A Year in a Net Zero Energy House

EV Makers: Here my tiny voice

2011-01-23T06:57:00.000-08:00

I am proud to say I have not owned a car since 1989 (and technically I think my parents owned that one). Yes, I have the benefit of living in Manhattan for the past 17 years and have had a walking commute for most of that. However, we do often travel outside the city esp. now with our upstate place. Zipcar and rentals have filled that need. However, they are either convenient and overpriced (Zipcar, Manhattan rentals) or inconvenient and cost effective (suburban rentals). In addition, fossil fuels are not everlasting and pollute. I have spare solar energy and I want an electric car.

Car industry (traditional and upstarts) I'd like to list my EV wants so that at least some of this trickles into gen 2 (the first I'll consider buying):

- 150 miles of range on a full charge (my infrequent but typical trips are 100 miles)

- 50% recharge time in 5 mins; 80% recharge time in 15 mins; and 100% in 30 mins

- Swappable batteries and a network of swap and charge stations (at least on major highways)

- Four door hatchback in roughly cross-over size (I don't really care that much about looks...with technology its always function over form)

- Solar panels on the roof and wherever else you can put them for battery refill; I've also heard of small wind generators that might apply...look into that

- Home charging stations that don't cost over $1,000 including installation and are based on a standard so it outlives the life of the car

- Under $30k all in

That's about it. We're not that far off right now. Get on it.

Net Zero for 2010 by 73kwh

2011-01-16T08:15:00.001-08:00

We made it. We were net positive on our energy use for 2010 by a tiny 73kwh. That's 1.25% (73/5799 kwh used). I guess my engineering work on sizing the solar relative to the geo and general usage was pretty accurate. But maybe it wasn't.

The tweak I made back in Nov raising the geo output temp for the radiant from ~95 degrees to ~105 degrees has initiated big savings. Last winter, we had days when it was cold where the geo ran almost the whole day (both in residence and away). It wasn't because it was struggling to keep up as much as the temp of the water feeding the radiant wasn't high enough to warm the house to the target temp. Thus, the geo kept running as the thermostats were never satisfied. The 95 degrees in the floor was not making our main zone 70 when it was under 20 degrees outside (and wasn't keeping up with 53 when it was below 10 degrees when we were away).

Raising the output temp by 10 degrees raises runtime energy use but only about 10-20% from what I can see. However, its had a dramatic effect on total runtime. The geo can now hit the interior temp even when its below zero (as it was a few days ago) and doesn't run nearly as much. Early signs point to about a 40% energy savings during this Jan compared to last. Projecting that out over the year we'll have upwards of 600-800kwh to spare this year. Looks like just the right amount to power an electric car ;)

Heading Toward Zero

2010-12-29T07:35:00.001-08:00

Coming to the last few days of 2010 spending it at the house. Looks like we'll be right at net zero for calendar 2010. December has been colder than average with few days above freezing but a good deal of sun for solar gain. Ambient away energy use was around 20-25kwh/day as we keep the place at 53 when not here. That is on target for my rough formula of 1kwh per HDD.

Since we've been here, we've been using about 65kwh/day of which about 45 is geo heating. We keep it at 69 (I'd be fine with 66-68 but others have differing opinions). That still maintains the 1kwh per HDD. As usual, we've been using the fireplace at night which generally carries the heating load until midnight. Overnight, the geo's runs have been interesting. Its cycling on for 10-15 mins and then off for 5-10 mins and stretches those off cycles out as it gets further into the night. Meaning that, even though the temp is dropping, its mostly bringing the slab up to temp which heats into the morning. Since I turned the geo target temp up to 105 its performed much better at getting to and maintaining 70 when we need it. I haven't actually noticed much more energy usage vs. when it was lower last winter. So our cycles are longer and less frequent when it needs to heat the slab from relative cold (when we're not here and maintaining 53) and shorter and more frequent when keeping the slab up to temp at 70. I also insulated several of the radiant pipes in the mechanical room which is now not as hot and thus transferring that energy into the slab.

One interesting observation was that I thought we were saving a couple of cycles and thus energy by using the fireplace at night. That might not be linear savings. The reason is that the geo doesn't end up running for 6-8 hours at night and the concrete slab gets cool (except around the fireplace). When the temp does drop after midnight, the geo has to cycle longer and more frequently to pick up the slab temp. One night I didn't use the fireplace. When I checked energy use for geo in the morning, I found it was about 20% lower than each of the previous few nights where the temp was consistent around 20 degrees outside. Checking the run pattern, it cycled on notably less and that could only be due to it only having to maintain the slab temp vs. a pickup due to the fireplace keeping it off. Thus, geo and radiant do work if you let them. Now I'm wondering if I should only use the fireplace when we need quick pickup. Doubtful since the aesthetic and entertainment value is still so high.

Heat through the fall

2010-11-23T04:35:00.000-08:00

I've been happy that we didn't need heat but for two days we were in residence at the house during Oct. I think I've zeroed in on the right ambiant temp, 53 degrees, for when we're not there. In fact, during Nov, the heat has only run 2 or 3 days and in single, light 2-3 hr cycle on those days. Overall, I know this will be significant kwh savings during this mid-Oct to mid-Dec utility billing cycle. Last year, we used 1,000 kwh during this period. To date for this period, we're actually net-positive by 100 or so kwh. That'll quickly go away this week but we certainly won't use 1,000 by mid-Dec. I'm guessing we'll be more in the 400-500kwh range. That'll leave us with about 1,000 kwh credit with the utility from summer generation. Even though we'll be up for the holidays through the end of the year, that should easily be enough to be net positive for the year. I'm guessing we'll have 300-500kwh left over depending on how meak Dec solar generation is (yes, we can sneak out 200kwh generation in Dec).

Now that we're up here for Thanksgiving week, I'm focused on learning and optimizing for in-house use. Yes, we're sized for and able to achieve net zero partially because we're only here about 25% of the time. While that does use less heat overall, its not 25%. The most expensive heating cycle is heating from 53 to 70 when we're coming up. I've made this better by only heating the bedrooms at first and using the fireplace for pick-up but it still generally uses 50kwh to warm the place when the outdoor is 35-40 degrees. Once the house is warm, it generally only cycles overnight in this temp range and thus only uses 12-16kwh per day. Our non-heat usage is generally 15-20kwh. At least one principle of Passive House design is true of solar gain and ambiant heating sources keeping the place warm during the day.

I've been using the fireplace at night and there is a benefit of saving probably one cycle from that heat (5kwh or so). However, the downside is that it allows the radiant slab to get cool and thus the geo has to work harder when it does cycle on. I'm guessing there's only a small net and, if we didn't enjoy the fire so much, I probably would forgo most nights.

The net is, being here full time doesn't increase energy usage for heat as much as one might think. I'm guessing it is double but not 200% as per our usage of the house would indicate. We'll sanity check those numbers after this week.

Weekend Heat Experiment

2010-10-19T05:42:00.001-07:00

This weekend was the first opportunity (cold enough to warrant heat) to experiment with some strategies to pickup the heat in the house from cold with the least amount of energy used. Fortunately, our geo system was fixed on Friday so we had all resources available. The plan was to turn the geo on and to use the fireplace at the same time for quick pickup. When we got to the house, the indoor temp was 57 and outdoor was in the mid-40s (declining to upper 30s overnight). The geo was started around 4pm and I started the fire around 5pm. I kept the fire at a decent mid burn. We got pick-up of about 4 degrees an hour in the main room (about 35x20 and 12-16 ft ceiling) primarily from the fire. Thus, by 8pm we were in the upper 60s and comfortable.

By that time the geo had the slab warming up (it takes 2-4 hours to heat the concrete slab to noticeably warm from cold). It then heated the bedrooms since the draft warmth from the main room into the bedrooms is only minimal. Those were in the upper 60s by bed time and the fireplace warmth lasted most of the night.

However, the geo did run more then I would have expected overnight. There was one anomaly affecting this as one electronic valve controlling radiant to the basement floor appears to be malfunctioning and always open thus diverting hot water there. However, this longer run most likely due to the main room slab (which is huge) still needing to warm up as the fire pushed the thermostat to stop calling for heat early in the evening. One thing I'll do next time is to not turn the geo on for the main room but just for the bedrooms while I'm heating up with the fire. The main room draws most of the hot water from the geo and thus is not heating the bedrooms optimally. Focusing the heat in the bedrooms will pick them up quickly while the fire warms the main room. I want to see this effect as the one downside is that the main room slab will remain cold (other then right around the fire) and at some point in the night will have to be heated which will be a long cycle. That's inevitable so I'm hoping that the run is only 2-4 hours to warm the slab and pick up the one degree. Geo is much better at maintaining temp then raising it rapidly.

We used about 100kwh total from Friday 4pm-Sunday 2pm. From historical usage, we know that about 30-40kwh was due to non-heating items (cooking, DHW, washing machine, etc.). Thus, 60kwh was for heating. Too high for this temp and time of year. Hoping to keep that around 30kwh.

Summer "Netting"

2010-10-15T09:22:00.000-07:00

This summer we netted 2,440kwh of electricity to carry us through the winter heating season. This was 740 hours more than last summer. This was partially due to higher generation this summer (about 220kwh) as July in particular was a banner month vs. a rain filled summer '09. However, the additional 520kwh was purely from conservation.

First, we still had some trailing construction work last summer so usage was higher due to that but it was minimal. It has mostly come from learning about our usage patterns in no small measure from our TED whole house monitoring system. That's really provided deep insight into what appliances use what amount of energy. We've done things like only use one hot water heater in the summer (and probably will continue to into winter except when we have overnight guests) and using our oven more intelligently (cooking items at the same time or consecutively to leverage the previous cooking heat already in the oven).

