Fireplace is wood. We really loaded the firebox last night. It brought the main area up to 75 before we cut the blower. If I had the air flow I think it would probably heat the whole house.
Timber Frame Hybrid Home - Owner Builder
- Thread starter jk96
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Fireplace is wood. We really loaded the firebox last night. It brought the main area up to 75 before we cut the blower. If I had the air flow I think it would probably heat the whole house.
MossflowerWoods
Super Member
- Joined
- Aug 12, 2011
- Messages
- 5,419
- Location
- Fredericksburg, VA
- Tractor
- Kioti DK50SE HST w/FEL, Gravely 60" ZTR Mower. Stihl MS290 (selling), CS261, & FS190 + Echo CS400 & 2010 F-350 6.4 PSD snowplow truck
Jeremy,
I Love that two sided fireplace... I saw one once in a demo home that was at the foot of the master bath, and the other side was in the master bedroom.
I want to build a smaller place than yours, like a very large cabin, that is entirely heated with wood (but will have ducting for AC and air movement, Virginia gets too humid...). Multiple fireplaces, some 2 sided, all with blowers etc...
I Love your house man...
Be well,
David
Well gentlemen its been a few months now and thought I would drop an update on house performance now that we've made it through most of winter.
First, if you are building with SIPS or spray foam and have been diligent about air sealing make sure your HVAC guy does a proper manual J calc. I would suggest getting another done from an independent person for comparison. The house is actually way easier to heat than I anticipated and created a problem with our geothermal HVAC. Our installer calculated a load of 7 tons for the house with all of the open space, lots of glass, etc and ended up bumping us to 8 tons for the extra cfm's he anticipated we would need. In reality, we only need 4 tons to heat the entire home and could probably get by with 3 tons and a little bit of auxillery backup heat on the coldest days unless we decided to heat the basement. Our geo units were running in short cycles of 8 to 14 minutes of run time which is not very efficient. I ended up tricking the zone programming so that our units only operate in stage 1 and never call for stage 2 regardless of how many zones are calling at once. In effect, I've turned our two 4 ton duel stage units into 2-1/2 ton single stage units. In addition, once we started burning consistently with the fireplace our units hardly ever run. When they do run they now run for longer cycles and in the more efficient first stage.
We have been running the fireplace 24/7 the last month and our Kwh usage for the geo units has averaged 10 Kwh per day, or about 3-1/2 hours of run time per 24 hours for both units combined. This means we are paying about $1.10 per day for heat with the fireplace running.
We have also added a buffer tank for our hot water heaters which should really help with hot water costs. In the summer we should basically be getting free hot water other than electrical usage from standby loss. I will probably update again this summer when our cooling load picks up. Hope everyone is having a great start to the new year.
Jeremy
kevin37b
Veteran Member
Been following this build all year . Absolutely beautiful inside and out . You did it right .
cartod
Platinum Member
Just awesome, living in a great home is like waking up every day on vacation. We got everything finished on our new home just the day before Thanksgiving. Your yard looks great, as soon as spring breaks I have to put a yard in. I loved watching you home come together Jeremy, Keep posting the little tweeks you give it. Oh, we have the same dining room table by the way..
buckeyefarmer
Epic Contributor
wow, amazed at the efficiency of your house.
BitChin1
Silver Member
Cool - was wondering how your spray foam would work out. In our house I have found that most load comes from small air leaks (HRV, bath vents and kitchen hood being the worst). How is your humidity level doing? We have adjusted our HRV to run more often and anytime the temp is above 30' and sun shining we open windows to reduce humidity - now in 3rd winter with TF we are able to get the humidity down to upper 40% range doing this but we have found this is the more difficult area to controll - heating (and cooling) have been easy.
Love the pic of the snow covered house!
Love the pic of the snow covered house!
Kyle_in_Tex
Super Star Member
Thanks for the update. Love your home. You did good.
Weird but good that its "too energy efficient". I hope your system can be compensated without long term issues.
Weird but good that its "too energy efficient". I hope your system can be compensated without long term issues.
Kyle_in_Tex
Super Star Member
Thanks for the update. Love your home. You did good.
Weird but good that its "too energy efficient". I hope your system can be compensated without long term issues.
Weird but good that its "too energy efficient". I hope your system can be compensated without long term issues.
I'll have to agree it is really nice to wake up to or come home to at the end of the day. And yes, we do have the same table. We've had ours for several years. For some reason the clear finish didn't last long and started to turn almost gummy. I had to strip it and refinish a couple of years ago.
We installed backdraft dampers for all of the bath fans and range hood. American Aldes Spring Return Back Draft Damper - 4 Inch - - Amazon.com As far as humidity we had some high humidity issues during the summer. I'm guessing that a large part of the problem was the short cycling of our air units not allowing them to run long enough to remove much moisture. I'm hoping most of that problem will be resolved now. Time will tell. Now that we are in our heating cycle we have had to run a humidifier to keep the moisture levels up. The fireplace seems to really pull the moisture out of the house.
Kyle the biggest problem I see is additional compressor wear from more startups although that issue has largely been resolved now. One of the other things I changed was our thermostats to ones that allowed me to set a higher temperature swing between startup and shutdown. The increase in temp swing along with the other changes has helped a lot with run times and doesn't seem to affect our comfort level. Now when the units do run we have longer run times and longer down time between runs as well. If the changes don't take care of the humidity level in the summer we will re-visit the issue with our contractor however I have a feeling things should work as planned now. We obviously paid a lot more up front for way more system than needed however on the flip side we are now only running in a more efficient 1st stage. More ground loop means more BTU's extracted for heat. We will also never have to use our electric backup heat. A $750 per ton rebate from our utility helped offset some of the cost of the larger units as well so all is not completely lost.
