A Visit to Fontaine Millworks

During some delicious Vermont Spring weather (snow, sleet, ice pellets....alternating with windswept rain and a tiny bit of sunshine), we made our way over to the Fontaine lumber mill in East Montpelier. Marc Fontaine is an accommodating sawyer who is completely professional and very organized.  Unlike the rag-tag lumber yards we're used to, his is immaculately kept and is obviously a smooth operation.

Marc Fontaine of Fontaine Millworks (and Bailey)

We picked out some hemlock posts for the center of the cottage: one to span the main floor and second floor, the other for the basement. We picked the ones with "character," and Marc was glad we were there to choose - he laughed and said he'd never have picked those.  Well, we like bumps and knots. If you're going to have a tree trunk in the middle of your house, it should look like a dadgum tree trunk, not some wimpy-ass smooth thing from the Emerald Forest, right?

Measuring our post.

We ducked into the main building to fill out some paperwork.  Nice and warm....and we were invited to step into the kiln where the lumber is dried.  Whew!  My glasses instantly fogged up, and it was impossible to snap a picture because the camera lens did the same.  We were in there about 30 seconds, and when we came out there were beads of moisture decorating my hair. The kiln heats the wood to a temp of 160 degrees F. to begin; it's then slowly reduced over subsequent days as the humidity drops. This process breaks down the cell walls in the wood, so that they can't take up moisture later as much as they would otherwise.  This was of particular interest to us, since we'll be enclosing hemlock posts inside the insulation envelope.  We were warned that the boards which would be in contact with the webbing that holds the cellulose could become damp after a heavy driving rain and then might absorb moisture which would then get sealed inside the walls.  We don't want any of that.  At the beginning of the drying process Marc controls the heat carefully so that he "sets the pitch" in the knots so that it can't ooze out of the knots later and discolor whatever finish we apply.

After our visit, we loaded Bailey into the car and headed up to Burlington.  It was a slippery, slushy ride, with over an inch of icy pellets on the roads, including I-89.  Folks have been taking off their snow tires in anticipation of real spring, so I was more worried about them sliding into us than the other way around.  I felt especially sorry for the people inching down French Hill, the long hill approaching Burlington.  Downhill is always harder in these conditions.

PassivHaus Alliance and Efficiency Vermont

As the only member of the group who doesn't drive a truck, Gerg was elected to drive the others to the PassivHaus Alliance monthly meeting this morning. So he spent about a half hour hunting for our Suby's rear seat. He thought it might be in the basement, or the woodshed, or perhaps on top of the RV, but it wasn't. Turns out he had put it in an old car about halfway down the drive. After removing some quantities of dog hair, he bolted it into the back of the wagon (after dark, unfortunately) and was ready to go.

They met at the Middlesex park'n'ride.  Malcolm and Indigo rode with Greg, and Chris followed them there. The meeting was held at the Efficiency Vermont offices on Lakeside Ave. in Burlington, an area of town that reminds me of SoHo back in the old days....artists' lofts in old warehouses, some grungy eateries, an industrial feel.

Gerg was introduced to Peter Schneider, Enrique, Sandra Head-buried-in-her-computer ( I promise I'll get her name later), Jeff Gephart and Chris West.  After the meeting, they moved to Peter's work area, where he met Matt Sargent, who will be assigned to consult on our certifications through Efficiency VT and to advise us on the details of our plans and assemblies.  They spent another hour and a half talking about assembly details, construction principles, and certification requirements. Many tips were offered, among them: Gerg got the name of a builder who uses the Siga line of tapes and membranes for sealing buildings (we've been looking solely at FourSevenFive so far); he also found out about a device, manufactured in Illinois, that will replace both the HRV and the minisplit! -- for not much more than the price of purchasing each device individually. More on this later. And they talked about the ability of dense-packed cellulose to handle moisture when used inside the insulation envelope of the walls and roof, about intelligent vapor membranes (sounds to me like great material for a sci-fi graphic novel), and a vent providing a rain plane in the roof.

