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Monthly Archives: July 2014

Innovative Home Building

24 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by Paul Duncan in Home Building

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Newfield, a mostly quiet, formerly farming community, is undergoing some changes as demographics shift and new residents move in. In some cases they bring new ideas and innovations, including in home construction.  Here’s one example.
Cockeyed cabin
Challenging old stereotypes, the owner clearly questioned the rationale for having a horizontal floor.  The steep slope of the property begs for a reinterpretation of floor orientation.  There are, of course, some challenges.

The cabin rests on the sloped ground with no foundation beneath. Since the cabin was wrestled from the road up into the woods, it’s slid down a bit, probably during some of the torrential rains we’ve had recently.  You can see the divot in the front of the roof when the cabin slid down in contact with a large tree in front of the door. New problems provoke clever solutions.

Heavy duty straps are looped around the protruding log wall ends and anchored around up-slope trees–that should keep the house in place.  Surely the tension on the straps won’t compromise the integrity of the logs they’re wrapped around. Genius.
Cockeyed cabin
You would think this kind of creative thinking and reinterpretation of tired old building conventions would be celebrated.  Sadly, this effort has been rewarded with a stop-work injunction fastened to a window on the cabin.  Who knows what the local building code authority objected to; it was likely the missing light fixture next to the front door or something similarly benign.

We salute you, home builder. You think outside the (downhill-sliding) box.

A Birthday Change Of Pace

04 Friday Jul 2014

Posted by Paul Duncan in General

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Lori has a birthday today. She consistently has one every year about this time. She’s very reliable that way. Normally we observe the occasion by doing a death march at Robert H. Treman Park in weather worthy of Satan’s hothouse.

This year was different on two fronts: the weather is uncharacteristically cool and Lori’s “on call” for customer service problems, limiting her flexibility. (It’s a new program her employer justifies by saying it helps software engineers develop customer awareness, much in the same way that requiring surgeons to rotate air-conditioning maintenance chores helps them develop operating environment awareness. Incidentally, in both cases money is saved by the employer–it’s a win-win! Except for the people laid off who used to do those jobs.)

This year we decided to visit Stewart Park in Ithaca; Lori had never been there and I hadn’t been there since my age was in the single digits. A windy cool day kept picnickers at bay but the park is quite the gem in any case. We will be back. We topped off the experience by having lunch at Ithaca Bakery, an old reliable favorite.

Lori hams it up with an old Weeping Willow tree
Lori stands among old Weeping Willows
Wind in the Weeping Willows off Cayuga Lake
Wind sports on Cayuga Lake
Geese see what the chicken was up to
Lori heads over a footbridge
Lori on a boardwalk between footbridges
Lori walks among old weather-beaten trees
Algae on water in bird sanctuary

A Year With Geothermal Heating and Cooling

03 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by Paul Duncan in Home Building

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geothermal

As we mark our first year living in our new home, we also have a year’s worth of data on how our geothermal heating and cooling system has performed. Subjectively, the answer is “great” with ample heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer. We’re always comfortable and the air is not as dry as furnace-processed air.

A big test, though, is how it performs financially. Geothermal systems are more expensive to install than more common systems. The expectation is that the extra up-front cost is compensated by much lower operating cost. We were eager to find out.

Our system provides some basic historic performance data that are useful in estimating use costs. We can get monthly summaries of kilowatt hours (KWH) used by the system for heating, KWH used for cooling, and how many hours the system has been running.

The system does not report the power consumed by the motors driving the pumps for the ground loops. There are two 245-watt motors and, for the sake of guesstimation, we’ll assume they’re running when the heat pump is running, enabling us to estimate the pump KWH consumption.

System Energy Consumption

Here’s what the data show for the past 12 months of heating and cooling in our Newfield home:

Geothermal energy consumption for July 2013 through June 2014
cool KWH heat KWH Hours Run pump KWH (est.) total KWH Cost (US $, est.)
Jul 138.8 0.0 141.0 69.1 207.9 $27.03
Aug 95.9 0.0 94.7 46.4 142.3 $18.50
Sep 30.2 18.0 47.5 23.3 71.5 $9.29
Oct 7.2 82.8 85.4 41.8 131.8 $17.14
Nov 0.0 287.1 265.4 130.0 417.1 $54.23
Dec 0.0 428.5 392.4 192.3 620.8 $80.70
Jan 0.0 554.2 498.1 244.1 798.3 $103.77
Feb 0.0 505.7 458.6 224.7 730.4 $94.95
Mar 0.0 479.7 433.6 212.5 692.2 $89.98
Apr 3.2 260.0 244.0 119.6 382.8 $49.76
May 12.9 80.6 88.5 43.4 136.9 $17.79
Jun 55.0 5.0 61.0 29.9 89.9 $11.69
Total: 343.2 2701.6 2810.2 1377.0 4421.8 $574.83

Graphically, we get a better idea of electric consumption throughout the year. There’s the obvious increase during the winter months and a lesser increase during the summer cooling season.

Geothermal Energy Consumption

Cost For A Year

The system reported a total of 343.2 KWH used for cooling for the year, 2701.6 KWH used for heating, and an estimated 1377.0 KWH were used by the ground loop pumps. The grand total for heating and cooling for a year: 4421.8 KWH. Last I looked we were paying about 13 cents per delivered KWH on our electric bill so, we can estimate we paid about $575 for the year for heating and cooling. Not too shabby.

But It Was Cold Last Winter

We had a really cold winter in the northeast.  To estimate the costs of heating and cooling during more “normal” seasons, we can use heating and cooling degree day (HDD and CDD) data for our area to help estimate what the costs would have been in previous years. I looked up the relevant degree-day numbers for the 12-month period we used our system and the 2 previous 12-month periods before that.

12-Month Degree Days for Ithaca, NY
Year Ending Heating DD Cooling DD
July, 2012 6979 157
July, 2013 7866 160
July, 2014 8503 112

Heating and cooling requirements for a building are proportional to the degree-day demands imposed on the system so, based on our year’s worth of data, we can estimate costs for the previous 2 years.

Estimated Costs For Previous 12-Month Periods
Year Ending Total KWH (est.) Cost (US $, est.)
July, 2012 3918.9 $509.46
July, 2013 4341.5 $564.39

Each of the 2 previous years had warmer winters but also warmer summers so more AC would have been required. But still, those 2 previous years would have been less demanding and less expensive than our year because of the frigid winter we had. It looks like we’re going to spend somewhere in the vicinity of $500 to $600 per year for heating and cooling based on current delivered electricity rates here.

Our geothermal heat pump has a Coefficient of Performance (COP) of 4.0 to 4.6 for the ground loop system we have. Some back-of-the-envelope scribbling indicates that we would be paying 3 to 5 times what we are now for other conventional types of heating and cooling systems available in our area. We’ll be somewhat protected from the volatility in the propane and heating oil markets as well, although there have been some spikes in electric costs in some areas.

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