Category Archives: Home Building

Sunroom & Siding

14 Friday Aug 2020

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Last year we decided to commit to something we’ve been daydreaming about for a few years.  We wanted to add a 3+ season sunroom to the house and replace the house’s vinyl siding, soffit, and fascia. We contracted with Crown Construction and we are very pleased with the whole process and the finished job.

Interior of sunroom addition.

The sunroom has a radiant heat floor, is well-insulated, and uses triple-pane energy-efficient windows.  We hope we can use it year round. So far it’s been a joy and we’re using it extensively.

Replacing the vinyl siding is something Lori, in particular, wanted to do.  Close up it looked cheap, extensive insect nests were populating all the gaps and crevices, and some bad installation was a real eyesore in some spots.

We chose to replace with engineered wood and changed the color while we were at it. The very skilled and experienced guys did a great job.  It looks as good as we dared hope.  The big surprise is how tight everything is, eliminating the fly and wasp issues.  The combination of the wood and the backer board they used also very noticeably makes the house quieter.  We’re also aware of a drop-off in micro-drafts during windy days–we’re hoping this makes a big difference in the winter.

Finally, we also replaced the siding around the front door with a stone facade which we like a lot.

Financially this overhaul may only add to our tax assessment and insurance costs and do very little to enhance the value of the house here in upstate New York’s perennially dismal housing market.  But at least it was expensive.

All told, it was a great quality-of-life investment and an efficient way to get rid of some of those burdensome retirement savings.

Stone facade replaced vinyl siding around front door.
Southeast corner of house showing new sunroom addition.
East side of house with sunroom addition (left) and new siding.
West side of house with new siding and stone wall around front door.
West side of house with new siding and sunroom addition (right).

Innovative Home Building

24 Thursday Jul 2014

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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 Year With Geothermal Heating and Cooling

03 Thursday Jul 2014

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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.

The Lease of Our Worries

28 Tuesday Aug 2012

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gas lease

One page buried in our title abstract causes us continuing grief.

People of Pennsylvania and New York are very familiar with “fracking” (hydrofracking), a well-drilling technique used to extract natural gas from vast shale reserves by fracturing the shale deep in the earth.  Very big money is involved and the topic has pitted neighbor against neighbor in heated discussions about economic impacts, royalty windfalls, property rights, environmental issues, and social upheavals.

I won’t rehash any of the arguments here, but I do want to show how the topic of gas leasing affected us personally and maybe, in the process, serve as a warning to anyone owning, buying, or selling property.  Surprising (and expensive) issues related to gas leases can bite you.

Our Quest

A few years ago we started searching Tompkins County in New York State for a few acres of land to build our retirement home. We looked over several possibilities and rejected a few outright because they had existing gas leases on them–we were familiar enough with the issues that we didn’t want somebody else’s decision affect any use or restrictions on land we would own.

We settled on a nice 5-acre lot in Newfield, south of Ithaca.  We bought it from the previous owner (a lawyer) who assured us that, although there once was a gas lease on the property, it had expired.  We informed our lawyer of our aversion to gas or mineral leases and that the deal was contingent upon the land being free and clear.  The previous owner signed an affidavit certifying that there was no current lease on the property.  We closed the deal and were happy and excited new landowners. A few months later we got some bad news.

We Are Encumbered

We found out, through a nearby lot owner who was equally surprised in her case, that our property did indeed have an active gas lease on it.  The original gas lease, signed by the owner of the farmland that was eventually divided into 5- and 10-acre lots was renewed by the lease-holding gas company (Chesapeake Energy) who notified the then owner of the properties, a development company, who then apparently neglected to inform all the lot owners who had purchased from them.  So, a few dozen parcels of land were now owned by people who were almost all unaware that their properties were encumbered by active gas leases.  So what.

