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Build status

Well, it is October.  If it started construction now, it would soon be winter and the weather may be too cold for strong concrete.  This may interrupt construction.  Since the terms of my construction mortgage motivate me to complete the task in 12 months, I think we are at the point where I need to decide not to build this year.

The fact that I am not really ready to start construction now anyway just makes the decision to wait for spring even easier.  I am obstructed by crazy bids and some of my own missing tasks.

One crazy bid was for heating.  I had already got 2 bids for geothermal and radiant floor heating.  The lower of which came to about $20k after a 30% federal tax rebate.  I knew that these were expensive systems, and also required a lot of excavation and hundreds of feet of ground tubes to collect the energy from the earth.  They are 4 or 5 times more efficient than electric-resistance systems, but many people claim that the initial cost is so high that the savings never pay off the initial investment.  Mean while, I had seen a sleek/simple system using an “Electro mini boiler“.

This is the same idea as an on-demand water heater, but with a lot more BTUs.  It is heated with simple electrical resistance, which can be expensive.  However, if I went with natural gas, I would need to run gas lines, etc.  When it is not in use, it doesn’t use any electricity (unlike something with a hotwater tank or a pilot light).  It also gains efficiency from the radiant floor distribution and can help to store/redistribute my passive solar gain.  I could even add a heat exchanger connected to my solar hot water tank, so it should be pretty good overall.

The Electro system would have the same radiant floor as the geothermal system, but would replace the expensive geothermal heat-exchanger hardware with a simple $1200 unit that I could bolt to the wall and hook up easily (one inlet, one outlet and plug it in to a 240 socket) without any excavation, etc.   I found a distributor/installer in my area and asked for a quote.  After 4 weeks, I managed to meet with the guy.  We went thru everything and then he told me that it would cost 550$ for a proper design/bid.  I told him I thought that was fair for a detailed design, but I just wanted some rough budget numbers for now.   A couple weeks, and several pestering emails and phone calls later and I got the “rough” bid…  $50,000!  No details.  Wow.  I told him I didn’t think that could be right and asked him what it included.  He checked the numbers and got back to me a week later with a bid for $29,500.  Again, no details, just a single number. I asked twice more for details and eventually got them.  His quote covered similar components to the geothermal quote (except he didn’t tell me the size of the mini-boiler).

The other company I asked for a quote on this sort of system has yet to get back to me after several emails and calls.  Since I have endless patience, I will call again this next week.

And the fence guy from a few weeks ago…  The original guy I spoke with is “no longer with them”, so my request got passed to someone else. I have called him twice, still no quote.  It really should take 5 minutes.  Maybe next time I will just stay on the phone until he does it.

Anyway, I have quotes for almost everything, but if I take them at their face value, the house is un-affordable.  We will need to find better quotes and/or do more of the job ourselves to make this work.  I had planned on making the rib forms and doing the ceilings, closets and stairwell shroud, but now I am looking at doing more of the rebar work, steel stud work, etc.

I also have not made some of the detail designs for things like the elliptical arch forms… so I will try to take care of that over the next few months and be ready to build in the spring.  It should also be easier to get quotes over the winter when the contractors are hungrier.

Visit

As you know, I had found out about an earth sheltered home going up last year and visited a couple times to help out and learn what I can.  They got their occupancy in mid summer this year after 13 straight months of construction.  I called Scott to ask him how it had gone and if he would recommend the shotcrete guy he had worked with…  He invited my family out for dinner instead. There were some scheduling hiccups, but we eventually got out there this past weekend.  The visit actually happened just as I was getting depressed about the quotes I had got, so it provided encouragement just when I needed it.

Duct mounted heater

Scott and I talked about the stages I had missed, from the waterproofing to final details like plaster and concrete stain. They also showed me a nice slide presentation they had put together.

The heating system was tiny.  He used a small inline ducted heater (I think it was only 1000W).  The system just fits into the duct system and plugs into a regular 110 volt outlet.  These units are meant for adding a little incremental heat to rooms at the ends of long duct runs, certainly not intended to heat a whole home.   Scott worked out (mathematically) that his passive solar house doesn’t need a heater at all, so he expects this little heater is all bonus.  I will call him in winter to see if it has worked out as planned.  He did show me his calculation (prediction) graphed along with his actual measurements.  So far, the house looks to be performing perfectly, but he has not gone thru a winter yet.  Personally, I would feel comfortable with a bit more heating capacity (calculation insurance), but if Scott needs a bigger furnace, he has the room to add it later.

