Clearing and Window Shopping
Busy weekend! We arrived at the cabin late Friday night. It was too late to check out the house site, so we crashed and looked forward to seeing the site at first light. When we walked up to the site, we were floored! It’s really starting to look like a building site now. There’s still quite a bit more clearing to be done, and we can’t wait to see what it looks like in two more weeks.
On Saturday we took a trip to R.K. Miles in Manchester, Vermont to take a look at windows. They have a great showroom with examples of many types of windows. They carry one of the windows we’ve been considering for our fall back position (Marvin Integrity) if we can’t afford our first option (ThermoTech Fiberglass).
The Marvin Integrity is actually a fairly high-end, energy-efficient window. It’s fairly good at keeping the cold out, but it also keeps the sun out, which is not good for a northern climate house oriented to take advantage of the sun’s heating capacity. To give you an example, using our current latitude, south orientation and window square footage, the sun can provide almost 13 million BTU’s of free heat in the months September through May if we use a high solar gain window (ThermoTech). If we use the Integrity window, we only get roughly 8 million BTU’s of heat, some 30% less. Look for a more detailed post on window science in the near future.
We also looked some wood stoves on Saturday. We’ve been trying to find a nice, small, modern-looking wood stove. Wood stoves are a bit problematic in a super insulated house, because they give off roughly 30,000 BTUs of heat per hour. On the coldest day of the year, we only need 10,000 BTUs. But we just can’t imagine living on 50 acres of woods without a wood stove. This weekend we saw some beautiful, super-efficient German and Scandinavian-made models, but they were also outrageously expensive. So the search goes on. We’ll also put together a separate post of wood stove options soon.
We’re still waiting for estimates for the driveway and getting electricity to the site, which are both related. The electric planner came to the site last Thursday and took some measurements. She’ll hopefully get back to us sometime this week with the pricing options for running power above and below ground. If we go below ground, our excavator will dig the trench, but the electric company lays the line in the trench. If above ground, they have to set poles and run wire. And we would lose a lot more trees. So we wait for the numbers.
Categories
- Air sealing 13
- Appliances & Fixtures 4
- Art 3
- Award 4
- Bathroom 8
- Batteries 1
- Decor 5
- Design 10
- Electrical 5
- Energy Calculations 13
- Energy Monitors 4
- Farm 1
- Finance 1
- Flooring 3
- Foundation 9
- Framing 8
- Heating 9
- House 7
- Insulation 8
- Kitchen 6
- Landscaping 3
- Lessons Learned 1
- Performance 60
- Plumbing 10
- Porch 5
- Radon 1
- Rainwater catchment 3
- Research / study 1
- Roof 7
- Septic / Waste water 2
- Sheetrock 6
- Siding 9
- Site Work 22
- Smart home 1
- Solar 64
- Solar Obsessed 10
- Stairs 2
- Surveying 3
- Ventilation 8
- Weather 1
- Windows & Doors 14
- plug-in 3
Archive
- Jan 2021 1
- Dec 2020 2
- May 2020 1
- Jan 2020 1
- May 2019 1
- Jan 2019 3
- Sep 2018 2
- Aug 2018 2
- Jan 2018 1
- Oct 2017 2
- Apr 2017 1
- Jan 2017 1
- Oct 2016 2
- Aug 2016 1
- Apr 2016 2
- Jan 2016 2
- Nov 2015 2
- Oct 2015 1
- Jul 2015 1
- May 2015 1
- Apr 2015 1
- Jan 2015 1
- Dec 2014 1
- Nov 2014 2
- Oct 2014 4
- Sep 2014 2
- Aug 2014 1
- Jul 2014 1
- Mar 2014 3
- Feb 2014 2
- Jan 2014 2
- Nov 2013 1
- Oct 2013 1
- Sep 2013 1
- Jul 2013 3
- Apr 2013 3
- Jan 2013 3
- Dec 2012 2
- Nov 2012 3
- Oct 2012 1
- Sep 2012 3
- Aug 2012 3
- Jul 2012 2
- Jun 2012 1
- May 2012 3
- Apr 2012 2
- Mar 2012 4
- Feb 2012 4
- Jan 2012 5
- Dec 2011 4
- Nov 2011 9
- Oct 2011 10
- Sep 2011 9
- Aug 2011 6
- Jul 2011 6
- Jun 2011 12
- May 2011 8
- Apr 2011 4
- Mar 2011 5
- Jan 2011 6
- Dec 2010 9
- Nov 2010 3
- Oct 2010 4
- Sep 2010 6
- Aug 2010 8
- Jul 2010 6
- Jun 2010 3
- May 2010 3
- Apr 2010 1
- Mar 2010 3
- Feb 2010 3
- Dec 2009 1
- Jun 2009 1
- May 2009 1
- Feb 2009 1
- Dec 2008 1
- Nov 2008 1
- Jun 2008 1