Efficiency Vermont (EV) will be installing a real-time monitoring system in the cottage.  It will be available online for live monitoring of the cottage's parameters. EV will cover the cost of the equipment, plus a two-year internet subscription. Fabulous!

After Gerg got home, Chris came over and they continued their meeting of the previous day for another hour and a half or so.  After that, shortly after 5:00, John Picard, our excavator, came over to review the list of requirements, specs, the design of the sub-foundation and drains, etc.  He and Gerg walked the land (here's an earlier pic w/ Chris, John, me, and Bailey, our Great Pyrenees).
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The cottage site is emerging from the snow that was like this:

then melted down to this (exactly where the cottage goes)


and which is now down to this:


They talked about landscaping, too.  Sorry I missed that part. By the time I got home, John was already in his truck, accusing Gerg of having hid the really big rocks on him earlier in the season, and ready to head home to his creamed chipped beef. Gerg has known Johnny since the old days...maybe 35 years. He built our driveway, plowed it for twenty years until we bought a snowthrower (which he also disparaged), dragged my Honda out of the field after it slid off the road the first year I lived here ("Those rice buckets don't hold the road much, do they? Why don't you get yourself a Chevy?"). He dug the cellar for our current house, repaired the foundation after the original house burned down, and brought his excavator over to bury our 220-pound St. Bernard when he died suddenly of heat stroke one summer (pic below is his father, Snowshoe, who was smaller).
Things are heating up!  Glad we went away for three days!

Anatomy of an Intus window

Yo, Canada!

This past week we took a side trip as part of our journey through PassivHausworld. We ran up to Magog, a small town in one of Canada's Eastern Townships, to spend a few days at O Bois Dormant, a great B & B getaway with amazing breakfasts.  It was our last chance to get away for a couple of days before things become too intense with the building project. It was totally relaxing and just what I needed. Gerg, on the other hand, spent almost all his time working on PassivHaus research and muttering about how much he still had to learn and how May 1 was almost here (our building start date) and how he wished he had started all this preparation a year ago (although we didn't find out about his parents' move until the first week in January).

It's amazing how much we both have learned since starting this project. Ah, if only we had known all this when we designed and built our current house. Presumably we wouldn't have used those crappy windows, or as many of them. We would have used more insulation, although we already have a super-tight, heavily insulated house. But without the PHPP, how was one to judge?  We had great intentions about being as energy-efficient as we could, and we thought our walls and ceiling were "over-insulated"!  Who knew??  We've also learned about induction cooktops (bought a small Max Burton single burner one to try it out), mini-splits, condensing clothes dryers, trellis window shades, and other performance-enhancing gadgets from reading the great blogs of other PassivHaus builders...and it's great to be privy to the thoughts and experiences of fellow travelers on this path. More about those, with links, later.

PHPP and WUFI

Thursday, March 28, 2013

PassivHaus Planning Package (PHPP) and WUFI (Wärme und Feuchte instationär) are not my favorite acronyms, but they are pretty silly when made into verbs ("Let's WUFI this"  or "I'll be WUFI-ing for the next hour or two"). It all seems to be goofily appropriate and sensible, though, when speaking with Indigo.

Indigo Ruth-Davis, our PHPP consultant, is certified by the Passivhaus Institute U.S. (The course was presented at Yestermorrow Build and Design School in Waitsfield, Vermont.)  He is a somewhat shy person, a builder and gifted musician who plays the cello like a dream, I'm told, and alternately arrives by large white truck or motorcycle. Tonight he and his partner, Peg, who is a lovely woman with amazing long wavy hair, arrived for a dinner/work session at 6:30.