Update: I called Scott on the first day of spring to ask how his little inline duct heater worked out…  Keep in mind that this was the coldest winter we have had in over 100 years.  He said the earth around his home (Scott did not use an umbrella) is already 10 degrees warmer then in the fall.  He thinks he is on track for a 3 year ramp up to a stable room temperature.  He said the little duct mounted heater did not have enough pressure (axial fan) to blow air properly through the ducts, so he used electric heaters during the day (powered by his large solar array) and a small propane heater on the coldest nights.

When I told him about my trouble getting reasonable bids, Scott seemed to recognize the problem.  At one point, he talked about trying to find a general contractor, but quickly realizing that they were all going to make the project un-affordable.   He ended up following the same tactic for a number of the trades.  When bids came in much higher than they should be (based on the cost of materials and skill/labor required), he took on the jobs himself.

This is what is know as FUD.  Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt combine to increase the cost of a bid in order to cover the contractors risk.  One way around this is to pay the contractors “time and materials”.  This puts all the risk on the homeowner if it turns out to be a harder job than expected.  But there is an old GC saying that says, “if you want a job to cost more and take longer, pay by the hour…”  For “risky” earth sheltered construction, I suggest a balance.  Pay “time and materials” on straight forward jobs where the person will steadily move to completion (shotcrete work is driven by the speed of the concrete pump), or where their reputation is important enough to their livelihood that you can trust them to work quickly.  Get a “fixed bid” when you don’t have as much trust and/or expect they could expertly “fiddle around” for hours (fancy stone work).   Even with “time and materials” deal, you will still need a best guess on the cost to budget, but the contractor will be more comfortable guessing reasonably if you can’t hold them to it.

For the water proofing, Scott decided against the expensive bentonite system that Formworks wanted to include with their kit.  Instead he planned to use a rubber membrane sprayed directly on the concrete.  This is the “blue stuff” often used inside concrete swimming pools.  The quote he got for the work was in the $50,000 range, aka un-affordable.  He found he could buy a top-of-the-line sprayer and all the waterproofing liquid he would need for a small fraction of that…  So he did it himself.  He mentioned that his straight extension ladder could not properly reach certain parts of the large (50ft diameter) domes, so he got the sides and the tops, but had to leave a strip between (at the shoulders of the domes) until after he had back-filled half way up and had better access.  He also put a layer of that drain board that quickly guides any water down to the perimeter drains.

Any waterproofing applied directly to the concrete can fail if the concrete cracks (although the rubber membrane can span small cracks).  It also doesn’t shield the soil near the house.  My plan calls for using an underground umbrella made of at least 3 layers of plastic sandwiching rigid insulation that should keep the house, plus many tons of dirt around it, dry and warm.   If the plastic is punctured, the water should run along the underside and continue away from the house…

Scott hired some young men (high school/college) to help with some of the tedious tasks, such as tying rebar.  I asked how that went and he said that they were affordable and hard working, but you had to be on site all the time to tell them what to do every little step of the way.  I definitely think this might be an affordable way for me to power thru several of the tedious but “low skill” tasks on my build.

His garage is wider than mine (in a 40ft wide dome), but only had two doors.  I am wondering about my plan to fit 3 doors in my 30 ft wide Quonset hut.  The doors will fit, but it may be really tight in there.  I may decide to go with 2.

He showed me his temporary saftey rail made of barrels filled with sand and connected by ropes.  This was enough to keep anyone from falling off the roof by accident and satisfied the inspectors.

Another interesting aspect of Scotts home was his solar electric system.  He said he was “not a survivalist, but” his house is set a long way back from the road and the cost of running electricity out there (included 4 poles, etc.) was going to be high.  He crunched the numbers and decided to set up his own solar system instead.  I forget all the numbers, but his array is quite large and should be more than enough, even during our cloudy Michigan winters.  He will have tons of extra electricity during the sunny summers.  He expects the pay back (if electricity prices don’t go up at all) should be about 20 years.

Mean while, my wife was talking with Scotts wife about topics such as “resolving conflict” (I wonder why that came up ;^) or nosy visitors sneaking on to the property.  Apparently the answer to the first question was “divide and conquer”.  Apparently they both had to compromise on some details.  The answer to the second was that they have had nosy guests sneak all the way back there and look around.  That can be a real problem with so many things to steal and places to hurt yourself on the job site.  They put up some serious looking “NO TRESPASSING” signs and have not had many troubles since.

