Despite Heavy Rains, Block Party Goes On

Last weekend, our annual block party was scheduled. We had a hand in helping organize a few events and were excited as our niece and nephew were coming over to join the fun.

However, heavy rains Friday night and Saturday morning threatened to put an end to this. We received 8+ inches of rain which contributed to I-290 being shut down for the first time ever due to the new river that formed beside it. In fact, our town was declared a disaster zone and received the highest rainfall in the Chicagoland area.

We and others on our block were fortunate to only receive a little minor water in the basement, unlike some friends who received much worse damage. But despite this rain delay, folks on our block decided to press on with the block party.

After a social breakfast, the main activity of the day was painting rain barrels. While I may have had a part in suggesting the activity, it was well-coordinated by another member of our block, who took some photos of the process. Those of us interested chipped in on paint and supplies ahead of time, and we ended up with 6 rain barrels painted by different families on the block. The kids got into the painting at first, but quickly lost interest when bubbles and water balloons started flying around, so the adults ended up completing the barrels.




For our part, we took one of our existing rain barrels and painted a playful underwater sea scene on it. Jen had some great inspiring artwork for a whimsical octopus, puffer fish, jellyfish, and more that she printed off in advance. We painted directly onto the barrel and protected it with a coat of polyurethane. We're thinking about installing our barrel off the garage beside the vegetable garden, where it can give a lot of life and color year-round.



Another fun activity I was in charge of was the Blender Bike. Our friend Jim works with the good folks at Working Bikes and loaned me an old exercise bike fitted with a DC motor that could power a lightbulb. It could also power an old school blender, so with a bit of ice and some Countrytime lemonade mix, the kids on our block got a first-hand feel for energy. I would have them pedal and get a good speed going on the exercise bike, and then flip the blender switch to on. They would immediately feel the "electrical load" and have to pedal much harder to keep it turning. It worked out great and with the heat and humidity, the kids lined up for an ice cold slushie! Especially the ones who were pedaling to power the blender.

The party really started a bit later, when I offered all the adults to make a slushie with vodka in it. Lots of takers for that!

I also brought out our baggo boards and had borrowed a really neat set from Chris to have a baggo tournament (with a 16-team bracket). This has become a good block party tradition. We had some good teams this year, and I think we'll do some seeding for next year's party.


Finally, I collected electronic waste (e-waste) from people as usual to take for proper recycling. There's a Green Fest in Elmhurst this weekend that will be a perfect drop-off.

We skipped the evening communal dinner in order to spend time with our niece and nephew, but I think the block party was great fun on an otherwise wet day. It's always great to come together and strengthen the community.

"On this shrunken globe, men can no longer live as strangers," Aldai E. Stevenson

Discovering Where our Energy Dollars Go

We've taken the summer off of blogging, but things are starting to pick up again here at Humphrey House. Sorry for the delay, but life happens sometimes. Anyway, I recently borrowed my friend Jim's blower door as a sort of DIY energy audit, looking at the overall "tightness" of our home.

For those unfamiliar, a blower door is basically a high-powered fan that sits in a tarped-ff doorway. You close all the windows in the building and turn this sucker on High. This will suck the air out of the house, and then start pulling air in from outside the home through any cracks and crevices. The fan is attached to an air pressure gauge monitoring both indoor and outdoor pressure, to ensure the home is depressurized to around 50 Pascals (Pa). At this level, noticeable drafts occur. [More info]

Once I had this setup and running in our kitchen doorway, I went around the home looking for obvious air drafts. Our house is now littered with pieces of blue masking tap indicating all the leaks and drafty spots in the house that should be sealed up before winter comes along. Most interesting finding: the older windows did not leak around the window sashes so much as they leaked around the frame. For example, more air moved from a gap underneath the window stool (interior window sill) between that and the piece of trim below the window (the window apron).

The really cool techie thing about the blower door test is the fact that with the gauge, you can tell just how leaky a building is. Despite consciously remodeling with energy efficiency in mind, I knew that I'd be in for some surprises. After all, we're living in a home built 100-years ago, when there was likely no insulation, and air barriers were really more like "hair barriers".

So, the air pressure gauge measures the volume of air moved out of the home. As you may recall from high school, volume is usually measured in cubic terms. In this case, we're looking at cubic feet of air, but we want to know that over time. So the gauge tells at a certain air pressure (50 pascals) how much air is moved in a minute (CFM)? Well, in our 1.5-story home, it's around 4400 CFM.

What does this number mean in real terms of how leaky the house is? Well there's a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation that can make this more meaningful. (Math Warning!)

We need the volume of air in the house. Given the average 8-foot ceiling height and 3500 sq ft of living area (2135 above ground + 1365 finished basement), we have about 28,000 cubic feet of air in the home. (Humphrey House air volume = 3500sf x 8ft = 28,000 cubic feet).

