Tag Archives: maine

STEAM FURNACES DON’T EXACTLY “BLOW UP,” FYI

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My husband didn’t hear me the first 200 times I said, “Add water to the steam boiler reallllly slowly.” He’s from a part of the country where the populace prefers less catastrophic methods of home heating. So when the boiler quit due to low water, he descended to the basement, located the cold water valve, and let ‘er rip.

Steam heat is one of those Northeastern traditions, born of cheap coal and hard winters. You shoveled coal into a boiler, and the resulting steam swarmed up through cast iron pipes to heat colossal, iron radiators. Sure, the radiator valves leaked a little, and the pipes hammered, and every week or so you had to add water to the boiler reallllly slowly, but… inertia. And in the 1970s when people began to give one tiny darn about fuel efficiency, it became apparent that steam boilers would never measure up… well… The heat was so nice, pulsing so steadily from those masses of iron.

Adding to the comfy inefficiency of steam, the radiators tend to be too big. They were installed in the early part of the 20th century, when houses had single-pane windows and no insulation. During the decade after the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-1919, radiators got even huger: They were sized for houses in which the windows were left open at night, all winter, to blow away the germs.

As homeowners insulated and weatherized over the years, the mismatch chafed. Most steam radiators retain at least some flaking paint not because it’s pretty, but because slapping on metallic paint reduces a radiator’s effectiveness–intentionally. Ditto for those boxy radiator covers. In apartment buildings of a certain age, there’s an entire cottage industry bent on out-witting the infernal steam radiators.

Well, my husband has beaten ours decisively. Cold water struck the red-hot intestines of the iron boiler, which shattered just the way the manual said they would. A pool of rusty water spread like furnace-blood across the floor.

 

I made a quick survey of the inefficiencies in this system:

Inefficiency of the boiler itself: Steam boilers always waste at least 15% of their fuel. Because my house is well insulated, my boiler was actually too big, further eroding its efficiency.

Heat loss to basement from mammoth, cast iron pipes: A lot, even though I wrapped them in insulation.

Radiator inefficiency: Between the dust, the paint, and boxy covers, a ton. Maybe 30-40%.

These various losses are apples and oranges, but they add up to a rotten fruit salad.

This house turns 100 this year. I think a century is long enough for the original technology to prove itself. We’re giving it a 21st Century Viessmann 222F direct-vent gas boiler with 98% fuel efficiency, three pump speeds, outdoor temperature sensor, and built-in domestic hot water tank–along with some flat-panel radiators, each one a zone unto itself.

We’re leaping a hundred years in a week.

What could go wrong?

KNOB-AND-TUBE WIRING: REPUTATION RESTORED!

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Electron eater. — wikimedia pd

Knob-and-tube wiring, the antique technology that strikes terror in the hearts of home buyers, is not a fire hazard! In theory. Technically. Much.

So says this report, which examined the rate at which the early 1900s wiring starts house fires. After studying a bunch of fires and fire-trap houses, these investigators concluded:

“Properly installed and unaltered K&T wiring is not an inherent fire hazard.”

Ta-Daaaaa!

But what the heck is knob and tube wiring, you ask?

It’s the aboriginal electrical wire, standard equipment from the 1880s to the 1940s. It carried electricity into your house in copper wire wrapped in cloth insulation. As they snaked through the walls, the hot wires were kept clear of the flammable wood with ceramic insulators, some shaped like knobs, some shaped like tubes.

Knob and Tube wiring. — Wikimedia pd

Although K&T has been rendered obsolete by wire that’s wrapped in a metal or plastic jacket, remnants of the “legacy wiring” remain alive and well in many older houses. And contrary popular perception, it’s not particularly hazardous! I’m pleased to have found this study, in part because my Dad always contended that K&T was actually safer than the new stuff. But because he was prone to skepticism in the face of most technological “advances,” including computers, vacuum cleaners, and the clothes iron, I wasn’t entirely sure I should trust him on this point. Apparently, I can.

So, yay! K&T is a much maligned and innocent technology!

Now, there are just a few minor GIANT caveats:

1: In an overhead light fixture, the heat of the bulb can slowly cook the cotton insulation off the copper wires. I stumbled upon this situation in my 1918 bungalow, and the black char marks on the ceiling plaster were legit scary.