We chatted for about 4 hours while walking around, having burgers, etc.   A very pleasant evening.

Eye Candy

And now the part most people tell me they prefer.  The eye candy.

If you want to sign a petition to save Charlies earth sheltered house (due to be torn down at the end of October 2013, for not getting permits before hand), check out this link.

Well, it is September already and I am starting to seriously doubt that I will get this house started this year.   Trying to get quotes has just been so frustrating.  I have many quotes in, but not enough to be confident that I can get the house built for what I want to pay .  Obviously, I don’t want to get started before I am sure I can afford to finish (Luke 14:28).  During September, I will get back to pushing for quotes.

In August, my grandmother died, which resulted in a trip to the old country.  I always enjoy the old stone and concrete architecture often found in Europe where many people live in homes older than the United States (the country)…  I even found several modern earth sheltered buildings and, during a layover in Madrid on the way home, I attended a green architecture expo focused on earth sheltering and green walls (featuring the work of Emilio Ambasz).

Found this earth sheltered building (mall with several coffee shops and a sports club) covering a whole block just north of the Torre dos Clerigos in Porto… I took this photo from the tower. Later we had coffee “underground”

But this post is not about that…

I use Chrome and tend to accumulate “tabs” over time.  These are interesting pages that I see.  Once you get interested in something like this, you start to see it everywhere; Google may also be helping.  I always plan to get this material into a post at some point.  For instance, I thought I could do a whole post on Michael Hill or a whole post on how earth sheltering affects insurance rates, but some of these tabs have been open for 6 weeks, so lets just get them down here and you can check them out if you are interested…

1) Michael Hill’s invisible Houses;   First, I think its funny that his name is “Hill” and he wants to build a neighborhood of earth sheltered homes in NewZealand (hobbit land).  I don’t think he started out with an interest in earth sheltered homes, but rather earth sheltering was a solution to his problem of a city council ban on urban sprawl that wouldn’t let him build homes around his rural golf course.  The homes will come with lots of restrictions to prevent them from looking like a suburban neighborhood, such as no swimming pools or trampolines.

2) This is a link to a shallow article on “27 Absolutely Stunning Underground Homes“.  I am not sure all qualify as “Earth sheltered” by my definition, but some were new to me and it did become a good starting point for further searches.

3) This next one is a link to an article about the Traditional Turf Houses of Iceland…  In Iceland, earth sheltering became the norm due to the harsh climate and limited lumber resources.  I thought it was funny that the article bothered mentioning that people there went to the toilet in groups.  Most of the homes use stone to cover the side of the sod, so I thought the picture showing the “herring bone” stacking of the turf was very interesting.

This article doesn’t hint at a downside, but I once read an article written by an Icelandic woman who said the happiest day of her childhood was moving out of the turf house and into a “real wooden house”.  While they may have been great at moderating temperature, they lacked modern insulation, waterproofing, heating, etc.   I expect they were a bit damp also had more than their fair share of bugs.

4) Houzz also had another article about Earth sheltered homes recently…   This one had some detail, plus Houzz provides the ability to link to more photos of each home, get info on the architects, etc.  We have already talked about some of these homes in other posts, but there are some new ones.

5) This next link is a short Weather Channel article about how earth-sheltered homes save energy and money, as well as offer “ultimate protection from extreme weather”.  The article cites the Formworks stat that earth sheltered homes use “80 to 90% less energy to heat and cool”.  It also talks about how insurance companies charge less to insure earth sheltered homes.

Personally, I talked to my State Farm insurance agent and found it would save about 1/3rd of the cost (relative to a similar cost wood home with shingled roof) due to a “safe home rating”.   In my case, with a $2000 deductible, that is about a 500$ savings per year.  I don’t think they are taking the full protection of earth sheltered housing into account, but it is at least some savings.  By comparison, a high end alarm system with active monitoring would save an additional 100$ per year (1/15th) in insurance, but cost much more in fees.

6) Another article on “Underground Houses are Energy efficient, low maintenance and low impact“.  I suspect the people at Formworks are starting to push the media a bit.  Good for them.