And so far this fall we haven't had to use the geo heat (and good thing since that's still being repaired). The temps have been warm, we've been getting good passive solar gain, and the fireplace has supplied a nice pick-up for cooler nights. I'm hoping not to have to use regular geo heat until mid-Nov on our way to a net zero year.

Question about Passive Houses during Transitional Months

2010-09-07T15:19:00.000-07:00

One thing that's notable about super tight, super efficient houses is that how you live in them or "lifestyle" is different (at least to me as I think about these kinds of things). I'm not talking about lifestyle changes like "sorry honey, you have to put on the sweater and wool socks as we're keepin' in at 62 in Dec" or "we'll be 'shower optional' on Thursdays". Its how you experience the house leveraging the external environment to dictate the internal one.

One of the incorrect early approaches to super tight houses was to limit glazing, air flow, and any other way the exterior environment would affect inside. Newer houses like ours not only embrace the external environment, we're somewhat dependent on them to function efficiently. The simplest example of this is in passive solar gain where you're using the lower sun in fall/winter/spring to give you a heat gain. However, there are more subtle ones like having east and west ventilation (where winds tend to blow at most times) for summer cooling. It also brings the outdoors in which is the biggest reason to have a house out in the woods.

This weekend, we had gorgeous weather upstate including Sunday night getting down to 46 degrees. We had the house wide open all day when it was 80 out (house was a comfy 75). Once the sun went down, the temp dropped quickly as there was no humidity. We immediately closed up most doors and windows to preserve our natural heat and that it did.

However, this prompted a question in my mind about Passive Houses. When you're in the transitional fall/spring seasons where sunny daytime temps are in the 60/70s and you want to open some doors and windows to enjoy it, are you restricted from doing that in a passive house given there can't be that level of heat loss at night (say if it drops into the 30/40s)? The house will perform if you keep it closed up but is that the lifestyle in a Passive House? Are you so dependent on heat gain during the day that you can't risk having natural ventilation in the transitional months? Anyone out there with a take on this?

That said, even our house is tricky during the transitional months. In the scenario described above, we'd probably have a few windows and doors open during the day and get nice solar gain on our concrete slab. We'd close them as the sun went down. Most likely the house would stay warm passively but in the case of a strong drop or that we forgot to close something early enough, we have the geo system there to warm us up.

Admittedly, this is a scenario where radiant is not at its best. Periodic and quick warm-ups aren't great with radiant. It takes 1-2 hours just to get the slab up to temp. When that happens for a couple of hours and then turns off for several hours the slab cools. Then it has to warm it all again. I experimented with turning the thermostat down in this scenario which made it run less but some in the household were cool at times. This year, I plan on making liberal use of the fireplace (cut up about a cord this weekend!) and will even try electric space heaters that can warm a 500 sq ft area quickly.

Passing 10Mwh

2010-09-07T04:48:00.001-07:00

I'm not that into arbitrary milestones but figured it was of note passing 10Mwh of solar generation this Labor Day weekend. We're about 19 months into our install. Performance has been notably above the estimate provided by the installer (I think he sandbagged so he didn't get calls asking why it was low) and 10-15% below optimal for the area (it's well below optimal for the latitude but that's pretty irrelevant as it doesn't take weather into account).

That 10-15% down was expected based on the solar pathfinder the installer did. We have one big oak that we wanted to save to the west of the house and from Sept through March it gives partial shade for about 60-90 mins each afternoon. Production Oct through mid-Feb was also below expectations as the low sun clipped some of the surrounding trees. I've been doing some thinning of the evergreen hemlocks to the south and west so we'll see how that helps. Fortunately, this summer was hot and dry so Apr-Jul met or slightly exceeded optimal (with July providing a new high point at almost 800kwh).

I have about 1100kwh banked with our utility. My estimate is I need about 1700 to be net zero for the year. Its a Sept+Oct race as Nov will start us back to being net positive for the month. I think my new heating strategy will both allow me to bank more in Oct and use less which I imagine will be the difference.

Re: Zipcar's True Economics

2010-08-30T11:38:00.000-07:00

As a result of my post regarding Zipcar's true economics, I received a call today from Brian who works at Zipcar. First, its always a good policy for a company to reach out to its customers be it proactively or in response to an issue. Personalizing and having a one-on-one to hear it out almost always casts a better light on it if not resolving the issue itself. So I appreciate the call and effort on their part.

I learned a couple of things but I think the synopsis is that they don't dispute with what I wrote. I reiterated that Zipcar used to be the convenient and more cost effective choice but its now probably only convenience (not that that isn't of value but it lessens as cost increases significantly past a day reservation). I was disappointed to hear that they recently had the rental car tax asserted again against them. I guess NYS is so desperate for cash that even something that benefits locals economically and helps the congestion problem doesn't pass muster.

I encouraged him to make changes to the figures used in their marketing as it is misleading at best to people considering signing up. Of course, I also asked why rates didn't go back down after they were raised a couple of years ago when gas went up. I didn't get a direct answer other than they've held rates for two years. Fine, but gas is one of your biggest variable costs so that margin has to be going somewhere.

I was able to inquire about and ask for a few other items with no promises (putting the cars back at MetroNorth train stations and adding weekly rates). At a minimum, I'm glad it was heard by someone there. And that leads to the final point I made: In the early days, Zipcar was pretty good about communication with members about what was going on with rates, cars, etc. You felt like part of the community and realized we were all figuring this car sharing thing out as it went along. That has certainly lessened over the years and, again, I say its due to a "professional" marketing organization coming in which promotes "messaging" over "communication". I hope mine was heard but my core assertion still stands.

Zipcar's True Economics

2010-08-28T06:13:00.000-07:00

I've been a loyal Zipcar customer for about 10 years since they launched in NYC. I've trumpeted it and had quite a few friends sign up. I've stayed loyal through many customer service and billing gaffes in the early years. They're generally a better run organization in that sense today. However, I've been disappointed to see this "growing up" means hiring of professional marketers well versed in BS and deception about the true economics of Zipcar.

Over the past few years they've put out some outrageous comparisons of Zipcar vs. car ownership and rentals. They were called on one particularly egregious one which no longer exists on their site. However, they still seem to struggle with reality. On this page, they compare a NYC rental vs. Zipcar. They show savings of $13 per day with Zipcar. But its almost an insult to our intelligence how they come to this figure.

Notice how a car rental has $10 in parking charges and $2.90 in other "additional fees" not subject to Zipcar. What they hell are these? Zipcar, if I'm taking a daytrip, my Zipcar and my rental are going to be subject to the same parking costs. I'm not going to reserve a Zipcar and just park it back in its spot (their argument for why this parking charge only applies to rentals). That's a complete farce. Second, what are these mysterious "additional fees"? We all know that rentals can suffer from cost creep but when I book a rental now I get an all inclusive day rate that doesn't include any additional fees (and includes taxes which Zipcar doesn't). Third, Zipcar conveniently chose their weekday rates (Mon-Thu). Zipcar is far more widely used on the weekend and that's generally when people make day trips. The weekend day rate for a Mazda 3 (cheapest car in their fleet) is $103.50. So the reality is Zipcar is far more expensive than a NYC rental as the $13 difference is from their made up figures and the real Zipcar rate is far higher. Zipcar actually costs you $26.50 MORE PER DAY.

Now, let's extend this model into other realistic options one has vs. Zipcar. NYC rentals are expensive. Around double what they are in any surrounding suburb. When we do our typical weekend or longer trip upstate, we are increasingly using rentals just outside the city. Here are some economics Zipcar doesn't talk about for multi-day reservations:

	Zipcar	Avis White Plains (easy 40 min train ride)
Day rate	$103.50	$38 (I have a midsize reservation for Labor Day at this rate)
Taxes (~ 20% in NYC)	20.70	included
Gas	included	$20 (this is conservative as we'll drive 150 mi @ 25 mi/gal and $3/gal)
Insurance	included	included
Train/Cab	N/A	$30 (off-peak round trip)
NYC Tolls	8.00	none
Total	$132.20	$88.00

That's a savings of around $45 PER DAY or Zipcar being 50% more expensive. When you do this for 2-4 days that's hundreds of dollars. Yes, its a bit less convenient to have to take a train but they run twice an hour on weekends. Plus, we get to avoid the legendary Friday weekend traffic out of NYC. We actually net out to the same door-to-door time. But Zipcar won't tell you this.

I want Zipcar to work. They are correct that it is more convenient. However, they significantly raised their rates a couple of summers back when gas went over $4/gal. I understood that but the problem is they never lowered their rates when gas went back toward $2/gal and now runs in the $2.50-3 range. Nothing like pocketing those margins.

The other issue that Zipcar never talks about is how they are subject to the NYC rental car tax which runs about 20% on top of their costs. This was a ruling against them several years ago which is unfair as Zipcar is to the benefit of locals not tourists. However, I've not seen them fighting this at all and it adds a huge surcharge. Yes, NYC rentals are also subject to this but my White Plains rental includes all taxes in that $38 day rate.

Sadly, its also become where car ownership vs. Zipcar is about the same. The figures they post on their site for that are also a farce. Their default value for car payment + finance charges are nearly $350/mth. I can get a much nicer car than the cheapest Zipcar models for that.

Zipcar doesn't add up but they proffer falsehoods to make them look economical. I once did about $400/mth with them but I'm reducing that significantly now. Once we get to gen 2 of electric cars I'm fully ditching Zipcar.

