Move of server

I have migrated the blog to my domain at www.bindy.co.nz Progress continues there.

Progress

Progress indeed. Mid January saw the boys helping out with house site preparations.

We headed off to Golden Bay on the annual pilgrimige ( brilliant weather this year!) with some trepidations as the slab was due to be poured in the first week of our holiday and the frames erected during the decond week.  Texts from home kept us up to date while co-ordinating heating and building teams saw some delays. In the event we returned to a nicely curing slab and were here to see frames erected.

It is an extroadinary process that seems to hobble together skilled processes with error management. It has been observed that if medics managed patients the way builders erect building tribunals would be very busy but somehow it seems to come together. Not much is irrevocable or as the builders quip “everything is fixable”. Two builders down to health matters saw a new man on the job and with only one frame put up back to front the skeleton was erected relatively quickly.

The build is about two weeks behind schedule but there is the potential to pick up time on the window order.

Murray and I have been doing our valiant best to make final decisions and after a few days researching tabs, basins , tiles and wooden flooring we think we may be getting to th point where the thing starts to gel…. nearly…

Zen and the art of house building

Well, all those who said there’s be no slab by Xmas, take a point. It is simply too tedious to go into why. Just the usual sort of mis communications, weather, things not lining up… whatever.   Block are sitting out in their plastic wrap waiting to be set in place and the concreted.

There is no point in foot stamping or blaming. Everyone is doing their best.

Photo’s coming.

Energy Matters

We are trying to get energy and heat matters settled for the house.   In theory this will be the first and last house we build but if I were to design again I would begin with the heating and energy and design out.

One of the challenges is that we have to combine a solution for the old and new house – one efficiently insulated and the otherr efficiently aerated!  We also don’t want to spend too much on the old house which , in theory, is not to stay permanently. ( though given the grief over losing the old shed I can’t see the boys letting the old house go! ) We seem to be putting lots of effort into heating the new bit but the the old house could suck anything we produce. Add to that the fact that the boys will use by far the most hot water,  that their rooms will still need heating as they do now and that we cannot easily insulate underfloor and don’t want to spend a fortune renovating up to the insulated standard of the new bit … its a design conundrum for anyone coming to consult.

Our first choice, since we will have en endless supply of wood,  would be to install a wood burner which could heat underfloor, radiators and water . This in combination with solar would  utilise resources to hand and be as least dependant on electricity.  Photovoltaic cells or wind power would be the ultimate supply of the latter.  Such a solution would be fine if budget were not an issue. But , if budget were not an issue we would be building quite a different house anyway.  None of the technologies which would build the best energy suite come cheap.

Also after some initial inquiries we also discovered that the above ideal  solution required something the size of a small substation  to collect, store and distribute the various heat transfers involved.

Over the horizon came geo thermal.  Just like solar solutions this comes in direct or indirect solutions.  It uses the heat in the ground and delivers this to a heat pump that raises the temperature and sends it around whatever hydro solution you have – under floor pipes or radiators.  So far we like this idea because it is not bothered by the clouds covering the sun … we await several prices.

At the very least we will install pipes in the slab for connection to the eventual solution .  And that raises the issue of the flow treatments….

But right now I am out to help on the big chipper…David and I drove over and collected it through sleety rain and came home to see Murray mowing the bit of lawn which will disappear on Wednesday when the digger starts scraping.  It is in comprehensible to the rest of us but a fitting tribute to the last 10 years.