7) This last one came from a link on a Popular Science article that caught my eye…  Earth Sheltered buses?  They provided a link to this other site with a lot more information.  Basically, a landscape artist, Marc Grañén, has setup several vehicles (such as the PhytoKinetic bus) with green roofs.   In addition to the somewhat theoretical idea that these green roofs function as CO2 sinks, the garden naturally cools the interior of the bus by 3.5°C giving the air conditioning a break…

The site also shows a  large trailer and small white van with similar green roofs.  I have also seen a transit train.

Here is a close up of the bus…

Thats it for now…  Maybe some eye candy later…

Progress update

While prepping for bidding, I did casually notice a few issues with the architects “Final Drawings“, but nothing that will stop us from building.  We have paid our architect and engineer the final payment.  I put that in bold because it is momentous!   It doesn’t mean the relationship is over, but it does mean that we can move on to the next phase and that feels good, and stressful at the same time.   I might try to pick up some print outs tomorrow, one of which would be for the architectural committee.

I have forwarded a digital copy of the plans to the neighborhood architectural committee for approval.   Hopefully we can setup a meeting to get that going relatively quickly.   My wife, Sherri, is still working on the landscaping plan that the committee requires.  The architectural committee has a month to review the plans and get back to us, hopefully they can approve it more quickly than that, but I worry that the real bottleneck will be how quickly I can get all the bids.

The first problem is that the bank requires bids to cover every detail (including the kitchen sink) before I can even start with the proper loan application.  This is all part of the dreaded “sworn statement” (cost breakdown) the bank requires as part of my due diligence.  Of course, we also need to do this to know who is actually building our house, so I would have to do it anyway.

The second problem is that contractors are terrible about getting back to you with a quote.  For instance, it  has been 2 weeks, 3 phone calls and an email and I am still waiting on the cost of concrete from a particular supplier, and this is a supplier with a “dedicated” sales person who doesn’t have any other duties.   She always promises to get it out to me by the end of the day.  Today she said, “Oh, didn’t I send that?  I will check tomorrow!”  Other contractors are actually out working for a living, so I can better understand why they don’t focus on the paperwork.  I know a couple of them rely on their wives to help with the estimating.  I have spoken to two of these helpmates already and I hope their husbands appreciate them.  Other quotes are coming together though and during conversations I am asking for references on other contractors they like to work with.  For instance, I got my excavator contractors to recommend concrete guys and I got my concrete contractors to recommend excavators… Now if only I could get either group to actually send in a quote.

One of the more interesting components to find quotes for is the steel arches that form the skeleton of the home.   Due to the way things work, I need to get separate quotes for the steel, which would then be shipped to the “roll-benders”, who would form it and then send those pieces to the metal fabricator to be cut to size or welded together.  This has involved quite a large number of phone calls because I am trying to keep to the three bid rule and because my job is beyond the capabilities of many companies.  I am very glad that I pushed the engineer to change his initial 3D curved design to a simpler 2D bend.  No one I have talked to so far would have had the capability to build it.  I am also finding that many are recommending that I change the small round tube to square tube which will actually be stronger in the direction I need it to be.   So far I am only working on the steel arches and curved steel headers.  I have not talked to anyone about creating the aluminum supports for the concrete sunshade.

Eye Candy

I am always keeping my eye open for “earth shelter” related things and I have actually had some tabs up on my desktop for weeks while I wait to have time to read them or fully digest them.  For instance, there is a guy looking to build a neighborhood of earth sheltered homes on a golf course in Australia, I see that he has over come many objections, but have not had time to read what they all were.  I also have a collection of “Vertical” garden buildings that I found along with the Park Royal Hotel in Singapore, but I have not had time to get into why or how they do it.  I included one of those pics this week, but will save the rest for other pages and posts.

In terms of more practical idea gathering, I have also long wanted to create some sort of koi pond mosaic in the rotunda space of the home.  On Sunday night I got some pics of other examples (4 included here) along with other stone and tile mosaic images.

Since the non-earth covered portion of my roof is so small (less than 600 sqft), I can afford to go with a more interesting and long lasting material.  I plan to use copper.  This means I should also go with copper gutters and down spouts.  Paying someone to fabricate and install curved copper gutters can cost over 100$ per linear foot, so I am thinking to use large diameter copper tube, cut open to collect water (that idea is not fully formed).  For downspouts, I like the idea of copper chains and I included some examples here also.

Enjoy…