Lindsay Jamieson

I’d say a solar charger is ideal.

Doug Hicks wrote:Drones cannot locate/spy on people ...
who live where there are NO cell towers!
Large such areas are in western Canada ...
specifically British Columbia and Alberta ...
according to my Cell Tower Locations map!
If you are interested in being part of the
formation of a safe-haven in such an area,
please contact ... doug70707@gmail.com

Check your email.

I have no options besides Starlink or Xplornet.
I went with Starlink. Southern Alberta.
Day 1 it was beautiful. Like 30+mbps all the time
Then the speeds declined. By about half per day. It was practically formulaic.
Emailed in. Restart check the wire check the dish bla bla bla. Couple days later it’s good again. They apologize for the inconvenience. Then it disappeared.
I could get a response from service to save my life. More than a month later, they reply and apologize but they are so swamped and all that bla bla bla. Send me a new router.
New router doesn’t work. Couple more weeks of radio silence. Get message oh can you please check the dish. Sure. I’m on the roof right now. Phone rings. Guy says they’ll send a new kit and return package right away. 2 days later I was up and running. It’s been 4 months and I haven’t even checked my speeds. I haven’t even had to restart.

Starlink is beautiful. Especially since it’s not a Canadian company. Just know customer service isn’t the type you can just pick up the phone and call. If it works it works, if it doesn’t then good luck.
There’s a lot of ill in the Canadian telecoms and I’m happy to be out of it. Canadians KNOW.

John C Daley wrote:

Geothermal heating for dhw

What is dhw please? thought bubble- domestic hot water?
You have been a busy person!
The improvements are impressive and you need to be complemented for going ahead with them.
When you want to think about collecting rainwater, look at the link in my signature, you may find it helpful

Yes domestic hot water. Jargon learned on the path.

Burton Rosenberger wrote:UPDATE:

Its been a while, but we did find someone who was living in a poorly designed double envelope home (aka not modern with concerns addressed) ...

I spent a good week tweaking the WUFI models to see if we could reproduce the 2 years of data we were provided. I modeled their home and then would modify the assemblies and settings till I got what matched reality. In short, WUFI isn't capable of modeling these homes. The only thing I could do to make the numbers match up was to switch to a single envelop and make the walls R90 ... this on a building with exterior R19 walls. There were many methods I tried to model it correctly but nothing worked in away where I would be confident in "selling" the results if you will.

So we took our structure, modeled it in wufi, and ran it through as a single envelope home ... came out with equivalent 2.5 coords of wood a year required to do DHW + heating. So while we are leaving space in our floor plan for a future double envelope if required we are going to go forward with a hybrid design. We did install two massive earth tubes on either side of the building along with two internal tubes (TBZ tubes) to connect them in place of a crawlspace.

In version 1, (see attachment) on the west side of the building, the earth tubes will come into the sun room and the sun room will be used for the replacement air for the home. The sunroom here is smaller than the other side of the building. I believe it was like 22x8 and will also act as an airlock into the main part of the home. On the east side the sun room is much bigger. Its an odd shape though ... 33x30 with a garage cut out of that space at 17x20. It will be a sun room as well and also hold a sonnenhaus style drain back tank to act as a thermal mass for our recycled evacuated solar tubes with wood stove backup ... it will be used for DHW and HRH ... but I suspect with the HRH we will likely be running it in a closed loop given all the sun coming into the space.

This is going to be a multi unit place so it should be interesting to see how it works out. At the end of 2021 we had the site leveled, tubes in, all underground conduit in, FPSF* modified commercial scaled footers for the steel building in, and the ICF wall placed on top said footers. Later this year we are going to do the slab and start erecting the building if we can.  

It’s good you can start new. See my retrofit description of a failed design.

I bought an late 70s era double envelope passive solar home last year. I’ve paid more than I bought it for since then repairing it (and I guess building to my expensive no compromise taste too lol.)

Located east of Calgary Alberta the concept was a total failure for a few reasons, not least because the prior owner carried out zero maintenance.

I worked together with a contractor that had passing experience with net zero and passive house building. He handled mostly the exterior envelope, roof, windows, doors, siding, insulation etc. the scale of the windows alone on the south facing wall made DIY and saving money impossible. Managed to salvage more than 3/4 of the 26 massive 4x8ft windows that were already there.

The design was 2 level home with lower walkout in the hillside.
Double roof, double north wall and crawl space under the interior house along with a sunroom the size of a small townhouse created the interior air space. It was continuous. The floor of the sunroom has 4ft of sand below brick floor for thermal mass.

There were vents up in the attic operated by thermostat to release heat. And in August omg was it hot. Not much roof overhang.

Then winter hit. If it was -30C outside we had a whopping heat gain to -20C inside. Working right?

There was an insane number of electric baseboard heaters in the house. 18kw worth if I recall. Bills were massive. Also the sunroom was retrofitted with a propane furnace. All this stuff was really old and barely working so the design failure was probably evident the first winter it was ever occupied.

Obvious failures:
1. Cladding and insulation was carried out to typical building standards of the late 70s: tar paper on 1/4” cladding sloppy fibreglass insulation placement in ceiling and walls and little regard for vapor barrier sealing. In fact they used vapor barrier thinner than Saran Wrap in some spots.
2. Intake Vents on north wall. Plugged with matress foam and duct tape. Nice place for mice. Oh yeah, there was many days work shovelling mouse poop out of this leaky place.
3. Bathroom vents to attic space.
4. No air sealing between inner dwelling and sunroom.
5. Plumbing penetrations in floors on lower levels sealed with: masking tape!!!

The home had been built by some rich dude and no expense spared on stone work, carpentry, siding, landscaping. Nothing that matters to energy efficiency. The previous owner did not have the financial or physical wherewithal to maintain or improve. Lucky me were turning it in to our castle.

Improvements:
1. Geothermal heating for dhw and floor heating.
2. Extending south roof overhangs to shade. There was none at the mid level of the two story window wall. 4ft hip roof added there. This summer has seen the house a lot cooler than outside.
3. Replace all windows with all the latest greatest tech in windows. So t ask me what, at the moment I spec’d it I just said shut up and take my money!!! Also reduced the size of a few windows and had the east and west sides openable to allows a breeze.
4. Also windows used exterior grade windows between the inner living space and the sunroom to get better sealing.
5. Added 2 HRV systems to the interior portion. The layout is such that say kitchen and a few beds are on the west and some beds and baths are on the east and there’s very large common areas in between both up and down. This needing two HRV not one like normal people get in a brand new home.
6. Back north wall and attic gap are filled with insulation. The above grade portion of the north wall is now R100 of glass insulation and sealed very well. We also sealed the gap from below grade to prevent air moving from the crawl space up. Insulating the crawl space is a future project since it’s a pretty ugly and expensive job to only save a few watts. Also all the old exterior vents in the ceiling and back wall are sealed up.
2. Exterior is now clad with 1.5” eps and house wrapped to kingdoms come then steel siding. Steel roof. 17kw solar on garage roof. All the rain run off is ready to be collected but that’s a future project. Between house and garage there’s a lot of surface. I’m up in the air between cistern and pond but by this time you can imagine there’s not much money left.
3. Floor heating. Man oh man I don’t even want to get in to what I did right here Every trade from electrician to plumber to framer to the guy who sold me the tile is shaking their heads. It’ll work and it’s my house lol. RELAX! It heats up and holds heat really well and nothing is exploding and falling apart.
Anyway we’re still finishing the interior. We basically blasted the budget on the geo/solar/exterior and the in floor heating.
I have a regenerative farm to get building. I’ve been here a year and still had to buy food. That wasn’t part of the ambition.