My TED

2010-08-27T04:59:00.000-07:00

I've been using a TED whole house energy monitor for about 9 months which shows us energy use, solar feed, and net energy to about a 3 second resolution. It also feeds Google Power Meter which is simple but has some useful graphing over time. Its great and has really helped me refine our energy use. I was finally able to confirm the geo runtime kw and also how often it runs in various states. Given that the geo makes up 50-67% of our energy use, fine tuning that has a huge impact.

I had noticed that TED was about 10-15% higher than my solar vs. what my Internet connected inverter box told me. All of these monitors are only estimates as they take second by second readings and estimate over time. Precision differences even between 1 and 3 second resolution can be notable. The other odd thing was that when I was generating a lot of energy but using little, TED would report not only negative net but also that my usage alone was negative which obviously isn't possible. It was a small amount so just chalked it up to rounding errors.

I was excited to receive my first utility bill to see how we did. I was disappointed to see that TED was 15%+ optimistic on our net energy usage and energy generation. It varied bill to bill (we have great variations in energy usage/generation between winter and summer due to solar and geo) but generally was in that range. I read on the TED forums of others reporting similar esp. with solar connected systems. TED responded saying they would put a calibration function in their software so we could individually tweak it toward reality.

I finally got the software update and applied it a couple of weeks ago. However, it had the counter effect as I calibrated down on solar but up on feed. When the feed inexplicably went negative during heavy generation it now went 15% more negative (in the wrong direction). I posted about it on the TED forums and got a response from a TED admin saying I probably had badly calibrated MTUs. I called the office and I have new ones coming which hopefully solve the issue. I have 15% bad data over the 9 months but at least that was relatively consistent so I can correct. Tune in post Labor Day when I install the new ones.

The Weekend Garden

2010-08-15T12:56:00.001-07:00

Not fully on topic regarding net zero, its still about our house and having it produce as much as we consume (in this case, in the food sense). We both have experience with and want to grow a lot of our own vegetables. We've done it with some success in the city on 140 degree rooftops so we should be able to do it in a more accommodating circumstance. However, only averaging being there every two weeks makes it difficult to maintain. I've been doing some research and keeping my eye on some fancy Internet connected/automated garden systems thinking this was the best way to bridge our time away (all while dropping $1000 on them).

We haven't as of yet done much with the landscaping post-build. This has mostly been due to lack of time, money, and idea of exactly what we wanted. Its also been good to take some time to understand the land in all seasons and also do some experimenting with container gardening and small patch gardening. What we learned:

Critters (presumably deer and Wendell Woodchuck) like to munch on whatever they can get their paws on so a comprehensive fence is necessary
At the height of summer, some fruit/veg/herbs can make it two weeks without our attention but only if we use a staged watering device and even then growth seems to be stymied and they look pretty haggard when we get back up there.
Full sun is not to be feared: In urban rooftop gardening, I had done so much to avoid all day sun mostly due to the unrelenting heat. That's much less an issue here and partial sun plants show notably less growth.

We have a patch we think is good place for the vegetable garden. It receives full sun during most days in the growing season and is viewable but not up in our face from the house. In addition, its roughly on the same plain as our main roof drain and whatever contraption I come up with to harness that huge volume of water theoretically should be able to feed it.

Just yesterday, I came across a discussion of sub-irrigation planting (SIP). Its a simple idea: use a non-porous, non-compostable material (geez where am I going to get some plastic?) to create a reservoir at the bottom of the planting area where roots can dip down which can be filled from above. Simple and sensible enough. The plants self-regulate with their roots sucking up water from below (a pretty natural solution) and there is no evaporation. It uses a tiny fraction of the typical amount of water. Most importantly for us, most systems last 2-3 weeks between waterings.

While much of my life (professionally and interest wise) is dedicated to technology, I'm a well known critic (or cynic is it?) of technology for technology's sake. The worst example is how we've forgotten all passive cooling techniques and now build badly loading up on AC which just makes the environment hotter. I love science and engineering applications which leverage and explain both nature and traditional human techniques in the environment -- the ultimate "system".

This is a good example. Its simple, cheap, and perfectly suited for our needs. The impervious underlayer will keep Wendell and friends out from below and I can leverage rainwater harvesting to fill it. I plan on implementing a small scale version in some of our planters and, once I clear the big wood pile that sits on top of our garden site, I'll implement the larger scale version (hopefully this fall).

Geothermal Heat Pump, Is It Worth It?

2010-08-15T09:39:00.000-07:00

When researching what our heat and hot water system for the house would be I took a look at geothermal heat pumps ("GHPs") also known as ground source heat pumps (there are also air source heat pumps). Often just called "geothermal" this is very different from what's being leveraged in Iceland for power and can confuse people. However, it shares its name due to the principle of leveraging the earth as an energy source (in the case of a heat pump as the heat source or sync). The idea is simple: take source energy (be it air, water, or a refrigerant) and convert it to be hotter or cooler through condensation or evaporation. It works just like your conventional refrigerator or window air conditioner. This is due to condensing certain refrigerants which give off energy.

GHPs are 200-400% efficient vs. even the best oil or natural gas furnaces which are about 95% efficient. This is because they source from the ground. Twenty four inches below the earth's surface, the temperature all year round in most livable climates is 55-60 degrees. Thus, think of how, when you turn on your window AC when its 90+ degrees outside, it takes its input from that hot air and must produce liquid that is around 40 degrees to blow air across the cold coils. A GHP takes its input from 55. That only requires a 15 degree change vs. a 40 degree delta. Heating is just the reverse. I was convinced this was the way to go.

I had received quotes from a local GHP and solar installer, Hudson Valley Clean Energy. They quoted a water-to-water system of nearly 10 tons which was over $110k. That was well above our budget of around $40k for heat and DHW systems. I put the idea of geothermal on the back-burner. Just to sanity check, I asked some other HVAC installers about the sizing HVCE had quoted. I came to find that 10 tons is more like a commercial installation and that there was no way I needed that size. Four different people told me that I'd most likely be in the 3-4 ton range but certainly under 5 esp because of the tight envelope and other energy efficiency I was building in. I went back to HVCE and they affirmed their quote after their engineers supposedly looked again at my plans. I tell this part of the story both for others to learn the lesson of doing the extra work to get multiple quotes and getting someone else who isn't biased to sanity check them. I also tell it because I believe Hudson Valley Clean Energy is either dishonest or incompetent (not uncommon in the building industry as I've posted about before).

After I received multiple other quotes for different systems all sizing around 3.5 ton, I went back to HVCE just because I felt they were doing a disservice to geothermal by keeping the cost artificially high (an example of this is my pretty-knowledgeable-about-sustainability architect advised against geo because he said it was too expensive mostly based off quotes he'd seen from HVCE). The president of the company actually told me that they oversize their systems just to be safe. Well, 10 ton vs. 3.5 ton is a bit more than conservative sizing. In addition, my energy star rater actually told me that oversizing an HVAC system in a tight house is actually worse then undersizing. This is because the system will short cycle. All types of HVAC systems are better when they run for few but longer cycles. This is for energy efficiency reasons (the biggest cost to heating water is the initial heat up vs. maintaining a temp) and maintenance as short cycling where there are far more starts and stops is harder on the mechanics and probably will break down sooner. Thus, do not work with Hudson Valley Clean Energy as I believe they are exploiting people's lack of knowledge in these complex systems for their own financial gain. I had a similar experience in the quote they gave me for solar PV which I fortunately knew more about.

Back to my GHP decision. I really did not want any fossil fuels on site at the house. This was both for dependency and cost reasons as well as my belief that we're at or beyond peak oil and we all know what that's doing for geopolitics and wars. In addition, fossil fuels are unhealthy and I didn't want them around. I wanted to be future safe being based on electricity especially since we were installing solar PV as well. I can always source electricity from either my sources or green sources from the utility (NYS has been installing a lot of wind farms and we opt in to it being our source from the grid).

In one final attempt, I took another look at GHPs and came across what's called direct exchange systems. Direct exchange differs from water to water in one important way. In water to water, the pipes you run into the earth are filled with water to extract and/or sync the energy with the earth. That then has to exchange the temp with refrigerant for the condenser which then exchanges it back to water again. Those two exchanges have loss no matter how much efficiency you build in. In a direct exchange system, you actually run the refrigerant through the pipes in the ground to the compressor and there's then only one exchange to water for your heating/cooling. There are important benefits here:

Its much more efficient due to the single vs. double exchange
It requires smaller wells (both in diameter and depth) meaning less cost for installation and less impact on the environment.

I came across a company named Earthlinked who had just received the highest efficiency rating, 400%, by the EPA. Thus, for every unit of energy (electricity) you put in, you get four out (for heating/cooling your water). They had been around since the early 80s and continually improving this technology now using more environmentally friendly refrigerant materials and gaining efficiencies. Their GHP can be used to heat water for radiant, for domestic hot water, and for air conditioning. We hadn't planned AC as its rarely hot enough up in the Hudson Valley to require it but, as we found out this summer, whatever is causing global warming is making it necessary at times and are thankful we did it.

I got a quote from an Earthlinked installer (NOTE: Earthlinked's reps and installers have proven to be difficult to work with -- and that's putting it nicely which I'll detail in a future post -- but I still am supportive of their technology). The total cost was only about $65k. While still above our budget it was the most energy efficient way for heat and DHW that I saw and required no fossil fuels. Seeing that we were under budget at the time (which was a farce obscured by bad project accounting) we went for it. This was coupled with me finding out about induction cookers which was the last missing piece of not needing fossil fuels (more on that in another post). We had found a way to not use propane (the most common heating/cooking fuel in the area).

