. The thing that I’m confused about is how all of these systems might tie together.

Say we have a solar collector and a storage tank. Assume for the moment that the storage tank is non-backup, i.e. it doesn’t have a backup electric coil in it for when the sun is down. The storage tank feeds the tankless system with preheated water. In the summer, the tankless system is unlikely to fire, since the stored water is probably already at the desired temperature. (Question to ask: is it possible to have the input temperature be too high for the tankless?) But what happens in the winter? The sun isn’t quite as strong, and we have loads of cloudy days. This is just the time when we want to take long hot showers. Will the tankless system keep up? Do we size it assuming the storage water is basement temperature or well temperature? How does the well pressure system play in to it (assuming our pump is capable of providing the required gpm)?

Should I just forego the tankless and get a big (gas-fired) tank as the backup system, or should I get the electric-assist storage tank?

I’m thinking about this now because these choices have an effect on where the mechanicals would go in the basement, which well pumping system I choose, the electrical requirements, and the roofing. And probably others that I haven’t figured out yet.

Also, how does a softener system affect all the components? We definitely will need one. My mom’s played hell with her water heater, faucets and appliances (her coffee pot had to be replaced regularly). Was it just a bad softener design in her house?

Nothing has made me want to have some CAD software around lately like the master bath in the current plan. There’s something about it that’s not quite working for me, and I can’t seem to make it “go” with paper and pencil. Ah for the days when I could just pick up machines with a stylus and shove ‘em around a factory floor until they fit…

We’re spoiled in this house with three full baths upstairs, two of them en suite. If one of those full baths had been on the first floor, we’d probably not be looking to build a new house. Having 3½ baths makes sense if there’s one full bath on each floor, so the number of baths in the house is good as it is. I certainly don’t want to add a second one upstairs.

What I like so far about the plan is the possibility for the studio to access the bath without going through the master bedroom. It gives us more flexibility when having overnight guests (not common, but it does happen occasionally).

There are some things, however, that I didn’t realize until very recently I would like to have:

• A toilet separated from the tub and shower. Some things are better private.
• A shower big enough for two people. With two (independent) shower heads.
• A soaking tub oriented so natural light falls on the reading material.
• A tub with 18-20″ overflow and a sloping back, set so there’s a seat/ledge near the head (this implies a drop-in or tile-in tub)
• One sink with a moderately large vanity. Our current bath has a pedestal sink for floor space reasons, and it’s not bad, but we don’t have room for shavers and contacts and brushes, etc.

As for the anteroom, well, I can’t figure what I might do with it, other than pile stuff in it. Maybe put in a cedar closet, accessible from the master closet?