You Look Radiant, Dahling

 09/05/2006

     Labor day couldn’t have been more aptly named for us this year. A whole weekend of work was squashed into one day due to the remnants of Ernesto that blew through the northeast.  It was a long day indeed.

     On Saturday, Anne and I laid out the plastic sheeting for a vapor barrier on the basement floor. We then moved all of the blue-board insulation into the hole, and were ready to start cutting it to size. But then a thought struck: if it does pour down rain tomorrow, won’t the floor become a big swimming pool as no water can drain past the plastic? A call to our excavator, a well-timed lunch break, and a return call confirmed we should cease and desist and wait until Monday. So we did, even though our first laborer arrived that afternoon. That would be Bridget, who arrived with three bottles of wine, a plethora of fancy cheeses and chocolates,  and dinner from an Indian restaurant. Hooray for Bridget. She received a swift promotion to “Chief Assistant to the Head Laborer.”

Who Turned Up the Heat

8/23/06

Controls for a submarine or modern heating system? You decide.

When I came home from doing some work and getting another quote for our countertops yesterday, on the porch were about nine or ten cardboard boxes, which is the entirety of our radiant floor heating system from Radiant Floor Company. It seemed so small. Having grown up in an old three-story Victorian, a heating system was always a massive and mysterious bunch of copper tubing, temperamental pilot-lights, huge water heaters and even huger oil tanks and furnaces. To see it all so simply laid out on our porch, as something I can pack in its entirety into my Subaru with room to spare, was an odd feeling. But I am cool with it. It is quiet, extremely energy efficient, and relatively inexpensive. Time to dig into those cartons.

 3/31/12 

I read that and see my naivete in thinking I would not have much copper involved in my plumbing system. I also believed I was going to plumb the whole house myself, or at least the heating and hot water system. Wrong on both accounts. Thousands of dollars, hundreds of feet of copper and one professional plumber later my heating system was installed, and I am glad I did not go through with my stupid plan of doing it myself. I never would have gotten the house finished. As far as how well the whole thing is working, an on-demand water heater and radiant floor heating are things you have to sort of get used to, and I think the addition of a solar hot water heater with a small super-insulated storage tank will make the whole thing work even better, but as of right now I use around 300 gallons of propane a year for my radiant heat, hot water needs, gas dryer and range. Not bad. The aforementioned large 3-story victorian uses that much oil over 2 weeks in January. So I feel pretty good about it.