The installation called for the GHP to feed into an 80 gallon tank for the radiant system. GHPs are a great match with radiant because radiant is very efficient at heating. Modern radiant installations in concrete slabs only need to heat the water to around 100 degrees. GHPs easily produce up to about 110 degrees. Baseboard systems need to be hotter at around 125 and forced air upwards of 140 degrees. DHW is also typically around 110 degrees and we have two 40 gallon buffer tanks it heats for that. All of the buffer tanks also have electric elements in them. In the radiant case, this is on a control which only allows that to turn on if the outdoor temp drops below 20 degrees to help out the GHP. We actually found that wasn't necessary and I think I'm going to set that to 10 degrees next winter. For the DHW tank, the elements help heat the water quickly (along with the GHP) when we come up. They also run periodically to maintain the temp in tank. One of the main things I've been playing with is how to optimally use the electric elements in the different seasons. If this were a full-time house, at least one tank would always stay on since we'd regularly be using DHW. These tanks themselves have very little heat loss (less than 1 degree per hour) and once they're at temp they only run about 30 mins every six hours @ 4kw. However, when we leave on a Sunday I turn them off and when we arrive back they are turned on. They are aligned in a series and the tank directly connected to the GHP heats up in about an hour (more in the dead of winter) @ 8-10kw (both GHP and element run). The problem is tank 2 which is hooked to tank 1 and only has the element to heat it up. It takes upwards of 3-4 hours @ 4kw. NOTE: I have a TED whole house energy monitor installed that tells me second to second energy use.

What I've found is, as a three person family with water saving showerheads, we don't need 80 gallons of hot water even in the dead of winter. When we have guests over and there are 4+ showers happening in the morning then it is needed (I think). Thus, when we come up now I only turn on tank 1 and the GHP gets it up to temp quickly and efficiently. Tank 2 stays cool until it is fed by hot water from tank 1. The only downside is that you have to run through about 20 of the gallons of cool water in tank 2 (which is what is connected to the plumbing) until it starts feeling warm at the tap. That's generally fine because we typically get to the house on a Friday night and don't need showers. What I do is put the faucet in hot position no matter what I'm doing (even getting a drink of water) so that it starts drawing from tank 2 and pulls hot from tank 1. I find that a round of dishes, watering plants, and a few drinks pulls it through. I'm still looking for ways to make this better so there's no inconvenience for the family. In addition, the benefit of having the electric elements is that they provide redundancy in the case the GHP is out of service. We've had to use this more than I'd hoped. Most people report that GHPs are generally maintenance free. Think about it, how often do you have to have your AC or frig serviced? I believe they are low maint but we've struggled with it being out of service a few times. I don't believe this is due as much to the GHP as it has been to a bad setup by the incompetent installer and many control system problems (we had 3x w/o heat due to the knucklehead not turning a valve open after he worked on the system). We're hopefully on the path to having that resolved with a new installer but still an open question.

Now about 12 months and one cold winter after installation, how has the GHP been doing? Pretty well I think. Winter was about playing with the thermostat temperature to find the right balance between comfort, away time setbacks, and energy use. When our GHP runs, it uses about 4.5-4.8kw of power (this includes associated pumps) or 19-20 amps @ 240 volts (the manual says it should run around 19 amps). For each degree of temp that it needs to increase room temp (for the whole house) it has to run for an hour. Thus, each warm up degree costs me about 4.5kwh. One downside of radiant is that it takes a long time to change temp in the house. I find that its about 1 degree per hour. That means if we're coming up in winter and the setback temp is 53 it takes about 15 hours to get it to 68 with the GHP running pretty much constantly. That's a lot of energy and I have a few days last winter with 75-100kwh of electricity use. This, in fact, was our greatest single use of energy in the house: the 10 or so Fridays we came up in winter getting the house to temp.

Maintaining temp is far easier and what radiant does well. I haven't nailed the exact figure but from my observations it takes about 1/4 the energy to maintain temp vs. heat up. Thus, 15 mins of GHP runtime to maintain 68 in winter per hour or 1.1-1.3kwh. There are many other factors affecting this like outdoor temp, how much sun there is, etc. so its not an easy figure to nail down. For how we should use the system, I did a back of the envelop calculation and determined that its actually less energy use to keep the house at 68 even when we're not there in winter assuming we'll be up again within two weeks. More than two weeks its better to allow it to setback to 53 and then re-raise. The irony is that we generally go up to the house every two weeks thus not clear on which is best.

Why 53 degrees for setback? Its generally held that you shouldn't let your house go below or too near 50 degrees as it will start affecting woodwork, glues, and other sealers. At first I kept the house at 58 during the fall so there was no chance. I didn't have the energy monitor at the time so I had little insight into usage when we weren't there except for our bi-monthly bill where it was too late to do anything and I still didn't know which component was using what. After I installed the monitor in Dec, I saw how the GHP ran and what appliance used what. I tested every degree in the 50s and ultimately settled on 53 in our main room and 55 in our bedrooms. I found that at this temp, the GHP barely ran during the transitional month of March. In fact, when set at 53 degrees, the GHP barely ran at all from late Feb into the spring. This meant that, with our solar PV, we were staring to be net positive on electricity in Feb/Mar which is crazy. We used more energy last fall that I had projected. I believe that much of this is due to having a higher setback and this fall I'm guessing that we won't even use heat @ 53 in Sept, Oct, and the first part of Nov. The rule I've found is that if the mean outdoor temp is above freezing, we don't need heat to maintain 53 as the house is so tight, even things like the exhaust hot air from the fridge maintain its temp (an air source heat pump itself) and warming from the sun is sufficient. We typically don't start seeing mean temps below 32 until mid-Nov.

This winter, I'm considering employing a different technique to raise the house temp when we go up. I plan on starting the GHP 4 hours or so before we arrive (I control my thermostats remotely via an Internet connected Z-wave system) to start getting the slab warmed (during the transitional fall and spring I might not put it on until we actually get there). That will only put the temp in the upper 50s. We do have a wood burning fireplace which was mostly installed for the fun of a fireplace but it has shown that it can be quite a furnace in its own right even though the FireOrb isn't the most efficient burner out there (but she sure is pretty). I find that one good burn of 3-4 logs actually saves at least one if not two cycles of the GHP. My plan is to light a fire when we get up there so that the fireplace helps quickly warm the place which its actually good at. From the trees we cleared we have about 10 years of firewood so no expense there either. I also have a couple of efficient Vornado space heaters we'll use for bedrooms that are away from the fireplace. This way the GHP just focuses on warming the slab and then maintaining. We'll see how that goes.

That brings me back to the original question: was the GHP worth it? I have to say that I'm glad we did it but I don't think I have enough info for a final conclusion. Part of this is driven by reading a lot about Passive Houses which I wish I had heard about before we built. Our house incorporates the key design element: south facing glazing to pick up sun heat in the winter. I've found that a bright sunny winter day can heat the house by itself about 10-15 degrees. It warms our concrete slab so it stays into the evening. In fact, all but the coldest (below 20 degrees) sunny days in winter use the sun as the primary heat source during the day. This saves a ton of energy: 6 hours * 15-30 mins GHP runtime per hour * 4.5kw = 7-13.5kwh per day.

Passive Houses tend to use minimal heat sources like air source heat pumps that require little energy. They are highly insulated tight houses like ours that benefit from the sun and other ambient heat sources to heat the house like body heat. Conceived of in the US but refined and implemented in Germany they are starting to make noise here. However, given that the northern part of NA is much colder in winter than Germany, there has been mixed results on these shores to date. However, in investigating them, I came across one article which basically said that radiant heating was overkill for a well insulated tight house. The idea being that the heat and temp stays constant for a long time even in the coldest winters and thus the slab cools down. Having to re-heat the slab is expensive and radiant works best when the slab stays somewhat warm.

This was eye opening to me as that's what we had experienced last winter (esp. when it wasn't below freezing out). The slab would cool and, as pointed out above, even in 70 degrees, if your feet are cool you feel cool. Yes, we put socks and slippers on but I still want to solve this problem. Ironically, I suspect that one way I can solve it is actually raising the thermostat temps. When I asked our moron HVAC installer what temp I'd have to keep the house at with radiant (I had no experience with it before) he said 64-65. I thought that was amazing given 68 is generally considered the min and our steam heat building in NYC is rarely below 72 and often at 75 in dead of winter. Well, 65 was fine with me but not with the Brit partner nor a small child. We tried 68 and settled on 69 with her wearing a cardigan most times. There were a few times I tried 70+ and it was quite comfortable and warm. This is one fun experiment with a super tight house, a 1 or 2 degree difference really can be felt. I think this winter I'm going to keep it at 70 or 71 which will certainly please some members of the household. I think that'll have the GHP keep the slab warmer and net out to less than 4kwh per degree. That's my hypothesis at least.

I'm hoping that the combination of warming up with the fireplace but asking the GHP to maintain temp will be more efficient energy-wise. After all, heating and DHW make up nearly 2/3rds of our energy use given that everything else is so efficient so it'll have a real impact. I'm also going to experiment with keeping it around 65 when we're not there to affirm my calculations. More as the weather turns.

Some Context: The House Envelope

2010-08-15T08:48:00.000-07:00

Before getting into how the house has been performing its important to set some context: what systems did we evaluate, what did we choose, how were they installed, how have they performed, and what would I have done differently.

First, the house envelop. Over the past two decades, building standards and general awareness that the house envelope and proper efficient air flow is the most important aspect of energy efficiency has grown. This is often the most challenging aspect of a retro fit as the envelop was chosen years before people thought about its impact and trying to go back and fix those choices is expensive. This is a big reason why we chose to build new. I didn't want to inherit someone else's problems and bad choices.