We can find out how many times the air in the house turns over per hour by taking the air pressure gauge measurement, 4400 CFM, multiply by 60 minutes to convert to hours, and then divide by the air volume in the home: (4400 CFM x 60 M) / 28,000 cubic feet = 9.4 air changes each hour (ACH).

You might be tempted to say, "That's one leaky house!" but remember, this is at a high pressure of 50 pascals. We can "normalize" that number by using a factor for a well-shielded home in an urban area to find the natural air changes (ACHn). For simplification purposes, we'll use a factor of 16.7 (this is derived from LBL empirical data). So we divide our 9.4 ACH by 16.7 to arrive at a normalized air exchange of 0.56 ACHn.

This means roughly 1/2 of the air in the house is changed over every hour. For comparison, the 1989 standard for air exchanges recommends 0.35 ACHn. So, in other words, despite soy foam in part of the house and other energy efficiency efforts, we're still pretty leaky.

We have a lot to do to air seal the home, but thankfully the blower door helped us find all the little holes where our energy dollars were flying out the house. Next step is to work on fixing them. If you're interested in getting a detailed analysis like this of your home, follow the directions on EnergySavers.gov, or find a professional energy auditor at natresnet.org or www.bpi.org. If you're in Chicago, look at any of these.

The Poor Man's route to Solar Energy

You can tell it is the dead of winter and not much is happening at Humphrey House. However, this gives us a chance to give an update on some of the projects we never got around to mentioning last fall when we were too busy working. One of these is the addition of a tubular skylight into our dining room.

This is a bit of unique installation because we really have taken advantage of every nook and cranny on the second floor, which may make you wonder how we managed to squeeze what effectively is a 10-inch HVAC duct through the space to connect the dining room ceiling and the roof. Well, we really got to take advantage of some of the existing architecture, which makes the suntunnel appear as if it goes right through the second floor living space, when it fact, it does not.


I cut in the suntunnel from the attic chase area behind the knee-wall in our laundry room upstairs, as close to the knee wall as possible. This was about 4 feet from where the exterior wall would normally be. But, as you can see in the photo, the suntunnell spills into the room a good six feet from the outside wall. How? By taking advantage of the bay window that juts out of the dining room. This makes the suntunnel appear close to the chandelier light fixture towards the center of the room, and yet the tube does not pass through any living space in our converted attic.

You would think with the windows in the bay that the dining room would receive plenty of light and not need additional daylight. However, if you look through the window in the photo above, you can see the house next door is quite close to us. And worse, it's a full two-story house with a steep roof, which ends up blocking out all direct sunlight to our first floor for 7 months out of the year. With the winter months being dark to begin with, I wanted to brighten up the space naturally as much as possible. And a $150 suntunnel was an ideal solution.

When we were on the green home tour in September, I described this as the poor-man's solar energy. I got quite a few puzzled looks, and Jen pointed out that is a bit misleading as it isn't really power. However, the tubular skylight does replace the need for us to turn the lights on during daylight hours. Just look at how bright it is After, compared to Before (and note the chandelier is not turned on).

During the day, the tubular skylight channels the sun into the dining room, located at the center of our home, making it brighter and feel warmer. So the suntunnel is our small leap into what is a form of solar power - passive solar (no moving parts). Speaking of which, our friend Jim is teaching a free seminar on passive solar and architecture at the Chicago Center for Green Technology in a few weeks on March 12. If you live in the area, want to learn more, and get some great ideas, it will be well worth your time.

As for now, I think I'll take advantage of this sunny day and go read by the daylight flooding into our dining room.

Thanks for Tank and Tankless Heaters

Last weekend, Jim and I finished making the final connections for our tankless water heater. I was admittedly nervous since this is a used Takagi TK2 tankless water heater we had gotten off of Craigslist. So rather than just cutting out the old tank model, we installed a shut-off isolation valve on our old water heater and left it in place for now. That way, just in case we run into problems with the tankless and need to revert back, it's a simple switch.

So, once the new equipment was in place and water lines were soldered together and leak free, we flipped the switch on the tankless water heater. Water flowed in and no leaks! I turned on a hot water tap, and water began to flow through the tankless. Once the flow was high enough (more than 0.5 gallons per minute), the electronic igniter lit the flames, which we could see through a tiny window (Jim is pointing to it the photo). Then the exhaust fan kicked on to push the fumes out the special stainless steel venting. Shortly, there was hot water flowing through the tap! Yay!

In a tankless water heater system, the hot water takes a bit longer to reach the taps than a regular water heater would. This happens because there is no constant heat source heating water all the time, and no standby heat is transferred to the water pipes. This is a trade-off with a tankless water heater. Less fuel is needed to heat, but more water is used and wasted down the drain as you wait for the hot water. Fortunately almost all of our plumbing runs are relatively short, so we haven't noticed this isn't a big deal. It takes maybe an extra 20 seconds at our furthest plumbing fixture.