So What

We found, through our neighbor’s plight, that most or all local banks will not issue mortgages or home equity loans on a property encumbered with a gas lease that includes surface rights for the leaseholder.  (By default, almost all gas leases written and signed at the time specified expansive rights on and below the property surface.)  One banking official told us the reason for the reticence was that, in the event of a gas company polluting a property or leaving piles of abandoned equipment could induce loan defaults leaving the bank holding the bag on a bad loan and a multimillion dollar cleanup.  So now we owned property for which a bank would not loan us money to build a house or, later, give us a home equity loan. This is not good.  Plus we saw our property’s value plummet before our eyes with this revelation.  We decided to try to get the leaseholder to release us from the gas lease.

Surface Rights

We secured the efforts of an attorney who attempted to convince the leaseholder to nullify the gas lease on our property.  They have no incentive to do this and, unsurprisingly, declined.  Our lawyer kept patiently and persistently working with her contacts and eventually got the leaseholder to relinquish the surface rights secured in the gas lease on our property.  We were joyful. This removed the impediment that banks have with loans on lease-encumbered properties.  The remaining terms of the lease were still in place but were not of the grave concern that surface rights were (to us and the banks).

We searched public records for names and addresses of the other lot owners and sent them letters explaining the gas lease and banking implications as well as the importance of removing surface rights.  Several have since thanked us and pursued surface rights release for their own properties.

Negligent Lawyer

Parallel to this effort, we contacted the law firm that handled our land purchase offering them a chance to make amends for their attorney’s screw-up in not spotting the active lease in the title search.  They did an “internal investigation” and decided they were faultless, we just changed our mind about the land purchase and were trying to blame them, and besides, gas leases make properties more valuable. We were dumbfounded and committed ourselves to a lifetime of bad-mouthing this law firm to anyone who listens.  We hope, in some small way, we can punish their arrogance by steering potential clients from them.  (They’re a well known Binghamton firm that are among those scrounging for legal windfalls by playing both sides of the gas leasing issues.)

We also spoke with a malpractice firm who said we had very good grounds for a suit but the economics of such a suit worked against us: the maximum damages awarded to us under NYS law if we won would not be adequate to entice a malpractice attorney to take the case on contingency, meaning it would cost us even if we won.

It Bites Again

With gas lease surface rights removed, we decided to now focus on building our new home on our property.  Our planning indicated that although we could finance a big chunk of it, we would need to finance part of the construction. No problem.  We paraded our sterling credit ratings and sound financial footings past an admiring loan officer.  We mentioned that we even secured the surface rights from the gas lease on the property.  You could hear the tires skidding.  The ability to borrow at all depended on the surface rights status but even having a gas lease at all was a bad thing.  Banks still consider it a higher risk.  Once again, the gas lease was going to cost us: an extra 1/2 point up front and 1/8 percent extra on the mortgage rate.  This is not huge money but it’s not trivial and it’s on top of all the other time and money we spent on the gas lease situation.

In Short

Our experience with gas leases and property ownership has taught us a few things:

  • Gas leases on properties are bad according to lending institutions.  They may either deny lending if surface rights are included in a lease (as they usually are), or make the cost of borrowing higher because of the “risk” of a gas lease.
  • If you are buying property in the shale gas region, it is best to buy only land that is free and clear of existing gas leases; whatever your opinion of shale gas drilling, you surrender a lot of flexibility (and probably value) if there’s an existing gas lease on the property.
  • Choose your lawyer carefully when buying property.  Make doubly sure, in writing, about your requirements relating to gas leases on a property.  Try to choose a lawyer who has experience with, and knowledge of, the implications of gas leases on property ownership.  One helpful hint:  if the attorney’s law firm also handles work for local banks, they will most certainly be sensitive to gas lease issues.
  • If you are thinking of signing a gas lease on your property, thoroughly investigate the implications of what this might mean for you, for your ability to borrow, for the future saleability of your property.  By the way, if you have a mortgage and sign a gas lease, you may be in violation of the terms of your mortgage and could be subject to immediate demand for full payment of the balance.
  • Almost all gas leases signed before the whole uproar over hydrofracking were signed with no attorney review, and even if they were reviewed, attorneys at that time likely had little knowledge of the implications of these very poorly written leases. Everything about these leases was vague and heavily skewed toward the leaseholder.  Many of us are suffering the consequences of these leases today as hydrofracking has rolled over the area with all its implications.