Building new and forging new ground is also no easy task. We weren't treading new ground in the the sense that nothing new was invented for this house. However, integration of disparate systems and understanding their effect on one another was. That's the biggest gap I see now in building: there are many exciting new products that are efficient, renewable, sustainable, and otherwise a great choice, but how do they effect one another? Fundamentally, cost prohibits using all these new technologies and, in many cases, too much is overkill and really against the principal of building with minimal impact.

There were several things we employed in the envelop that are pretty straight-forward and did not significantly increase cost while significantly increasing efficiency:

Thick walls: Upgrading exterior walls from 2x4 to 2x6, 8 or more. The cost of this is small and the additional volume of insulation that you can apply significantly decreases heat penetration.
Blown in insulation: Much better (and environmentally friendly if you use water born materials) than bat insulation as it seals all air pockets for only about 15% more in cost.
Umbrella roof: The concept is simple. Build a conventional roof, then lay sleepers on top of the radiant barrier. Then apply another layer of plywood and your roofing material (preferably galv-alum to reflect sun). The sleepers create an air channel and in the hot summer air convention vents all the hot air out of the roof instead of super heating your interior. Inside our house, there's no difference in temp from the floor to the ceiling even when its 100 degrees out with blazing sun. In the winter, the opposite affect happens where the roof stays cool and snow remains up there longer creating an insulating igloo effect. This costs little more than a conventional roof and has a huge impact.
Concrete mass floor: We love the look of polished concrete floors. It was a convenient truth that radiant heating performs best in them. The triple play is that the concrete mass significantly affects the comfort of the house. We knew this was the case with the radiant floor heating since it takes much lower temp water (95-105 degrees) to heat the slab and keep it even and comfortable in the winter. What we didn't realize is how key the slab is in the summer keeping the house cool. Its stone w/o direct sunlight to warm it in the summer so it stays cool. This is especially apparent when using our #1 cooling technology in the summer: taking off your shoes. How your feet feel is how you feel.
Triple paned windows: We used fiberglass triple paned high efficiency windows from Canada. We have a significant amount of glazing and didn't want all the heat flowing through them. While I saw that the U-factor of these windows were best in the market (about the same was a well insulated 2x4 wall), I was concerned about the aesthetics of fiberglass. However, fiberglass is not a good conductor and thus by far the most efficient window pane material. That outweighed concerns over the look and it ends up the windows are beautiful and no one knows they're fiberglass. Fiberglass has one other benefit: its cheap. The extra cost for the triple pane and energy efficiency was far outweighed by the savings of fiberglass. We received quotes for double-paned wood frame windows and they were 20-25% MORE expensive then ours w/o the efficiency.

Thus, this envelop is tight. We felt this winter in that you can go near any outside door or window when its 10 degrees and there's little perceivable difference in temp from the middle of the room. In fact, we had the challenge that heating for the radiant floor wasn't running that much and the slab would go cool because the heat was being kept in for so long (more on dealing with that in another post).

We really realized the benefit of the envelop this summer. We went up during the 4th of July week when it had already been two weeks of 90 degree+ temps and we were looking at another week of the same. When we arrived at the house midday, it was well over 90 outside. The house was sealed up (not always the best but more on that later). When we went inside it felt like the AC was on. It was only 74 degrees inside when it had been 90+ during the day and around 80 each night. This startled me and showed me how the tight envelope can be as important in the summer as in the winter.

Funnily, with it being so warm out we wanted to open all the windows and doors to bring the outside in. When we did that, hot air started convecting in en masse. Inside it went from 74 to 85 in about 30 minutes. We quickly realized our mistake and moved to close all the windows and doors. That stopped the raise but we then had the tight envelop working against us. It wasn't going to cool down quickly as the house trapped that heat.

Ironically, this affected us for the next few days as the house really is very slow to change temp no matter what the outdoor temp. We had to keep the house sealed up during the day and opened it up at night to cool down. This actually worked pretty well and we only had to use the AC one day but this was after we had let in the outdoor heat and the temp was 100 with high humidity. Fortunately, the AC cooled it down in about an hour and used little energy from our geothermal system (more on that in another post).

Some might note that a problem with super tight houses has been raised in recent years. They can become "sick" houses meaning that there is no fresh air circulation. If there's a complicating factor like mold or VOCs it can make people sick. To mitigate this, proper ventilation is required. We have energy efficient motion sensing vents in each bathroom which provides airflow when we're there. When we're not there (it is a weekend house), I'm still experimenting with what is best. We have a whole house fan that can powerfully vent a lot of air in a short period. I've taken to running that once or twice a week (I can control the house via an Internet accessible Z-wave system) and during the summer have been leaving one or two awning windows cracked. The winter is a bit more challenging as we don't want to vent the warm air out.

The envelope of a house is critical and truly has to work together. The "weakest link in the chain" notion really does apply here. If we had skipped on one element, all the others would've been for not. I'm happy we invested here and it ended up costing little more than the conventional building choices.

Re-animation

2010-08-15T08:38:00.000-07:00

I'm going to reactivate this blog. I had intended to document our house building project last year in detail on this blog both as a record and hopefully to provide tips on our experience. I didn't keep it up both due to time constraints and that the project became so difficult and frustrating. The last thing I felt like doing was to write about it (short of a few vents/forewarnings). However, we're over the hump with a great weekend house.

I'm going to transition to documenting our experience in our net zero energy house. I've come to realize we are a bit more pioneering in this than I'd realized. While there's been a lot of talk about renewables, energy independence and the like, the reality is that few people are doing much beyond talk and buying CFLs. Some of this I understand as heading into this new world order is daunting both in education and cost. I hope to share my experiences with both to help others move in this direction. Many of the choices we made I'm happy with and they are performing. Some were unnecessary or disappointing.

I'm staying active in the renewable community and always looking at new technologies either that I could incorporate or just to understand developments. There are a ton of promising things in the lab but, as with most of these breakthroughs, the engineering work to bring it to market at scale are more challenging than the fundamental science. That's why there was a Manhattan Project far after nuclear fusion had been discovered.

2008-11-21T14:45:00.001-08:00

celebrating Tabs' second birthday

2008-10-20T08:55:00.001-07:00

In silicon valley for a day of meetings and then on the redeye home (fun)

2008-10-19T08:54:00.001-07:00

In SF for wedding and remembering my love/hate relationship with this place...don't miss the travel

2008-10-01T06:38:00.001-07:00

I am trying out Ping

Building has begun

2008-04-28T06:31:00.000-07:00

Finally, after many years, headaches, regulatory hurdles, and fun we are building. We got our permit a few weeks back and our CM is on the job. We have a road:

And the beginnings of a foundation:

The path toward progress

2008-01-19T13:48:00.001-08:00

Our road and site clearing is coming along:

The First of the Headaches

2008-01-10T10:53:00.000-08:00

Well, as we knew and have already experienced, building a home is complex and curveballs seem to be more common then fastballs. We're just in the early stages of building (yay! our road is underway as is clearing) but two items have come up (one more of a headache and delay with some cost and the other a big cost issue).

We're running electric to the site as we're digging the road so as to put the cables underground. It costs a bit more but there's no chance of a tree taking them down. We have to run off the neighbors pole that he put in last year during his house build. He's supportive of the plan but there are still a few wrinkles to work out with him. Our electrical sub submitted the plan to the utility (or their agents) and they poo-pooed it. Why? They want another pole for some goddam reason. Well, I kind of know the reason its because they would have to reconfigure the existing pole due to some transformer issue bla bla bla. That's because once a pole serves more then one customer the utility has to buy it from the owner and maintain it (it is a private pole currently owned by the neighbor). If they get us to put in another pole they can shift the burden to me to do the transformer thing.

This is not only a problem because it would cost more money but there is only one real place the pole can go: on said neighbors land right in the middle of their view. An obvious no-go and I haven't even bothered to ask. My electrician is appealing to the utility and seemed confident he could convince them to go with the original plan but we're still waiting to hear. Its getting tight as the electric is supposed to go in the middle of next week.

The bigger, costlier item came up today. Our energy efficient Canadian triple pane window company that gave us a great quote for all our windows and doors this past summer has significantly increased their price on our bid. This is by $20k or nearly 40% of original cost. Previously, they not only beat all the other window companies but also offered increased energy efficiency with their technology. So they get the bid and now suddenly it goes up because "they missed windows on the original bid" and "shipping surcharge" and "raised prices" and other BS. Hey, I recognize the US/CAN $ rates have changed and prices can go up but you can't just "miss" windows and put that back on us. Our architect is trying to resolve this but they better throw in something for this screw-up.

Oy!

Contractors

2007-12-14T11:32:00.000-08:00

I'm sure this just adds to the pantheon of "Stories of Less than Honest Contractors", but I feel the need to contribute.

We began our house building project in 2005 hiring an architect after purchasing our land in Woodstock, NY in 2004. We were in no rush (and immediately at least not in financial position to do the house) but wanted to use the time to get what we wanted in a weekend house. As those in the construction business tell you there are three things pulling at any construction project: time, quality, and money, and at best you only can have two of them. We'd chose quality and money.

Our architect was ready to go by December '05. We asked for his recommended contractors and we sourced one ourselves: our neighbor Glenn who builds mostly spec houses for a living including the one right next to us. Glenn was enthusiastic and seemed like it was going to work. As we were advancing past the initial bid he told us he couldn't take on the project. There were several reasons but mostly it came down to his resources and his commitments to other projects. While disappointed we understood the extenuating circumstances and Glenn also provided another contractor, Rod, who could take over.

As 2006 rolled around a few things were changing for us. First, we found out that our first baby was on the way. Second, I finally hit the wall working at Palm, Inc. and it was time for me to move on. It took time to leave as I agreed to transition my position to another person but I didn't have anything concrete I was going to. Those major life changes had us hold off on the broader project and just focus on doing the bridge which Rod was up for.

