New House Build

[AllByteNoBark]

Very nice place Richard. Has to be nice to be living on the farm you grew up on.

 

[ovrszd]

First off, nice work on the house. We did stained concrete for the lower level here - kind of a dark leather brown color that came out nice. I think it is a good solution for slabs.

Radiant floor heat - my experiences. I started off thinking an on-demand HW heater was a great solution. I no longer really think so. There are caveats to that, but what i ran into has soured me on them. I have 3 Takagi on-demand heaters. 2 in the house, 1 in the shop. The 2 house ones are very high efficiency (96-97%) and one is dedicated to domestic HW and the other to radiant floor heat. The one in the shop is slightly lower efficiency but still decent (low 90's?) and only covers radiant heat. From the get-go they have some great advantages - small footprint, the ability to do sealed combustion with PVC venting, high efficiency and very simple controls (your T-stat asks for heat and starts the pump, so the heater automatically starts with teh flow from the pump).

HOWEVER.....

I have learned that these are SUPER sensitive to hard water. We moved in Aug 2015 and did not have a softener in yet. It was on the do to list but I didn't consider it urgent. We started having a lot of issues with hard water plugging up the shower valve screens so finally in Nov 2015, I put in a softener. That fixed those issues and i figured we were good. The next year the domestic HW heater started to leak. Tech support was very helpful and they were nice enough to comp me a heat exchanger, which I had to install (THAT was fun...NOT!). They diagnosed it as due to hard water. Now we ran hard water through it for all of 3-4 months at most, then fully soft water, but that was enough to kill it. I had lengthy technical discussion by phone and email on their diagnosis, and it was clear they were right. I bought a good hard water kit and found my incoming well was 24-26 grains hardness. After softening, it was <1. We have not had problems since, for the past 3.5 yrs.

Radiant had the same issue as those heaters got filled with hard water prior to the softener. The one in the shop crapped out this past spring after only ~5 yrs use - same issue as the house DHW. The one in the house is still going (3-4 yrs) and I did flush it with vinegar to see if I could stop the hard water build up. So far it is OK, but who knows if it will die soon? The other wrinkle is antifreeze. Now this depends a lot on where you live. Up here, if the power went out and it got really cold, I would be at risk of freezing the system after sufficient time down. Can't take that risk so I added 50% antifreeze that is designed for radiant systems to both house and shop. I didn't do that right away but when i did things got worse. I start to hear a low grumbling vibration from the heaters when running. This is cavitation that is happening in the heat exchanger due to the antifreeze mix having lower thermal conductivity than straight water. It is bad for the life of the heater. I can improve it by raising the system pressure. Most in-floor radiant runs at 15 psi, but I run 25-30. It still does not quite eliminate it. You also have to up the pressure in the expansion tank and any relief valve to match when you do this. If you are not running antifreeze, you will eliminate part of this issue, but not the hard water issue.

The next time i have to replace one of these, I am going to find a small conventional tank heater and put that in instead. I believe that will improve things but i will lose floor space. Time will tell.

My $0.02
-Dave

Good stuff Dave. I'm new at this and highly appreciate any experiences.

My shop is running on water without a softener. My house is running on water thru a softener. So I guess long term I will be a good test case for hard water problems.

Thanks again for your post.

 

[Steppenwolfe]

Here's a video of the outside of our House and shop.


Outside House Video - YouTube

Beautiful place, enjoy all of your hard work.

 

[ovrszd]

Very nice place Richard. Has to be nice to be living on the farm you grew up on.

Thank you for the compliment. We are enjoying it. I probably have a greater appreciation than my wife. But she understands the value so it's mutual.

 

[ovrszd]

Beautiful place, enjoy all of your hard work.

Thank you. It's been an adventure.

Tomorrow I'll post some pics of the inside. Want to talk about our cabinets throughout the house. That was an adventure.....

 

[truckdiagnostics]

Nice job. Wish I would have built the house that way. The wife wanted the walk out basement

 

[ovrszd]

Nice job. Wish I would have built the house that way. The wife wanted the walk out basement

My first house was walk out basement style. Served us well for raising a family. Cheap floor space. By the time we sold it we were tired of stairs. That was the driving force for this design.

 

[ovrszd]

We used a local cabinet builder. He's been building cabinets for 30 years. Started working with his Dad who has passed on. We tried to use local builders all we could. We didn't inspect any of his previous work. Relied on people's responses that had used him.

The house we sold had very, very good cabinets. So our expectations were pretty high.

The cabinets are finished in Rustic Cherry like our previous cabinets were. We really like the look of Cherry. Karrie did a good job of finishing the fronts. There are an occasional visible nail hole but you have to inspect them pretty close to find those. The fit of the doors and drawer fronts are pretty good. I adjusted a couple doors for a better fit after Karrie was done.

He installed the units in the house without the drawers, doors attached. He added the counter tops and cut out the sink holes after the cabinets were installed. I was a bit surprised by that. We cleaned a LOT of sawdust out of the cabinets before he installed the drawers/doors.

Karrie was hired on 01 October, walls were roughed in so he could get accurate measurements 01 December. We set a move in date of 01 April. We finally told him we were moving in on 11 May. He wasn't done with the cabinetry. I told him there would be no more wearing shoes into the house. No more leaving a mess behind himself. He worked an additional week to finish after we had moved in.

Here's a couple initial pics. First is the sink cabinet in the laundry room.

Next is miscellaneous cabinets in the kitchen area.

Hallway linen closet

Sink cabinet in 2nd bathroom

 

[ovrszd]

Terry selected two different styles of counter tops. First pic is the laundry room cabinet before sink install

This is the kitchen island before cooktop install.

 

[ovrszd]

This is the Laundry Room Sink Cabinet finished. Drop in large bay sink. High clearance faucet. Pull out drawers behind swinging doors on the left to store laundry supplies. Pull out trash container behind swinging door on the right.

This is the Kitchen Sink Cabinet finished. Flush mount sink embedded into the counter top for easy cleaning. Single bay deep sink. High clearance faucet with extendable hose and a soap dispenser.