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State of the Build

Well, I wish I were more than half way done by now, but instead, I am looking ahead to the new year.  If all goes well, I will actually be building this year and this website will get a whole lot more interesting.  I plan to get the 2014 build season rolling on Monday by calling contractors who had been too busy to get back to me during the building season.  Hopefully their pencils will be “sharper” now.

I did try to to get a few quotes in December.  I found that my window person (who we really liked) had moved on from the company (so I will need to start over with her replacement), I found a potential new electrician and tried again to get quotes on the Electro Mini Boiler install.  The only one who wants my business seems to be the steel Quonset hut people, they call me every month to tell me the latest specials.

The budget is very tight and we are trying to build a lot of house for not so much money.  I am hoping that my low cost finishes will help me keep costs down.  Based on previous quotes, I am now planning to pick up more of the work myself, perhaps hiring some teachers/students during the summer.

The architects drawings are “done”, but my “virtual build” is revealing even more problems than I had originally known about and small changes are on going. (separate section below and last week).

The website is now up to nearly 1800 visits per month, which isn’t bad considering how rarely I am posting and that I don’t spend any time on the SEO.  Google sent me a card for 150$ worth of free advertising.  Maybe I will use it once things get rolling.  I don’t plan to spend a penny past the free stuff though ;^)  If you are interested in this project, please “subscribe”, so that you will get an email next time I post.  I also appreciate comments.

Virtual Build

For the virtual build, I am essentially building the house piece by piece from the plans trying to guess where I will run into problems.  The idea is that if I find a problem virtually, I can take steps to avoid running into the same problem during the real build.  I am keeping a list of errata as I go.

Last week, I found a problem with the mezanine windows overlapping a rib and a sun tube, so I moved them along the wall by 18 inches.  The window buck on the other side looked fine in terms of lining up nicely with a steel stud, but once I put the steel arches between the ribs and covered the vaults with concrete, it became apparent that the earth may bet a bit to close to the western Mezzanine window.

I was just about to go and sort that out, when I noticed a much worse problem.  The kitchen door is supposed to tuck under the arch on the bottom right of the above image.  It was clearly not going to fit.  I started checking all the measurements related to that corner and found a few oddities.  For instance, the radius of the outer wall was listed on the drawing as 4 inches larger than the scale drawing was actually made.  I had build my model based on the listed dimension.  I also found that the architect had drawn the arch in the kitchen view as 4 inches wider than in other views, although he still labeled it as 16ft.  Those two errors added to 8 inches, but that wasn’t enough to explain the problem.  It turned out that the bigger discrepancy was the span and elevation of the rib in the drawing that showed the position of the door.

I had explained this to my architect a number of times…  The radiating vaults needed to be placed at a constant slope so they could maintain a constant peak height.  When the kitchen and dining room ribs were moved radially outward by 7’2″, they needed to lowered by 20″ in order to maintain that slope.  The architect had eventually repaired this in other views, but apparently not in the kitchen view where he worked out the door placement.  The door was always going to be clipped a little, but nothing like the problem I now face.

(correction, the rib in the above pic was not 20 inches higher than it should have been, it was just a few inches due to the whole thing being a larger scale; perhaps from an earlier iteration?  The architect had lowered it as I asked)

So, now I will sleep on this problem (and probably also think about it in the shower) and see what solutions I can come up with.  Early candidates include moving the rib another 2 ft out radially, it would be technically possible, but would ruin the look.  Optionally, I could move the basement door and stairs 2ft west along with the kitchen door, but that may cause problems on the other end of the stairs and probably would ruin my kitchen layout…  Maybe a single unique Rib without the lower spandrel, but then I may need to contact the engineer to get the design approved.

Eye Candy

And now for most people’s favorite section…  The gallery of random things that caught my eye.

I see I have quite a few from the humor site “9gag.com”, as well as a few from houzz.com.

My soil temperature experiment has been running for over 2 years.  It has been a long time since I saw anything new in the data, so I am not too worried about it any more, but I figured that every years temperature profile is different, so I might as well let the experiment keep on running until I build…

Last time I downloaded the data, I noticed that there was one bad sensor, but I was busy and since I didn’t really need the data, I didn’t worry about it.

Several of the wires had been damaged, probably by little teeth…  This white wire is the biggest sensor on the station and includes air temp and relative humidity.

Prepping for this next winter, I went out to the property today to change the batteries and download the data.  I also replace the burlap skirt that I had over the wires.  I remembered that one of the sensors had given bad data last time, so I took a careful look at the wires and found that two had be severed and a couple more were chewed partway thru.

Could this have been prevented?  Possibly.  In some of the pics, you can see what is left of the original burlap that I had used to protect the cords.  It had been worn away by the environment (sun and weather), and I had been too slow to replace it.  Had I replaced it sooner, I might have prevented whoever was chewing on the wires from having access.  “Stitch in time saves nine.”

I downloaded the data and took a closer look…  Things were a bit strange (as the charts will show), so I decided to try the number-one IT trick “turn it off and turn it on again”.   I changed the batteries and rebooted the data logger.

The black wire was for the 7.5 ft deep control temp.  Behind it, a bit more out of focus, you can see another black wire that was nicked…

Back at home this afternoon, I see that the data showed the 7.5ft deep control temperature probe (black wire) failed on June 6th, 2013 at around 5:30 PM.  Instead of turning off and not giving any data, the sensor showed ridiculous numbers in the -90°C range.

In the middle of the night on September 6th, three months later, the air temperature and RH data (the white wire) went horribly wrong.   Suddenly air temps appeared to drop from 12°C down to -91°C and relative humidity went from 93.9% to a nonsensical, but consistent, value of “1”.  I don’t know why, but the air temperature fluctuated, so I guess some electrons were getting thru.

This chart shows the sudden drop in the air temperature data, along with subsequent fluctuations.

The data started getting strange lately…

Then something else strange happened… Shown as a blue vertical spike in the previous chart   Not sure what, but on Oct 10th, the data suddenly went crazy…  Perhaps the data logger hiccuped?  Or the battery failed for a moment?  Or maybe a deer peed on the station?  I probably will never know, but this next chart shows the raw data around that time.

Raw data from my sensors showing the strange hiccup…

The data goes crazy for about 8 readings, but then things seem to reset.  After the reset, everything seems to have shifted down a bit…  The strangest thing is that the 7.5 ft deep temperature sensor and the air temperature and RH sensors started making sense again (see columns H, L and M, before and after the hiccup). I can’t think why the data would start making sense with the wire still cut… perhaps there was data in the cache and it is showing me samples from a previous year?  Anyway, when I saw this, I was glad I had reset the system while I was out there today…  Hopefully things will look better next time I download the data.

This next chart shows all the temperature sensors, but I removed the 8 really bad readings from the above chart…  You can still see the sudden shift on October 5th, as well as how long the 7.5 ft deep gauge was misbehaving…  You can also see that everything returned to “normal”, but shifted downward a bit.

Fortunately, I had already determined that there was hardly any difference between the dry and control temperatures at 7.5 ft deep, so I won’t miss that sensor too much…  But I will need to get out there and repair the other sensor when I get a chance and see if the probes appear to be trustworthy again after their reset.