2: Adding insulation over K&T can allow the warm wires to heat up and set things on fire. An awful lot of old houses have had insulation blown blindly into their walls and attics over the years.

3: Those pure and original K&T circuits have been tampered with over the years, pushing them WELL past their design specifications.

Now, how do you know if someone has twiddled around with your original K&T?

Oh, we just know they have: When these houses were built, electrical fixtures were limited to an overhead light in each room, and a couple of outlets for the Victrola and one of those crazy new toasters.

But since then, a tidal wave of electrical inventions has washed through the marketplace, and into the house. When the electric razor appeared in the 1930s, your Grandpa had to have one. He spliced a new wire into the old K&T circuit in the basement, and poked it up into the bathroom wall to power a new outlet. Electric refrigerator? Splice in another branch! Vacuum cleaner? New outlet! Washing machine? Electric iron, fan, coffee percolator, radio, television, microwave, clothes dryer, cook-stove?

So many splices!

Each with the risk of untwisting, or touching something flammable, or lacking sufficient insulating tape!

Each brighter light bulb and bigger fridge pulling more hot current through the humble wire wrapped in cotton!

So it’s mixed news, really: K&T is not inherently a fire hazard. But exherently, it really might be. It probably is. I’m glad mine is all gone. Sorry, Dad.

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TOILETS IN CELLARS: I sh*t you not.

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“Boys and girls, do you need to go to the basement?”

When I first darkened the door of Boothbay Region Elementary School, I was baffled to hear the teacher ask this of my class. A couple kids raised their hands. They left the room. Eventually they returned–that seemed promising. It was a few days before I correlated the term “basement” with the bathrooms down the hall.

Since those days, I have occasionally discovered toilets that actually are in basements.

I find these cellar stools interesting for two reasons.

First of all, to call a toilet a “basement” illustrates how we use euphemisms to talk about taboo topics. Consider how far afield we will travel to avoid saying: “I will poop now.” Instead we come out with, “I’m going to visit the little girls room,” or “I need to see a man about a horse.”

But second, toilet history is just fabulous. There’s such tension between the desire to poop in private, and the competing desire to poop far away from where we eat and sleep.

The obvious compromise is the “outhouse.” It offers the privacy of a house, but it’s outside of the house. The outhouse had a long run as the pooping location of choice. But as toilet technology evolved, the crapper sneaked indoors, like a stray cat on a cold night. Although early “indoor outhouses” tested out all levels of the house, my favorite was the “bay privy,” a feature of medieval castles.

The bay privy was a bump-out, a small addition, hanging high on the wall of a seaside tower. Within that bump-out was ye olde outhouse. And far below, the bay did your flushing for you. (Not every castle was waterfront property, and so some castle privies simply discharged to the castle wall, contributing to the defense of the premises.)

But I suspect toilet-in-basements descended from cesspools-in-basements. Before public sewers penetrated urban areas, many city dwellers did their duty in an outhouse over a cesspool. Or, if space was really tight, they did  it in an “inhouse” that was mounted over a cesspool in the basement.

From the outhouse evolved the portable “earth closet,” a chair-type appliance with a removable hopper full of absorbent dirt or wood ash. Then came the water closet, which used a “trap” of water to prevent sewer gases from rising out of the toilet.

wikimedia pd

The point is, the toilet was a filthy and troubled entity, not remotely welcome in the bathroom. The bathroom, after all, was where you went to wash, to clean yourself. (Technically, the “lavatory” is the washing-room, not the toilet–again with the euphemisms. Even “toilet” is from the French word for getting gussied up. “Toilet water” was another term that gravely disturbed my youthful ruminations.)

So it’s my guess that toilets ended up in basements because they just too gross to come upstairs. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that toilet technology earned the commode a place in the average washroom.

But there are other theories.

The “Pittsburgh Potty” is a commode found in older Pittsburgh homes, sitting shamelessly in the open basement. Sometimes a rudimentary shower stands nearby. They’re rumored to be the Maine equivalent of a “mud room,” a place for dirty laborers to shed a layer of grime after work.

Others argue that a basement toilet was more of a men’s room, with the upstairs loo reserved for the ladies.

I think it’s also possible that the cost of upgrading to an indoor flush was less daunting if you installed it in the basement rather than remodeling and plumbing a room upstairs. In cold regions, the risk of plumbing freezing in the basement could be lower, as well.

