well, well, well, well.

Our well isn't big enough.  The well people, Wragg Well Drilling & Pump Svc., came out today and checked the output of our 175 ft. well.  It's pumping about 2 gallons a minute, which is below the minimum.  They have to come out next week and drill deeper, they estimate that they are going to go down to about 400 feet to get the required amount of water.  I am so glad that Dan, our excavator insisted that they come out before he started digging.  If he had dug the hole, the drill wouldn't have access onto our property, and would have had to go through someone's yard.  Yikes.

On the flip side, just had a meeting with Wendy at Sanford and Holly's about windows.  She found some stock windows that have a .60 shgc rating.  Not quite up as high as I would like, but good enough.  I am very happy that we will not have to special order any windows.  The price goes through the roof.

Dan marked out our house in blue paint.  It is SO cool.  Love it.

Thanks for reading.

start and stop and start and....

We are waiting on a well check.  The company is going to come out and test and fix the existing well.  They are coming Thursday.  No more progress until then.   -sigh-


Thanks for reading

some pictures of the site

some explanation of the stakes:

Stakes with red flags on them are the path of the driveway or height markers.

Stakes with blue flags are the corners of the house
Stakes with yellow flags are offset flags (I think 15 feet offset).

Silt fence and garage

Dan, our excavator, has put in the silt fence and has requested that the zoning officer signs off on it.  It looks good to me.  The silt fence separates the wetlands area from the building area to make sure the wetlands stays undisturbed. He also found the septic tank (it wasn't where we thought it was).  Teri and Jim Burnett spent yesterday afternoon beginning to clean out the garage.  The site looks completely different than it used to.  I get out of school next Thursday; I suspect that I will be spending most of my time on site.  I can hardly wait.  Wendy at Sanford and Hollie have the a line on the special windows that we need for passive solar heat gain, which you can learn about in my previous posts.
Pictures of the site to come soon.

Thanks for reading

Windows and zero energy challenge

I am learning a lot about windows, not the computer kind, but the house kind.  The one feature that I have to pay attention to for the south side windows is the solar heat gain coefficient (shgc).  The shgc rating ranges from 1.0 down.  A rating of one means clear glass and 100% of solar heat going through.  The lower the number, the less solar heat.  Unfortunately, the higher the number, generally the more heat leaks out also.  So most windows today have a low shgc.  Ones that I specced out had a .29-.35 shgc.  This mean only 29 to 35 percent of the solar energy is getting through.  This is much too low.  So far, and quite frankly I haven't started to seriously look, the highest shgc stock window I have found is .45,  still to low.  I am looking for .60 and above.

With these high shgc windows come two complications.  The first is the heat loss factor.  It is pointless to try to heat the house passively if much of my heat is going to leave through the windows.  Therefore I need to have insulated shades that I can pull down at night to minimize heat loss, or get those windows that have them internally installed. 

The second issue, which segues into the second topic in this post, is the zero energy challenge.  I have decided (from advice given to me from Peter Harding our energy consultant), to enter the house in the Connecticut zero energy challenge.  This is a contest for new constructions, with a grand prize of 10,000 dollars to the most energy efficient house.  A link with all the details is here:   http://www.ctzeroenergychallenge.com/about.htm

As far as I can tell from the existing contestants, I am the only contestant who is doing his own general contracting.  Every other contestant is a building company.

Excavation -silt fence construction to start Monday!
Wish me luck, and

Thanks for reading.

Sam

We got our foundation permit!

We got our foundation permit!  We got our foundation permit! We got our foundation permit!

Thursday-Friday stumping the ground setting up the silt fence and bales. Monday benchmarks surveyor stakes and starting excavating!

Oh my gosh!

minutia

These last few weeks have been a whirlwind.  I have constantly debated writing about the wide variety of meetings that I have been a part of.  Excavators, bankers, foundation guys, more excavators, and plumbing suppliers.  I have been averaging 1 to 2 meetings, site walk-throughs or long telephone conversations a night.  It quite frankly has been exhausting. I know that the most exciting parts of this ride is just beginning, but to get here has sapped much of my strength.  I hope that the sight of the big machines digging into the ground will get me re-energized.  School is winding down also.  I am writing final exams, and getting that all in order.  Teri is studying for her midterm for her first summer session class.  In a word, it's very chaotic.

The latest issue in the passive solar issues are getting the right kind of windows.  Most windows today do exactly opposite of what we need.  They stop heat from escaping from the building.  They are very energy efficient.  Some windows are so energy efficient that they are better than the walls built in a traditional manner. Unfortunately they also block the sun from putting heat/energy into the house.  The amount of solar gain allowed in is represented by a number called the solar gain coefficient.  A rating of 1.0 is single pane clear glass, which allows for complete pass-through of energy.  Most of the windows that we have seen are rated at about .25-.35.   We are looking for windows in the .78 range.  So far no luck.  Haven't tried very hard yet though. 

Thanks for reading.