I work at the Vermont Center for Crime Victim Services, in the next town "over," and despite my proximity to my workplace (about 8 miles), I rarely get home before 6 p.m., for a variety of reasons, including enthusiasm for my job and poor planning. On this particular day, I had driven to Burlington on extremely short notice to meet with some attorneys who were participating in a cultural/legal exchange with Vermont Legal Aid. They were from the Ukraine and were interested in learning about what Vermont is doing to combat the problem of human trafficking in our state.(I'm the chair of the Vermont Human Trafficking Task Force.) We meet at a cafe on Main Street for about an hour, where we conversed with the assistance of a former U.N. interpreter whom they had brought with them.This was fun, fascinating, and also surprisingly tiring -- so by the time I got home, after getting stuck in the first major highway construction project of the season (there's a joke in Vermont about having six seasons: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Mud Season, and Construction), I was pretty whupped. But Peg and I had an instantly easy rapport, and we gabbed as I cooked and Gerg and Indigo put their heads together over spreadsheets and scratch paper downstairs.

So.. they talked about the window schedule (which is construction lingo for a list of windows and their sizes), window placement, and the impact on the PHPP.  They talked about the foundation, insulation, radon, air and vapor barriers.  And what was the result? 

We're at 3.55 -- we need to stay at 4.75 or under -- thus, we have some important decisions left to make, but we're doing really well. Hanging questions: How to heat it?  How to ventilate it?  (This is harder to do on a small house than a bigger house, by the way.)

We will have 8" of EPS under the foundation.  We will have 16" of EPS around the foundation.  We will have a 12 mil. air and radon barrier wrapping the whole foundation.  We will have 16" dense-packed cellulose in the walls and 22" in the roof.  The roof will be essentially flat, to hold the snow (for further insulation).  It will be a rubber roof, fully adhered EPDM. This is what we have on our current house, and it is marvelous -- the only noticeable drawback being that it is hellishly hot on your feet when you venture out on it in the summertime. 

So...the differences between our house and the "conventional" Passivhaus that you, our readers, know? First of all, we are going to have curtain walls. That means that the outside walls are completely separate from the timberframe.  They are not constrained by the posts or braces.  This mimics the construction of our current house.  What this means, in real life, is that you don't have to run any electrical wiring or heating elements through the walls -- they can be concealed in the space between the posts and the inside sheathing of the wall.  Ours, by the way, are all tongue-and-V-groove cedar, from Goodridge Lumber in Albany, VT.  (Goodridge is another story for another time)

The second major difference is that the roof, which is almost flat, will hold the snow.  This provides additional insulation, and we don't have to worry about snow sliding off, or shoveling it, or where we plant shrubs or flowers that could get clobbered.

The third major difference is the timberframe itself.  I love the elegant simplicity of the timberframe, its flexibility, the way its "bones" are visible, like the skeleton of a big animal. You don't need any interior walls -- and if you want to take out the ones you do have, or move them, it's simple, because they're not supporting anything. 

Most folks think timberframes are expensive, but they don't have to be. The assumption is that you're essentially building two houses...the frame itself, and the walls, which are sufficient to support the house.  What we did here was build the timberframe and then hung walls outside of it, which would NOT support the house, but act as a moisture/weather/air/temperature barrier. So, in effect, we have built only one house. The timberframe appears to "float" within the walls -- it's spaced 2" inside them -- which also provides a space to hide electrical cords and such.  It's a beautiful design element which allows you to view the frame itself from many angles, some of which would normally be obscured by the wall.

In this pic of our guest bedroom, you can see wall "floating" outside
the posts and knee braces  and rafters of the timberframe.

The cottage will have a little more structure in its curtain walls than our current house, because we're moving from EPS foam to dense-packed cellulose -- which is not rigid and doesn't support itself. Therefore, we'll have to build a little more structure into the wall.

What's up next?  We're running away to Canada for three days, to the little town of Magog just across the border, for a last-ditch vacation before the actual construction starts. Next Monday, Chris and Indigo will be here to discuss various certifications and the PHPP.