Advice The Home Improvement/Automation Thread

Had a couple hour chat with the builders today, talking about walls and floors and trusses and insulation and all that. Got shit figured out.

Gonna do single floor slab, heated by an air-to-water hydronic heat pump. R40 walls, R60 ceiling. I originally planned to do ICF but changed my mind. Doing 2x6 walls with foil faced foam on the outside.

CoP on the heat pump is gonna be ~4, using a slab qualifies me for time of day metering so I'll be heating it with 57% cost electricity. And it'll have twice the insulation as my old place, which had baseboard heat, in comparison it'll be like 1/14th the electricity to heat the place compared to that. And this house I'm in right now has thinner walls and oil heat and probably costs even more. Can't fuckin' wait.
 
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Air seal the shit outta it. Buy a blower door so you can continually test and identify incursions and seal em up during close in
 
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Air seal the shit outta it. Buy a blower door so you can continually test and identify incursions and seal em up during close in
I think in AA you have to do blower door tests now. At least in the last few houses I worked on in Arnold.
 
HRV is code up here.


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Builder mentioned this and said it might be worthwhile, he's done it on a couple houses.

Spraying aerosol silicone into the air sounds like something that can cause 1000 different problems but if it works and it's proven and gives a decent ROI, fuck it.
 
They did that shit on This Old House. Fucking badass.
theres a whole youtube series with Matt Risinger about building a net zero house that has this tech too.

Dude has basically unlimited money, so his solutions are not feasible for most, but its still cool to see how tight he sealed the place up
 
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Builder mentioned this and said it might be worthwhile, he's done it on a couple houses.

Spraying aerosol silicone into the air sounds like something that can cause 1000 different problems but if it works and it's proven and gives a decent ROI, fuck it.
its like 3-4k right?

I think its good when you're going for net-zero and sealing up that last 1-2 sqft of penetration, but not that worth it if you are holey-as-fuck which most houses are.

Its amazing how much air leakage a brand new house, which hasnt been designed to be tight has. I think the average was something like 80sqft... like having a garage door open all the time into your house.
 
theres a whole youtube series with Matt Risinger about building a net zero house that has this tech too.

Dude has basically unlimited money, so his solutions are not feasible for most, but its still cool to see how tight he sealed the place up
Yeah, IIRC, they did on TOH a couple years ago for a net zero house.
 
I want to build a deck, which will require a permit from the county. Have any of you ever gone through this process? I don't know the first thing about stuff the county is going to ask for.
 
I went through it by not getting a permit.

If you dont wanna deal with permitting, often floating decks below a certain height dont require permits if you dont attach them to the house with a ledger board.
 
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Depends on where you live and the rules in that township but here, if there's any digging involved, they need to be sure there aren't any gas lines or cables and then they come check to be sure the construction is up to spec/standards/code.