That was completed in Dec '06 (several months after it was supposed to be done but we were in no rush) and we told everyone we were on hold for a bit regarding the rest of the project. As 2007 rolled around things had stabilized as I had advisory work and the pressures of a family made us really want some space (even if it was just on the weekends). We knew we had to move out of our East Village apartment into a larger one sometime in the next few years but decided the NYC real estate market was overheated and thus we could gain some space upstate. My accountant also advised taking on more mortgage interest as I was getting killed by the AMT and interest is one of the few write-offs you keep under the AMT.

We told our architect we were back on the project in spring '07. Since Rod had done a decent, albeit delayed, job on the bridge we went back to him for the road and house. He was confident he could do it (even though he tended to focus more on heavy work like foundations). We gave him plans in May '07 we told him our budget and he promised a bid in a few weeks. Those weeks passed and there was communication with Rod but no bid. He had many problems he claimed in putting it together. As the summer advanced we started to worry that Rod wasn't up to it.

Our architect brought in a couple of his contractors (including a couple who had bid the first time around). By August we were on our way to Europe for vacation, Rod's bid was nowhere to be found (even though I told him I had to have it before we left), and three others were to have bids to us by mid-Sept. When we returned Rod still hadn't produced anything and we pretty much wrote him off. The other three produced their bids roughly 3-4 weeks after receiving the docs.

One of them, Brian, said he would honor his bid he had produced in the first round. When we initially received it we saw it as on the high-end. However, as I parsed through it more deeply I realized that he had overbid on the bridge and road and the house wasn't far above our budget. Of the other two bidders, one submitted a rough bid that was a bit high but basically said he couldn't do it. The other, a favored builder of our architect, blew the numbers out of the water on the high side. His bid for the house part wasn't bad. He just tacked on a 30% management fee on top of it. 30% margin in any business is amazing and most try to achieve 15-17%. Some, like supermarkets, eke out 3-5%. This was robbery and a bit insulting. He obviously didn't want the job by why crap on an architect that gives you a lot of business.

Oh, and Rod finally had his bid together. It only took 4 months but again his house number was fine but he then also tacked on a management fee. It was more reasonable but he was acting as GC and marking things up and also putting on a management fee. Unethical. So we told Brian he was the guy and to put together a detailed bid. He took about a month and came back. We understood if the bid went up by 10-15% given fleshing out detail. He submitted a bid 50% higher after he said he would honor the number! And no, it wasn't that materials or labor prices had skyrocketed. It was that he also was tacking on a 20%+ management fee on top of GC margins.

My architect has told us that the construction industry is moving more toward doing construction management in charging a % on top of the overall cost as a management fee just like architects do. That's fine and makes it all more transparent since underlying materials and labor costs are passed right through. And 15% is reasonable in this scenario. However, some are delusional in thinking they can act as a GC (fixed bid but no transparency of underlying costs which they mark up) and putting on a management fee. In our case I think this stemmed from a) them still thinking the housing/building market was red hot and they could pick their projects and b) that we were clueless city-folk with lots of money to spend and thus their bids were more about what they though we'd pay then what it actually costs.

Given this insanity I went back to Glenn given that we had stayed friends and I knew he could tell me how much houses cost to build in the area. He confirmed that these people were trying to rip me off and that my estimates (given that I now had 5+ sets of bids) for the project were reasonable. He also happened to be back in the game for our project and that's who we are now working with and hopefully he'll be our construction manager.

Road Work Begins

2007-12-14T11:19:00.000-08:00

Yea, yea, I know, it takes 4 months for me to post. But no, I now am committed to at least somewhat regular updates on our project NOW THAT IT IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING! Yes, road work has begun and we are underway. We are also advanced with a contractor after being delayed by several who were less....how do we say this....than straight-forward (more on that in another post).

As you can see, equipment is on site and clearing has begun. We feel good about Pete, our road contractor, who has been straight-forward and met our budget. This came from a recommendation which, in this business, means everything. Target completion is Feb '08 and includes utilities being brought to the site.

Back in the building saddle

2007-06-28T08:28:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since last posting here and that's for good reason. We had put the building project on hold after we finally built our culvert bridge. Yes, it is large as the town required the pipe to be 54" in diameter which is as large as you see on highways. Good thing though as we've now had two "floods of the century" in the past few months and it has passed the test.

The other reason was that our bundle of boo, Tabitha, was born in November and we needed to focus on her. A week after her birth we found out she had a serious heart defect that required open heart surgery. She was not doing well for the first couple of months so we expedited surgery which happened in February. It was brutal but she pulled through and is now a happy and healthy baby.

I also changed jobs to advising a financial concern on an investment in a mobile technology company and, at first, it wasn't clear how long that would last. In many ways it still isn't clear but things have stabilized enough that I feel comfortable taking on the financial burden. Since we already have a lot of cash invested in the land and the bridge the bank will not require any more money down to get the construction loan. I will still put some money in to keep the mortgage reasonable but we have flexibility. We also know that we'll have to upgrade our apt in NYC in the next year or two to at least a two bedroom and having the house will give us flexibility if we decide to sell and live upstate for a bit and/or we end up going back to renting if we can't find the right place to buy or want only one mortgage.

Anyway, back in the game and hopefully will keep this up to date as we're now kicking things off (again).

More on the kitchen (cabinets)

2006-03-05T14:00:00.000-08:00

As reported in a previous post we're starting into details on key rooms and components. The architect is working on the main plan so I thought I'd save us some back and forth (and some money) by sketching out what we'd like the kitchen to be from his rough configuration and sketches. The girl and I were remarkedly on the same page (doesn't happen all that often) with our independent designs.

One of the biggest items in a kitchen for look and feel, cost, and overall theme is how one approaches the cabinets. We have agreed that we're not going to have wall hung cabinets but open shelving as we'll have sufficient storage and we both feel eye level cabinets make a kitchen feel heavy. We also do not want anything traditional and are quite intrigued by the newer glass and other glossy colorful models out there. Now those fancy Italian ones run you $25k+ just for the cabinets. Considering we're hoping the keep the whole kitchen around that price it ain't going to happen.

Then there is the more pre-fab (or what some call semi-custom) cabinet makers. This starts with Home Depot and Lowes and ends with my arch enemy, Ikea. Why do I despise Ikea so much? Let me list just a few reasons:

1) Their products are cheap crap. I know, you say you get what you pay for but do we really need more consumerism and more people buying stuff they're not really going to use and also having it be of poor quality. I am one these days to say buy fewer and buy better esp for durable goods. Same budget just don't need more stuff to clog your place.

2) Their stores are some of the most stressful experiences one can have shopping (and this includes many holiday jaunts to the local NJ mall). Don't know what I mean? Just go to one on a given Saturday afternoon.

3) They make doing business with them difficult. Try using their kitchen designer online. Try actually buying a few of their products that have to be assembled online. Take a bet on whether or not you'll actually get all the parts you need when you buy one of their DIY items.

4) Their employees want nothing to do with you and are stressed out in their stores. I guess this just reflects the whole customer experience.

I knew that many other of my friends held some of these views but I had always found myself in the extreme. Ikea seems to do a great job of creating this friendly accessible image which does brainwash people. The only better job in retail marketing I can think of is Target which has produced an amazing brand image for a store that is basically one very small step above WalMart.

In any case, when researching kitchens one always runs across the "Ikea Kitchen" idea. Given my thoughts I had rejected it outright. The girl does not loath Ikea like I do so she kept bringing it back up. And then our architect brought it up. Then I start seeing it more on the design blogs I read. Now here's the rub (esp. about their website), you see these amazing looking designer kitchens that are from Ikea including what we wanted. Then you go to their site and there is no way you can create that. It does seem now that they are picking up more modern door styles but again, you can't match the door styles and cabinets when trying to configure. Why? Because in their genius they keep their Swedish names when you are shopping but when you are configuring the kitchen they use English names. Who missed that one at ikea.com?

In any case, I have now spent many hours online reading about people's experience with Ikea kitchens. My main thanks is to Apartment Therapy (www.apartmenttherapy.com) and their community. Here are the general thoughts:

1) Ikea's cabinets are very solid and rival anything you'll get from HD/Lowes.
2) Their door styles have gotten better and more broad. Even so their hardware is standard you could customize there from a cabinetmaker
3) Don't use their countertops, sinks, or fixtures as they are crap.

So basically you get the frame from them, maybe the doors (we probably will), maybe the pulls, but get the rest elsewhere. Now this sounds like a reasonable strategy. They say that just on the cabinets you'll save significantly over HD/Lowes (and certainly the fancy custom places). Now the main advantage is for DIYers. Typically 50% or more of the cabinet costs are for shipping and installation. If you can do that yourself you really will get your kitchen cabinets for more like $5000 instead of $20k. I plan a lot of DIY and this is certainly within my skillset (so he says).

We're going to investigate Ikea in detail and get a real quote when our architect is done with the detail design so stay tuned.

A Builder

2006-03-05T13:52:00.000-08:00

Things are moving along...Deliberately. We have preliminarily selected a builder: the one building a house on property near us. They were the first we met and have been the most responsive. We had a bit of an odd situation with them a few weeks back. We had arranged a joint meeting with our architect, the builder, and us. The afternoon the day before the builder (or more accurately his architect/manager) called saying they couldn't make it and that they really needed a commitment before spending any more time on our bid. This was a bit odd to us. We had some major open issues and the best they had provided so far was one big number and the idea of the meeting was to get more detail and refine the budget hopefully toward making that commitment. I convinced the builder to show after a phone conversation and we dragged out of him what the deal was. They just needed a bit of money $3500-5000 to make it worth their time to do the detailed bidding. I understood this and I guess it was just a situation they weren't use to since they mostly do spec houses.