Anyway, we've now been living with the new tankless for a week. Sunday night, Jen was very happy to finally be able fill the bath tub with hot water instead of running out halfway through! But we noticed when taking a shower that the hot water fluctuated off for about two minutes (completely, so it was cold!) and then came back on.

I read the TK2 manual, did a bit of research, and found a great discussion on problems with Takagi TK2 water heaters. This gave me some good ideas such as cleaning water inlet filter, cleaning the igniter and flame sensor (next to the tiny burner window) as well as checking the temperature sensors in the water intake and outtake lines for any clogs. So I did all this. At first, looking at this thing with the cover off is quite intimidating, but if you try to look past all the electronic wires, it's relatively straightforward.

However, after all these maintenance tweaks, it seems we still have occasional problems with the shower. We still get hot water there (and everywhere else for that matter), and there is no problem if the shower is set to full-hot (not mixing with cold water). I wonder if this is mixing valve issue so we'll have to do a bit more investigation on the temperature fluctuations (and maybe even call Takagi) to get this figured out.

Anyhow, despite these initial problems, I'm quite pleased with the fact that the system works, and I'm really looking forward to cutting out the old tank-style water heater and getting some extra space in the small utility room / shop area in our basement. But we'll hold off on that until these issues are resolved, knowing that if needed, we can fire up the old beastly water heater at any time.

Going Tankless: Part II (for Real)

Remember when our water heater went out and we thought about getting a tankless water heater? Ah, the memories. It was in May 2006, but it seems like only yesterday that I was replacing that thermocouple. Wait, that's because it was yesterday! What do I mean? Well, the thermocouple went out again already.

Yes, I fear the 23-year-old water heater has reached the end of its useful life. I've replaced the thermocouple again, but how much longer can it go on? It's time to replace the entire water heater. Since the old beast is so layered with sediment that it won't even fill up our bathtub, this replacement isn't exactly a shock to us.

In fact, after it went out in 2006, I actually found someone on our beloved Craigslist selling a tankless water heater that had been installed in a mulit-family home for a few months. While the owner was glad at the energy savings, the residents weren't too happy when four people tried to shower at once.

If you aren't aware of the main performance difference between tankless and regular water heaters, the tankless design can't accommodate the same flow rate (gallons per minute) as a traditional heater. But as long as you get the right size, it isn't a problem. For exmaple, the unit I purchased is a Takagi TK2 which supports two major appliances. So although we never do laundry at the same time as showering, in theory, with this tankless heater, we could.

So while we limp along on our old standard heater, I contacted my good friend Jim, to help with the tankless installation since he has the exact same model. Also, there are some unique install considerations for these. Since tankless water heaters burn so efficiently, you can't use a standard exhaust duct... it has to be double-walled stainless steel. Jim also installs solar thermal water heaters, so he could help me install this so that if I ever wanted to go solar later on and use the tankless as a supplemental backup (a common configuration) there would be room to cut in the solar piping. Anyway, here's another photo of it during the installation process.


As you can see, the space-saving design is already a bonus as it tucks away into a 2'-wide space between the furnace and a foundation wall. I've already got plans for the area where our old water heater currently rots rests. Anyway, we're not quite done with the installation just yet, but we'll be wrapping things up very soon.

I See A

While I was up in the northern reaches of Wisconsin, Jen attended the The Historic Chicago Bungalow & Green Home Expo and picked up some really neat information from tons of vendors on bungalow restoration and renewable energy sources.

Well I was kinda bummed that I didn't get to make it to the expo. So when I heard that last Saturday was national solar day with local tours across the country, I quickly went to the ISEA website (pronounced I-See-A) to find out what the local group had planned. To my surprise, they were planning a viewing of 4 different buildings right in Oak Park! One of the homes even featured the tankless hot water heater that we bought (but have yet to install) for our house. The homes all featured solar thermal technology, which captures the sun's heat using water and transfers to your home hot water heater, essentially pre-heating it. A large system can also pre-heat the return air in an HVAC furnace by running the solar-heated water through a heating coil. Kind of like an automotive radiator that works in reverse. As a bonus, I got to see a converted electric only S-10 pickup and a diesel Jetta modified using a "Frybrid" system. The owner told me he drives for free using used cooking oil from local restaurants(biodiesel). All in all a pretty exciting afternoon!

Getting back to solar thermal systems though, the event put the attainability of a solar system within reach. A professionally installed system, after rebates from the state and a minimal federal tax credit come out to several thousand dollars. But the components themselves are relatively affordable except for the collector plates that mount on the roof. So I'm thinking that before we close up our walls upstairs (yes, we're still insulating), I might run some insulated 3/4" pipe up. Although with copper prices so expensive, maybe PEX is a better choice.