But  ultimately, I suspect toilets lurk in basements because they are fundamentally squalid, vile, foul, vulgar: base.

IT’S THE PERFECT WEATHER TO PLAY “READ THE ROOF”

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White makes right: Snow shows that the right side is better insulated than the left.

White makes right: Snow shows that the right side is better insulated than the left.

With a fresh blanket of snow on the roofs, and the furnaces churning in the basements, it’s a fine time to play “read the roof.” This amusing/depressing game can reveal a number of secrets that your house might otherwise keep to itself.

Like, where is there insulation, and where is there not?

On the right side of this first example, you can see a clear line where the insulation ends, over the “knee wall” portion of the third floor. (See cross section below.) Escaping heat is melting the snow faster on the lower part than the upper. On the left side of that big dormer, there are a couple of rafter bays where escaping heat has melted the snow completely, suggesting no insulation; and between them, a pretty well insulated bay. Chimneys are almost always good at conducting heat from the inside to the outside, melting snow in a circle around their base.

 

Action shot: Thermal bridging under way.

Action shot: Thermal bridging under way.

Here’s a classic case of “thermal bridging.” On the left side of this roof, the wooden rafters that support the roof are allowing heat to escape faster than the insulated bays in between them. The migrating heat melts the snow over the rafters a bit faster, creating those parallel lines. It’s like an X-ray of the roof framing.

Extra credit: The overshot eave of the bungalow gets no heat from the interior, so see how the snow there is slightly deeper there?

 

Compare and contrast: An efficiency freak does not live in my neighbor's house. She may not have amazing insulation, but she has a life.

Compare and contrast: An efficiency freak does not live in my neighbor’s house. She may not have story-book insulation, but she has a life.

Can you spot the hot spots?

Can you spot the hot spots? (That line down the middle is ice on my windshield. Sorry.)

OK, that’s my house. I’m an energy efficiency geek. The home of my neighbor is more normal. In old houses, those rafter bays are only about 4 inches deep, which really limits the amount of insulation you can cram in there. Both these houses would have been built with no insulation, or perhaps a product from the “Yankee Ingenuity” line. (Newspaper isn’t uncommon; I have also seen sawdust and old clothing.) Updating of insulation tends to happen piecemeal, willy-nilly, as the years  and energy crises and remodeling projects go by. The result is usually not “blanket of snow,” but “crazy quilt of snow.”

 

This last one is frankly open to interpretation. It’s an odd pattern. We can see again that the cap of the house — the flat part of the third floor ceiling–is better insulated than the sloping part over the eave. On that lower part, those narrow white stripes suggest that the rafters under the roof are actually the most insulating element of the “roof assembly,” and the rafter bays between them are letting heat out faster. And both the chimney  and the sewer vent stack are acting as thermal bridges.

The puzzling part is that row of hot dots. Something about the insulation pattern directs rising heat to these distinct spots in the roofing structure. Those hot spots may not be very big, but once the black roof is uncovered, it heats quickly in the sun and enlarges the dot.

For reference purposes, a cross section of a basic roof. And the ice dams that occur when insulation is of the crazy-quilt variety.

Cross section. That swirly stuff is insulation, but only in new or really well renovated houses.

Cross section. That swirly stuff is insulation, but only in new or really well renovated houses.

Oops! I forgot to replace all my old windows before winter!

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unnamedThis picture is worth a thousand words. Just do this, and you won’t have to read the rest of the post. But by all means if you prefer reading about stuff you should do, rather than actually doing it, read on. We’ve all been there.

I, for example, read up on replacement windows every November-December when the first blast of Arctic air barrels into my 1918 bungalow. “Next summer,” I vow.

Then, each “next summer” I do not replace my windows, for a number of reasons. Not least, the  bungalow is a tropical vernacular, and tends toward enormous windows on the first floor. Your average vinyl replacement unit would soon warp under the weight of all that glass.

But another reason is that replacing windows just doesn’t save much energy. Even brand-new, double-glazed windows are relatively worthless when viewed as insulation. Two layers of window dressing (roller shade + curtain; Venetian blind + Roman shade) give you the same insulation value as a double glazed window. But only

ONLY

only if air is not leaking around the edges of the old window unit.

Aaaaaand even if air is leaking around the shrunken frames, rattling them like frosty bones and causing your candle flames to dance merrily, you still don’t have to replace them. Just do this:

1: Tear off strips of cling-wrap.