That issue is now out of the way and on Monday we're going to sign a pre-construction agreement for $3500 so they're compensated. If we move forward with them that'll be credited toward the project. It is a good idea as this allows for all parties to work together to refine and get a more accurate picture of costs. Plus, they are still about $25k over our top budget which we need to find a way to pull some out.

The Kitchen

2006-01-30T07:17:00.000-08:00

This is the first domain specific posting about a sub-element of the house (save for various musings on the bridge which is a major project in its own right). Since most of the primary elements of the house design are done (or done until we find out we can't afford floor to ceiling windows) it's time to focus on designs for the next level of key items. The kitchen is first up.

The kitchen tends to be the most expensive room in the typical house (on an all inclusive cost per sq ft basis). This is probably obvious to most people given the number of expensive appliances and finishes that are jammed into an often small space. We went to a kitchen design store the other day and they asked our budget which I gave some ballpark figures on what I calculated for the appliances, cabinets, fixtures, etc. That didn't add up to them. They wanted to know the $/sq ft we were planning on. I had never thought of it this way. Part of the challenge for us is the kitchen is meant to be open to the dining and living room so where the kitchen stops and others begin is not clear. I could condense it down to have a better number but methinks it best to stick to my original calculation and find a reasonable sq ft to apply.

In any case, we think we've actually found most of the appliances we want. We both love to cook and can prove that by being the only people I know who live in NYC and actually cook 5-6 nights a week. Much credit for this goes to the girl as she enjoys it to the level of being able to crank meals out night after night after a days work. That's not for me. I prefer the plan and execute all day on the weekend production. I rarely can plan more than a day ahead for a meal so when I'm doing a big one I need to spend the morning deciding, the afternoon buying, and the evening cooking (and enjoying my wine; there are few better experiences than "cooking with wine").

Back to the appliances. Even though we like to cook we don't need many fancy things. We're pretty much old school DIY in the kitchen types. The array of crazy new tools baffle us and a few experiences show how early enthusiasm with a dehydrator leads to it collecting dust in the pantry after a month. We even have debated not having a D/W as we never use the one we have in the apt but we'll probably have one since real estate people tell us it shows its value in resale. LG has great french door fridges with lower drawer freezers that are the most energy efficient of main stream makers (there are some better ones for super energy efficient which tend to be less aesthetically appealing and more expensive). And they are stainless steel and mid-priced ($1500-2000).

The stove/range is where the real decision comes in. The "trophy" range in the Viking/Thermodore class is very tempting. I did some research with consumer reports and on other online places and as you'd expect they basically concluded they don't cook any better than your average $1200-1800 stove (and even one $600 model got high grades). However, this is not a passionless utilitarian debate. They look good! Also, ironically they are the only ovens which still use the old fashioned temperature knob instead of digital programming. No biggie to me but the girl don't play digital in her cooking. So we've compromised on this: we've picked out our trophy range (Thermodore professional; we like the temperature dial in the middle) either as one range or separate top and oven and have a fallback to a midrange if budget is tight (probably GE Profile, JennAir, or similar in that class).

Cabinets are expensive. Our architect has been advising Ikea but I DESPISE Ikea (more on that in another post but it is cheap and poorly made crap that should have no places in a nice modern home). We are hoping to keep costs down by not having upper cabinets over the counters just under counter and an island. We'll have open shelving above which we prefer anyway and gives the kitchen a lighter more open feeling. I really like the new lines of back painted with glass fronts that are around. But they are very expensive and our aforementioned kitchen shop advised that if we don't want to spend $35-50k on a kitchen to look for lacquer painted MDF instead. This should work for us and cut the cost in half. We want a strongly colored kitchen and are leaning toward red for the cabinets but other colors will be explored. We're leaning toward engineered granite or concrete for countertops.

All-in-all our new kitchen will be a huge novelty for us compared to our 80 sq ft apt kitchen with 1930s stove. Our concepts to go the architect soon so he can earn his keep.

Moving Along...slowly

2006-01-30T07:13:00.000-08:00

Things are moving but not at breakneck pace. We've sent out the bids to two other contractors and are waiting for prelminary estimates from them. One thing that will hopefully benefit the back and forth with them is we provided much of the detail requested by the first bidder right up front. So theirs, theoretically, should be more refined. We're also waiting for the refined bid from the aforementioned bidder #1. We did receive their bridge estimate at $44k. Toward the high end but actually something within our target budget! Champagne (or Mad Dog mixed with club soda for us after the bank gets drained by this process) anyone?

More this week hopefully.

Some progress on bidder #1

2006-01-06T11:49:00.000-08:00

Well, we have made some quick progress with bidder #1. I talked with their project manager last night and he re-expressed his interest in the project even after I told him we had to be much closer to the $200 sq ft than his $250 sq ft. He understood and said how this was preliminary done w/o a lot of the details which they had to put in some higher assumptions for. But he also did say that $200 sq ft is the minimum in our area (NE).

It affected some action since their architect sent over a letter to mine this morning asking for a lot of detail on many of the variables in the project. Much of this has to do with the HVAC setup, finishing work, and materials used in potentially expensive places like the bathroom. The hopeful news is that since we're going with a minimal HVAC (no AC), wanting to do much of the finishing work ourselves, and keeping the bathroom pretty minimal and modest as far as finishing and fixtures go there might be room.

The other item the PM revealed to me was that he put in extra labor assumptions than normal because the house is up on stilts over a slope and they'd have to put up a lot of scaffolding and lug a lot of materials up onto it. I told him of our architect's idea that the construction staging area be at the top of the hill which is on grade with the house and thus lugging should be less and no much different than normal. He thought that could make a difference.

Rolling up the sleeves is next week so we're hopeful.

Our First Bid

2006-01-05T09:05:00.000-08:00

Right before the holidays we met with a builder up at the site. This builder is doing a house near our property who we had met over the summer. The meeting went well and they brought their architect/manager, project manager, and lead contractor. A solid showing we thought. We spent a good hour+ with our architect (Matt) running through it. Unfortunately, there was six inches of snow on the ground so we couldn't get to the actual site.

They seemed very enthused about the project because it was different from the more conventional homes they had built. Their architect particularly liked the modern design and eco elements. We told them at the end our target of sub-$200/sq ft and they didn't blink. They promised a rough bid turned around soon.

Today we got their bid. It came in quite high at $300/sq ft to our surprise. After we took the deep breath I talked with Matt and he said he wasn't shocked. All along he'd been advising that this is where he'd been seeing bids come in at. The one problem with the bid was that it didn't break down most of their core building estimate. It only broke out non-core items that would be subbed out. So we have to go back and get some detail to see why their number is so high. Was it a negotiating tactic to come in high to negotiate down esp. if they built in large margins for their labor? Did they put in high numbers on key elements like windows and concrete?

Matt says that he can usually find a way to trim off 10%, even 15% but getting to 20% is often the max. Beyond that it becomes difficult and you really are changing the project from both an architectural and builders standpoint. Does the builder flat out need $100k in labor fees to take the project? Then it'll be tough to negotiate down. In any case we're going to go back to them and get the detail of their bid and enter with an attitude of "we're apart on the number can we roll up the sleeves and get to a better place". In addition, we're bidding out to others so we can see if this is the market rate or unreasonably high. We also got a separate dealer bid on our windows since that's such a large and key element of the design. That came in high at $70k (we thought more around $50k) but there are ways to trim that back since we had large and custom elements there. But again, that might just pull us back $20-30k.

If we can't get one of the contractors into the range we need our options are few and not great: 1) we can do a house re-design but as Matt said we don't have a lot of quantity (sq. ft.) nor complexity (pretty much dimensional w/o crazy design elements) to take out; in fact the one unique item is the floating poll design and Matt doesn't think putting that on the ground really changes the equation that much; or 2) put the project on hold to see if there are other avenues to build it or if time and a declining housing/building market helps us. Obviously the latter is not desired and leaves a lot of risk to the market.

Here are fingers crossed.

Renderings

2005-12-01T10:06:00.000-08:00

Progress is being made (even though not totally evident here). Some renderings:

Images of the Streams Rushing after mid-Oct Rain

2005-10-21T15:27:00.000-07:00

To Tha Bridge

2005-10-21T15:22:00.000-07:00

We're making progress on the bridge as well. We had a civil engineer in and he gave Matt ideas to simplify the design and construction. We have three drawings and we hope that cost and time will be less since it'll be more conventional. We might even get a cool wood tripod span out of it.

Nearing Conceptual End

2005-10-21T15:16:00.000-07:00

We've had a couple of meetings with Matt over the past weeks and are nearing the end of the conceptual design. He's done some great work in refining the model. We're still working around a similar premise to what has been posted here but it is amazing how a few tweaks can change things. The big conceptual breakthrough was to make the entrance at the back (west) side on-grade. We were struggling with side entrances through the deck and this brought it all together.

The other big advance is to have a semi-tower on the north side of the house which would have the mechanical on the base (semi-basement) and second bedroom and office above. The top floor will float a bit above the roof line of the main house to let in light and now we can mount the solar panels up high on the tower and have to clear fewer trees. We also should get some great north light in those rooms. He also designed in some really fabulous half stair cases to get to the different half floors.

Oh, and we have two builders who are going to take a look at the project. Matt will bring in one more. We hope this will let us find one and sanity check the bids. They'll be brought in in mid-Nov.

