Re: O/T Positioning of Home

Posted by doug stockman on January 30, 2005 at 02:34:35 from (67.139.200.85):

In Reply to: Re: O/T Positioning of Home posted by Slofr8 on January 29, 2005 at 08:45:54:

Wood will not allow the sun's warmth to heat the thermal mass.

Gypcrete is generally used to hold the radiant floor tubes, so yeah, use radiant heat on the main floor if you can afford. If you do not go with radiant on the main floor, forget the gypcrete. Either way, with wood floors, you may want to keep your south facing windows to less than 8% of floor surface area. Otherwise you will probably overheat.

Three feet of overhang seems a bit much. There are books out there to calculate how large the overhang should be. With a three foot overhang, you may not have any solar gain by April - which I suspect is still very cold in Maine. Of course, the amount of overhang is dependent on the size of the windows in the vertical direction and their proximity to the overhang.

Probably 80% of our heat comes from our high efficiency wood stove, but a warm floor when you first get up in the morning is nice. I assume your radiant heat boiler will power the baseboard heaters on the main floor if you choose to go with the baseboards instead of in-floor heating.

If you expect to do most of your heating on the main floor with the wood stove, you may want to see if you can use the wood stove to heat the radiant heat as a backup. Since you have all the thermal mass (if gypcrete), you can store large amounts of heat from the wood stove.

For the basement, definitely place tubing in the concrete. The tubing is cheap and the concrete is already going in there.

Insulate everywhere as best you can. Get at least R-10 under the basement slab. Do not leave an opening uninsulated under the slab. You will just be heating the ground under the slab and some of that heat will bleed off away from your home.

It is possible to overinsulate, but in my mind, insulation and a tight house are the most cost effective interventions you can do. Heating fuels of all types will only go up in cost. You will pay more and more each winter to heat your house. Insulation is only paid for once. Keep the heat you put into the house where it belongs and do not let it escape. That applies for a tight house as well. Once the insulating crew goes through, spend a day with insulation, caulk and expandable foam to seal every place you can find that may allow cold air in. I spent about 8 hours doing that. It is time and money well spent.

Although we have many double hung windows, consider using almost all casement windows. They seal much better and do not leak so quickly over time. If you get your home really tight (< 0.35 air exchanges per hour, we are 0.25), you will need a heat exchanger, also called a heat recovery ventilation unit. That keeps much of the heat you paid for in the house while exchanging stale inside air with fresh outside air.

Best of luck.

Doug

Follow Ups:

• Re: O/T Positioning of Home Slofr8 06:38:49 01/30/05 (1)
  • Re: O/T Positioning of Home doug stockman 02:14:59 01/31/05 (0)

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