The Experiment Station

We are nothing if not empirical around here. If you want to know whether or how well something is going to work before you invest largely in it, an experiment is the way to go. Back in March of last year we had a very good time setting up the experimental hydronic floor grid in the craft workshop, and came up with a good plan for even heating. Now we’re trying to decide what kind of glazing will go on the south-side solarium/greenhouse wall of the new house.

We thought glass. Glass is clear. Glass is strong. Glass, given various modern treatments in the way of coatings, has good transmission of the light spectrum we want to the heat-sink masses within the house, and for horticulture inside the greenhouse. Coatings can control the passage of heat into the greenhouse as well as the escape of heat on the way out. And glass, y’know, it has the appeal of  literary references: “He that lives in a glass house must not throw stones.” Also,“glasshouse” to the British means a greenhouse and, our greenhouse was meant to be glass.

Green has become a difficult word these days. How is one to know what a person means when they say, “We have a Green House?” Is it a glasshouse?

(This one is at  Wisley Garden in Surrey)

Or is it a green house?

(The arctic green house at Summit)

Or is it, as we expect ours to be, a Green House?

with a greenhouse.

Try not to think too hard about it.

But I wander.

Monty, our fondly held builder, wants to use polycarbonate plastic. He says it’s safer (it’s half an inch thick, so I suppose he has a point there; if you’re going to throw those stones,  that’s a consideration). We say it’s electrostatically active (We might actually have said “cling,” but just think how much stuff sticks to statically charged surfaces). He says it can be done with larger panels and less framing (OK, another point).  We say, but, it turns yellow. He says, not for years. We say, not enough years! Who wants to replace all the glazing in the greenhouse in 10 years? He says it transmits light and heat just as well as glass. We say: LET’S DO AN EXPERIMENT!

We can’t, obviously, test the yellowing over time before we’d like to move in. Besides, manufacturers provide that kind of information. Here are the labels off samples of glass with different coatings. Almost all you could want to  know about light transmission

except how it performs in the field.

So, let’s build little boxes!

These little plywood houses covered in insulation and duct-taped over the seams each contain a concrete block for a heat sink and are glazed with [Sta. A] Makrolon® “High-tech plastic from Bayer;” and [Sta. B] glass. It’s more complicated than that, but it’s glass. It’s been several different kinds of glass over several periods of observation, all in comparison with the polycarbonate. The idea is to see how much heat goes in, and how much heat stays in when the outside air cools. We could have built a half dozen little boxes to run simultaneous tests, but we didn’t. Chief Scientist and Mechanic Richard changes out the glazing  in the glass box, leaving the poly box unchanged, and even tries masking the glazing altogether to establish a control condition.

And we make notes. Lots of notes on a little yellow pad

kept beneath the thermometers mounted on the boxes.

Science is happening live, daily, at local stations.

Construction Report: They Used to Use Whole Trees

Who remembers this kind of scene?

If you were a kid in the Northwest in the 1950s and ’60s, you’ll have your hand up. Trucks like this used to roll down the highways with one giant log on its way to the mill. They moved them on the rails, too, tucking a couple of little trash logs in under the big one, like in the photo below, from the Oregon History Online website.

If you needed, say, a roof beam, someone went out and looked for a piece of a tree big enough to make one for you. These days, I doubt there is a mill in the Northwest that could handle a tree like that. No one then would have imagined trucking a load of little pencils like this one:

And if you needed extra long boards, why, those could be found, too:

If you come across old dimensioned lumber from back then, you’ll find that a two-by-four measured  2″ by 4″,” which might seem normal unless you’ve been lumber shopping in the modern era. Today they are 1 1/2″ by 3 1/2.” And if you want that piece more than 24 feet in length, it will now be finger-jointed together from shorter stock.

I am not suggesting we enjoy a lesser quality of wood since then. If anything, let’s consider those memories of a time gone by to be evidence that we were pretty careless of our resources. There was so much of it! Everyone could have what they wanted from the forests!

In this 21st Century, we are beginning to learn to do better with less.  In an earlier entry I wrote about the Faswall blocks we’re using for the exterior walls of the house.

They make use of otherwise wasted wood remaining after the milling of conventional lumber. Other parts of the house have arrived on the site in what is called Engineered Wood.

Engineered wood is plywood, Gluelam, particle board, wafer board, Masonite… any number of products we’ve become accustomed to seeing in homes. They’re made by taking forest logs and peeling them, shredding them, blowing them apart, smashing them, or collecting up the waste bits of them, and gluing them back together into various forms and shapes. They make use of timber that would be otherwise useless as structural material and, a big plus, the various forms have properties that are predictable in ways not found in natural wood. I admit, I find “real wood” to be more desirable than glued up pieces of wafers and chunks. But we’re past the time when we can indulge the luxury of pillaging our forests for its giants. A managed timber stand of Douglas Fir is harvested at about 40 years of age. The mills are now tooled for trees of modest dimension. Those 40 year-old logs are too valuable to be used wastefully.

So, last week we saw the delivery of a load of I-joists made from engineered wood:

These joists, to hold up a conventional subfloor or roof, would have been solid two-by-twelves. These measure 2 inches across their laminated bases and are 14 inches tall.

And this arrived as well:

It’s the roof beam of the house. It measures 8 3/4 inches by 32 1/2 inches, by 48 feet. Look down on it and you can see the finger joints.

Look at the side, and you can see the, umm, whatever kind of joints these are. C’mon. I’m a woman. How should I know?

And here’s a piece cut off the end (the beam arrived a little over-long). That’s glue in there between the pieces.

This beam is so far from what these men

might have contemplated, it’s mind-boggling.

Meanwhile, the house now has gables (the better to hold up that beam)!

Suddenly it looks less like a suburban medical office and more like… maybe the ruin of some ancient house? Appearances are deceiving. It’s not ancient; it’s just right for today.

Construction Update: Doorways and Windows and Floors, Oh My

It has seemed like things have been static for a while now. That wasn’t really the case, but for some long weeks there was little evidence of progress visible on the outside of the house.  It looked like this for … ever:

But things were going on underground and behind scenes. Here you see the studding for the interior walls:

and the footings for the raised beds in the greenhouse:

These, below, are ventilation pipes that will carry cooling air into the house from the earth berm on the north side. Here, Richard is preparing them with self-leveling concrete inside, to provide an even surface that will allow condensation to flow downward.

Eventually we saw the first floor sky view closed off as the steel pan for the second floor was installed. The construction crew was unhappy to be at work in the snow, but on this beautiful morning, I caught one of the construction crew with his camera out, taking advantage of the second-floor viewpoint.

The masonry for the greenhouse beds has been built up:

And at last, the second floor walls stand. It looks a little institutional at this point. Imagine, if you will, the house gables above, the greenhouse extending off this side of the house, and the exterior walls stuccoed in earth tones. Much remains to be done before that, however.

Contemplating all that work tires even Yellowcat, on the job as project supervisor.