2: With a fillet knife, putty knife, whatever, work that cling wrap into the crack between the window sash and the window frame.

3: You’re done. Go read something enjoyable.*

No hair dryer. No gray, gummy ropes of… gummystuff. The cling wrap disappears into the chasm, not to be seen again until spring.

*Extra credit for stuffing cling wrap into the pully mechanism at the top of the window.

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YOU, TICKS! GET OFF MY LAWN!

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800px-NIEdot311That facebook post about opossums eating 1 billion ticks an hour: Is it true?

The study that spawned this silliness is much more interesting. Researchers were asking which tick-bitten lawn critters are best at reducing your risk of getting Lyme disease. The answer: The more the merrier.

When larval “Lyme ticks” emerge in the spring, they scramble up a fern and then bite onto whatever small creature ambles past. Lately, they often suck up the Lyme bacterium with their blood meal. After a few days they drop off; grow a click; and then snag a new passer-by–passing along the Lyme bacterium when they bore into the skin.

But those initial hosts vary in their ability to discover and destroy tiny ticks on their skin. Opossums are compulsive groomers, and they locate and eradicate almost every larval tick that attacks them. So if you put 100 larval ticks on a variety of animals, and count how many ticks successfully eat and advance to the status of a human health threat, it looks like this:

Who's Chewing Who?

Who’s Chewing Who?

Half the ticks who take a shot at a white-footed mouse live to suck another day. Only about 3% of those who bite a possum can say the same.

So, two things:

One: No, possums don’t eat a billion ticks a minute. That was a silly extrapolation from a controlled experiment. But possums do kill and swallow a huge percentage of the ticks silly enough to bite them.

Two: Anyway, the point of this study is that biodiversity is (once again) the answer to all your household concerns. Each of those “hosts” are killing some of the ticks that attack them in your neighborhood. More = Merrier.

Three: To get more possums to hang out at your place, the secret is again biodiversity. They eat snails*, slugs*, mice, insects, dead squirrels, etc. They’re shy and nocturnal, so give them “hedgerows” of shrubbery to hide under, and keep outdoor lights off. I don’t water my crispy Freedom Lawn this time of year, but I do water my native creepy-crawlies: My naturally mulched native plant beds hold moisture that will see an insect through drying times.

Four: Yes, possums are essentially immune to rabies; and are extra cool in myriad other ways; and they don’t dig up lawns, wreck gardens, or give birth in your basement. You’re thinking of your dog.

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OMG, just do the math, anyway: That poor possum would have to eat 24 ticks  an hour, around the clock. Every 2.5 seconds, day and night: Another tick. So, yeah: Just no.

 

*AKA “possum oysters”

THE FINAL WORD ON EFFICIENT HOT WATER! MAYBE.

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Hot water, olde school. Wikimedia pd

Hot water, olde school. (Bad dog, timeless) Wikimedia pd

The inherent waste in household water heating (and, yes, the carbon footprint of flushing an upstairs toilet) are the kind of things that cause me grave concern on a daily basis. Going to the Building Energy conference in Boston helped. Kinda.

The hot water thing: We tend to heat a tank full of it, then spend more carbon-based energy keeping it hot even when nobody needs it. Each time we open a hot water faucet somewhere in the house, we draw that hot water from the tank and into cold pipes. Heat is lost. The farther the water travels through the pipes, the more heat it loses. And after you’ve received your hot water and you shut off the faucet, then all the hot water still in the pipeline slowly sheds its carbon-costly heat and returns to room temperature. *

(You rightly imagine that the hot water pipes in my basement are insulated with foam tubes. I got the tubes at Home Depot on clearance for 1 cent apiece, which spared me a ton of math on the financial arm of the equation.)

The old solution to this soul-killing waste was the “on demand water heater.” Fired by gas or electricity, it replaced the big tank in the basement, and heated water instantly** when you opened the faucet. But the heated water still had to navigate the same old heat-shedding pipes.

So at the trade show I was intrigued by a display of POUETs: Point Of Use Electric Tankless. point-of-use-water-heater

Stiebel POUET

Stiebel POUET images

These are sized for each faucet, or “point of use.” There’s a tiny one for the powder room sink; a medium one for the kitchen; and a big one for the shower. The size is driven by physics–the faster you ask for water, the faster the element inside the box has to warm it.***

 

I love this, particularly for remodels or additions on a house. Yes, you’re using electricity to heat water, but you’re wasting approximately none of that energy. For a deeper analysis of the carbonaceous tangents, read this geek’s story of converting his household (and his grumpy family) to POUETs.