Minimiam

2005-10-02T19:16:00.000-07:00

Not home stuff (except if they'll sell you these to put in your home) but the photos of these miniatures are amazing:

http://mapage.noos.fr/minimiam/go.htm

Home Design and Arch Books

2005-09-24T08:41:00.000-07:00

There have been a plethora of new contemporary home design books published in the last 4 years and I think I own most of them. Yes, I do have over 30 home books now. Here are some of our favorites after a quick look through and judging by the number of pages we marked:

House: American Houses for the New Century, Cathy Lang Ho and Raul A. Barreneche
Cottages: The New Style, James Grayson Trulove; NOTE: some of the photography in this book is blurry and poor
Sustainable Homes: 26 Designs that Respect the Earth, James Grayson Trulove
Designing the Good Home, Dennis Wedlick
The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture, Alanna Stang and Christopher Hawthorne

The last one is the best and the home on the cover is definitely inspiring ours. While all the titles and themes are toward green/sustainable homes (a good thing) we selected them because of the great modern architecture within.

First MAB Arch Meeting

2005-09-24T08:11:00.000-07:00

Last Friday we were able to have our first official sitdown session with MAB since hiring them. Matt had already been working both in coming up with a few preliminary designs and also having gotten an estimate for our solar. The above design was the one that struck us as being quite close to some things we were thinking but with that extra touch to add more interesting elements. It really re-enforced for us the value of an architect and reiterated Matt's reputation as a real artist at architecture.

We really like this layout. We agreed to have one big room as the kitchen, dining, living area on the east side. This will have a lot of windows on the south for passive solar and a sizeable deck on the east for a nice indoor/outdoor space. The north side is where we'll have to do some work to have a balance of windows (since the nicest view is that way) but also insulate. Noting our budgetary constraints, Matt said we might have to consider some non-opening locally built windows to allow for glazing w/o having to pay the premium from the window making oligopy.

The most interesting concept here is the entry stairs, deck, and hallway. Since the house is sited on a slope and will either run with the slope or be in poles (like a treehouse) Matt came up with the idea of entering from below via a stairway that comes up into the middle of the deck (shown on the diagram). This would then look into a small hallway entry that would bridge the public and private spaces.

In addition to that, three modest sized bedrooms (one to be an office) and two baths. This all topped with a shed roof facing south with nice overhangs. A lot of exciting possibilities. This gives us a solid baseline to refine into specific room sizes and placement of utilities. One of the things we think we've lost because of budget constraints is the big fireplace. This will be replaced by a wood burning stove of which there are many nice contemporary models (including CPs favorite "sixties teardrop"). One benefit of this is that the main room won't be dominated by a fireplace and allow for 360 degree views.

Giants game

2005-09-19T17:47:00.000-07:00

Girl getting her real american experience

CPs shell art

2005-09-09T13:40:00.000-07:00

Sea farin' ahrt at the beach...now we're looking for driftwood. Jersey shore!

Some Clearing

2005-09-08T08:48:00.000-07:00

Now that we officially have an architect and the siting project is starting we spent time on the site over Labor Day looking at site A. I broke out the chainsaw (which almost broke me) and we cleared out the small dead hemlock in the probable siting area to get a better feel for it. Besides removing these weedy (and potentially dangerous) trees we'd want to at minimum thin this area so it was walkable and it might end up where the house is so they'd be gone anyway.

We got a good indication that just taking down some of the hemlock let nice light through as we don't want to be in the dark and need it for the solar. We're basically going to try and keep all the hardwood and thin out most of the hemlock.

And yes, I should have taken a picture with my Treo.

Walking the Site

2005-09-08T08:39:00.000-07:00

Matt and I walked the site last week. The good news is that he was excited about the property and its possibilities with multiple house sites. The less than good news: the road and bridge is going to be a big and expensive sub-project (not that we didn't know it). It won't be insurmountable but we probably eliminated site B which is deeper into the property because the road would have to be 400-600 ft and a small bridge over the stream. Road appears to cost about $20-30 a linear ft and that's w/o utilities which can run another $20 a linear ft for under ground (its $1500 for a pole every 300 ft which looks more likely). In addition, our little idea to bring the road down to a lower part of the stream and cross there wouldn't really save us much money because of the road costs and also we'd really impact the central part of the property where the view is because the grading (10%) would land the road right in the middle.

So we're back to focusing on site A and the big bridge. The good news is that we plotted out a rough possible road and that would only have to be about 200 ft after the bridge on relatively flat ground. And there looks like a natural place for a parking area/roundabout. We're still trying to keep the bridge/road/utilities to $50k but Matt thinks we'll be tight. Since we've formally hired him now engineers are going to be sent out in the next couple of weeks to assess the bridge possibilities. We like the idea of a pre-fab bridge where we put into concrete piers and they lay a bridge on top with a crane. Those firms will also do some of the engineering work for you.

Oh yea, and we looked at the house site pretty close to where CP and I had wanted it. This way we also leverage the already approved septic areas and can work the house into the slope for some extra intrigue. That process also starts soon.

Some nice reference houses

2005-08-26T15:17:00.000-07:00

C2C Home

2005-08-26T14:52:00.000-07:00

This is a great entry way. I love the concrete grass thing:

More here:

http://www.landliving.com/articles/0000000847.aspx

Chat Lunatique

2005-08-26T14:40:00.000-07:00

Hey look the French do have a sense of humor:

Schindler

2005-08-26T14:36:00.000-07:00

CP bought me this nice book of arch by RM Schindler. Great modern stuff and amazing most was done in the 20s and 30s

Good Home Blogs

2005-08-24T09:53:00.000-07:00

Here are a few nice architecture, home design, or related blogs that I regularly read:

Land + Living: nice homes here but mostly in SoCal unfortunately
Apartment Therapy: well, more for NYC dwelling than country homes but still good stuff
design*sponge: she's a bit sappy and _loves_ everything but good links esp. for furniture/homewares
MocoLoco
LiveModern: people building modern houses...how familiar

An Architect (perhaps) and a Site Visit

2005-08-24T09:16:00.000-07:00

We have found an architect (well, we think so but we haven't signed the contract yet so this may be the jinx post)! He's Matthew Bialecki based in New Paltz, NY (town about 20 mins away from our land). See his other projects here:

http://www.mbialeckiarch.com/

We chose him amongst the four we interviewed because:

1) He had completed other projects with a similar background to ours
2) Was quite keen on our interests and that we are open to some different ideas for the home
3) Has green building certification and experience
4) Is local, knows local codes and builders, and
5) (this is more me than CP) he was quite frank with us about options and approach given the constraints of the project

On that last point I appreciated that he told us going with a geothermal heating system was total overkill for a house our size and budget. He recommended a low-energy tankless boiler as a backup as he believed we could achieve most of our heating needs through proper passive solar design (and don't forget the center mass fireplace). And that would net about the same energy efficiency.

Oh, and he tried to impress CP with his art book collection. Then he vogued for us.

He had some really nice cardboard mock-ups of projects in-the-works and promised that we'd get a cardboard mock-up as well! That pretty much cinched it for me.

In any case, he's coming for a site visit on Monday 8/29 and this will be important to starting the siting process. Even w/o seeing the property he already had some interesting ideas about our streams/bridge/siting challenges (more on that later). We also mutually agreed not to sign the contract until after the visit. This allows for some adjustment based on his assessment of the siting since that could materially impact the scope of project. Also, in negotiating the contract we carved out any engineering work on the bridge since, depending on the scale we end up going with, that's a special project.

More on the visit after.

Clos vougeot

2005-08-16T13:09:00.000-07:00

I got seeds!

Tree huggers

2005-08-14T09:23:00.000-07:00

Official measure: 2 1/2 humans

Summer in London

2005-08-14T03:57:00.000-07:00

thank god its not winter

Sisters reading

2005-08-14T03:50:00.000-07:00

Much conversation was had

Choosing an Architect

2005-08-12T08:54:00.000-07:00

We've take the summer to find, interview, and now come to a decision on an architect for our home. We read a bunch of articles on how to do this since it's both of our first home building projects. We decided we wanted an architect so that we could do something interesting but also work within some challenging constraints:

- $300k budget
- 1500-1750 sq. ft.
- an interesting but challenging wooded, hilly, and wet 7.25 acres with limited access
- and building as green and sustainably as possible

Now that we've done the interviews (2 NYC architects and 2 local to the site) we've come to our selection. Our decision centered around a few criteria:

- Were they interested in the project given the above constraints and the style we indicated
- Had they a similar aesthetic style and could they show us similar projects
- Local experience with builders and towns
- Green building experience
- Could they start this fall on the project planning with a target of build begin this spring
- Did we have a good rapport with them

In the end, only one architect satisfied all these criteria and that made us feel like they were the right choice. We now have their contract in hand and they've been flexible in changing that a bit (including fee structure!) based on the project.

We'll list the name once we're officially signed. We decided to move ahead with them with a site visit coming later this month (August) before signing. This is because the siting is complex and may change the scope of project a bit so we can adjust the contract accordingly.

We're off to France and will probably contemplate all of this over again but we're excited that we're moving from dream into concept. Now the hard part starts.

House Project

2005-08-12T08:53:00.000-07:00

So we convert this little test blog (with several fun cat photos) over to cover our house building project. We'll document as best we can the process of building our modern home in the Hudson Valley in upstate NY. It'll be quite a process and hopefully not too painful.

Bay ridge flower

2005-07-31T13:39:00.000-07:00

My cat also hates you

2005-07-30T17:17:00.000-07:00

Cat craze

2005-07-30T17:13:00.000-07:00

My cat hates me

2005-07-30T17:05:00.000-07:00

Black Hole Sun

2005-07-20T15:37:00.000-07:00

Black hole sun does exist. Chris Cornell was right.