Agreed, its looking great down there.

Not 20 minutes after the carpet guys drive away:

http://i182.photobucket.com/albums/x...s/IMGP2242.jpg

http://i182.photobucket.com/albums/x...s/IMGP2243.jpg

It really ties the room together.

They didn't even let me paint the trim!

Well, not that I even had the paint, but that's aside form the point!

On a more practical note, I finally turned the heat on this morning. It got down to 66 in the house. The boiler fired up once when I turned the thermostat on and once about an hour ago. A little background about S-F: I have FROZEN every winter of my 32 years. Growing up my room was in what originally was, and should have remained, an attic. So it was hot in the summer, and I mean HOT, and cold in the winter. Cold as in there was a pane missing from one of the windows. There was a register for forced hot air but none ever made it up there so I put blankets and homosote over it to deaden the blaring volume of the full concert grand piano my mother likes to play at unholy hours. Since I have spent three New England winters fully out of doors. In a tent for one. In a van for another and sleeping wherever in the city for the other. Otherwise I've been too indigent to even think about using heat. Well, when I moved into this house I decided two things. One is that I'm not going to freeze this winter. A little cold is good but 2 pair of long johns, wool socks, slippers, sweater + sweater vest and a wool hat just to sit and eat isn't happening. Fortunately I also decided I'm going to spend less on heating utilities. So I think I'm going to keep the house at 68 all winter during the day and around 60 at night. If the gas bill starts to get around $50 a month I'll just spend a little more money I don't really want to spend and drill and fill my walls.

looks even better "decorated."

Hollie Mollie!! That's one heck of a lot of WORK! That would have killed me!!
Looks very nice down there. You did an excellent job.
S-F, when you renovate something, you don't fool around!! :thumbup:

I kinda know what you mean about the cold. I'm one of those people that hates winter.
Growing up in SW Texas might have something to do with my intolerance to winter in MA. ;)

Right now, we have our 4-Tons of Sanyo humming along at 22C (71.6)
which, I will turn way down to 20C (68) while we sleep tonight.. :o

We've been burning $2.60 a day during this latest cold snap.
One gallon of heating oil would be about $3.60 these days.

At these prices, I guess we can afford to keep warm as toast this winter!!

Cheers,
Rich

Thanks! And My personal opinion is that housing should all be superinsulated. I think that for the average person who isn't building new and isn't rich keeping passivehouse ideals in mind is a good start. Houses just shouldn't need heat! I make heat as I burn my rice and vegetables in my body and I burn fuel to cook them. That should be enough unless I decide to heat the outdoor winter with it for some unfathomable reason. :confused:



I'm keeping a close eye on your ASHP projects. My estimated heat load for the basement included the use of an HRV which would move some air heated by the main floor to the basement. It's looking like an HRV may not be in the budget this winter so I may nee some heat source down there or else my daughter who sleeps there might freeze. A minisplit has crossed my mind more than once. If I get too cold and decide to go ASHP you'll be one of the first people to hear about it.

Thanks for chiming in on this thread and keep up your enthusiastic work!


Colin

We keep our house at 68 while home and 60 when not. I find it pretty comfortable almost all the time unless I'm physically exhausted. I also keep an eye on the humidity of the house to help that out too.

Your heat is radiant is it not Daox? Do you think that bringing the temperature up from 60 to 68 all the time is using unnecessary fuel? Much like the way that accelerating is where you spend fuel in a car as even compared to high (relatively of course) RPM highway driving at a constant speed.

Some of my heat is radiant, but without the solar panels up I won't be using that at all this year. My new little on demand hot water heater just doesn't have enough oomph to do more than one thing at a time, plus its electric and more expensive to run.

Colder is always better and the farther back you can set the thermostat the better. The only exception being when you have a heat pump and it has to kick in resistance heating. Heat loss is always proportional to the temperature differential, so the colder the less heat loss. Also, furnaces are most efficient when running for a long time vs short times. That both adds up to farther temperature setbacks being a good thing.

Yes I see all that. There are two lingering points for me though. The first is that the peak efficiency of my boiler at least is reached within (a couple minutes) so a longer run than that isn't going to make it any more efficient. Second is that it takes longer for radiant systems to heat the house than forced hot air so there could be quite a big demand to bring 60° air, floors, jugs of water, etc. to 68°. I control my thermostat with Z-Wave and have it bring the temperature up in steps in the morning to deal with this.

Warm as toast!
 

That's why I only turned the Sanyo twins down a little bit last night..

6.8 kWh in 10 hours. 680 watts all night long on average.
I think 15 cents an hour is worth being able to get up late,
and walk around semi-commando style to make my Inka drink.. ;)
No goosebumps on this old hide..

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