My quick recon finds no plug-in versions of POUETs, probably due to the meddling of “life and safety” regulators who will go to any lengths to prevent water and electricity from hanging out together.

Got any experience with these? Is my enthusiasm warranted? Can I stop worrying about this?

 

*If you recapture that heat to keep your house warm, good on you. But even in the winter, space-heating via pipes buried in walls and basements is a pretty weak method.

**”Instant” is a relative term, according to anyone who ever lived with an on-demand water heater. So is “on demand.”

***Yes, the carbon footprint of these many boxes of electric heating elements is starting to spread a little. It bothers me, too. I suspect “clustered plumbing” is the answer: designing homes where the bathroom backs up to the kitchen backs up to the laundry machine.

ICE DAMS AND HOW TO NOT GET THEM

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Figure-1

Image: UMN Extension

Looks like time to re-post this classic, after all: Last year, half the houses in the neighborhood developed ice dams. Part of the reason? This neighborhood has tons of bungalows.

The bungalow is native to sunny India, where the deep overhang of the eave acts like an awning.

Maine and India have little in common beyond the bungalow. Here, that overhang gets very cold, because it’s not heated by warm air rushing upward through the ceiling and into the attic.

That fleeing warm air does heat the roof over the attic, however, and melts the snow thereon. Water runs down the roof as god intended. But then it hits the unheated overhang and promptly freezes. Over time, a ridge of ice forms atop the eave. Now running water backs up behind a growing ridge of ice, seeps between the shingles, and enters parts of your house previously reserved for dryness.

The slanted ceiling of a bungalow’s second floor makes matters worse: You can’t add much insulation there to slow the flow of heat.

The outdoor angles compound the problem, as intersecting roof lines direct a lot of water toward the valleys.

What to do? Don’t do this: In a fit of freezing pique I once took a pickax to my ice dams. It tore that ice right up! And the roof under it, too!

Prevention, as usual, is the sensible thing. Maintain a clear path for water to take off the roof. Rake snow off the eaves before the cycle sets in.

And if you must build a bungalow in Maine, insulate the heck out of it.

LEAVE THE LEAVES!

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It’s time for my annual appeal for disorder, chaos, and Mother Nature’s right to winterize her home as she sees fit. Your contribution? Stay out of the way.

Leaf-raking must hearken back to the origins of the lawn. Today’s lawn evolved from the broad sheep pastures that surrounded English country estates: Just as every suburban American deserved a “castle” of her own, she also deserved a miniature field of grass. Lacking micro-sheep to maintain these micro-pastures, homeowners were vulnerable to misguidance on artificial perpetuation of this artificial landscape. Like raking leaves.

Full disclosure: I do rake some leaves. If too many gather in the hollows and wind shadows of my Freedom Lawn, they’ll create dull spots in my springtime tapestry.

But I don’t pick them up, and I sure as shootin’ don’t put them in a bag made of pulverized trees and haul them to the curb for a diesel-powered truck to collect. My carbon footprint cannot afford that lifestyle. I need to conserve all my discretionary carbon for transporting chocolate from the tropics.

But more importantly, those leaves are needed here in the yard. Curly and crisp, the leaves trap air when they stack up, delivering a substantial R-value. Frogs, native bees, voles, beetle-bugs, and a trillion other little critters have evolved a lifestyle that depends on locating a wind-stacked heap of those leaves, and crawling under it for the winter.

Carting your lawn’s leaves to the curb is like breaking into your neighbors’ house during a blizzard and stealing all their blankets.

So I rake, but all the beastie-blankets stay within the confines of the yard. Along the fences, under trees, on top of gardens, those leaves will spend the winter providing creature comfort to creatures.

In the spring, I used to pluck the flattened leaf-carpets from my flower beds. But this year I experimented with skipping even that step. For mature beds of native plants, it was exactly what the lawn doctor ordered: I didn’t have to thin the obedient plant or bee balm, because only the hardiest made it through the leaf mulch; and the mulch kept the soil damp. It was almost like Nature had planned it that way.