This Old House

Kevin

Today on "This Old House"...

Tom

This new deck is going over the rubber roof and the sleepers with the help of this tool and these clips.

Richard

How do we zone a house that we've pulled apart? I'll show you.

Kevin

And it's up on the rooftop with solar panels. Hi, there. I'm Kevin O'Connor, and welcome back to "This Old House" and to our cape built in the 1880s. So, the big development for us this week is that our walls are finally getting insulated, and that means that our electricians, our plumbers, and our HVAC crews have done all of the work into the walls. The other big news is that we are getting ready to finally take a delivery on our windows, so -- whew! -- maybe we can get some heat in here. And Tommy and Charlie are out here on this side deck area. You guys are getting ready to put down the final top deck there, right?

Tom

We are.

Kevin

Tommy, what are we -- Charlie, you know it's like 30 degrees out, right? Get your jacket?

Charlie

I got two layers.

Kevin

You got three, actually. What are we using for material?

Tom

Well, this is a material that we've used before. It's a composite decking, but the interesting thing about this, it's actually, if you think about the interior, the composite makeup of this, think of it as fine particulates of sawdust that are encapsulated with plastic. The benefit to that is moisture will not affect it, so you can install this on the ground, under the ground, and even in the water.

Kevin

Wow. Alright. Ooh, that's dense, too.

Tom

Yeah, it's dense, heavy, but it's impervious. It doesn't take any water at all.

Kevin

Okay, and it's got slots on both sides, so not tongue and groove.

Tom

Right. Hidden fasteners. So you don't see anything through the surface. So here's one of the clips that we'll use right here, and this one just goes into the slot. And the other side of the slot of the other board will go into there and hold the two boards down when you screw it, and you don't see the fastening system.

Kevin

Okay, sounds good. And in terms of what's below, Charlie, we've got living space below this deck, so you had to make this watertight.

Charlie

Yeah, just like a regular roof system, really, of a house, but we're gonna have a deck above it. So we install the rubber roof over it. The actual frame has a pitch to it, about 3 1/4 inches from front to back. So we had to level the deck, so we put a sleeper system on.

Gotcha. Charlie

And we determined the thickness of our starter for a sleeper on our screw so it doesn't go into the rubber roof. So our clip system goes down into the framing and you get screwed in, but we don't want to penetrate the roof.

Kevin

Gotcha. Okay, so sleepers in.

Tom

The sleepers are in. You know where the word "sleeper" came from?

Kevin

Like these? No, I don't, actually. Wasn't expecting a quiz, but...

Tom

Well, years ago, they used sleepers in roads with horses and carriages, and it was basically they would take the timbers and they would lay it on the road and they would infill them. And that would give a path for the horse and carriages to go.

Kevin

Okay.

Tom

But then the builders started using them. They would take logs, and they would put a perimeter out for what we call a sill of a house.

Kevin

Yeah.

Tom

And then they would put the timbers on top of that and frame the house.

Kevin

So any time they laid the wood down, lay it down, hence, "sleeper."

Tom

Right.

Kevin

Okay.

Tom

So these are sleepers on this roof, which basically takes the pitch off of the roof that's down below for the water to shed but levels the deck up top.

Kevin

Professor Silva, can we get to work now, okay?

Tom

We're ready to go to work.

Kevin

Alright, so where do you guys want to start in terms of putting this down?

Tom

Well, the first thing we need to do is get a parallel line off the house and transfer it out here because we want to make sure that our decking ends up even when it hits the house. We don't want to have a tapered piece at the end.

Kevin

So you're gonna start out there and work your way back in.

Exactly. Kevin

Okay.

Tom

We're gonna use these blind clips right here. We're gonna place them on the line so we can push our board into it, which is gonna hold the edge of the deck from coming up. Okay, now the clips are in. Take the board and push him into that, and that will hold it. Alright, that's our first board on that side, so now we can start installing the clips on this side of the board. Alright, here's the next one. Alright.

Kevin

So, guys, you have left the front edge exposed. I presume you've got some sort of a trim piece or --

Tom

Yeah, we're gonna actually picture frame the outside perimeter. So what I mean by that, we're gonna use a different board. You know, the ones that we just put down have a slot in them, and that's for the fasteners. Well, this one doesn't have a slot on either side.

Kevin

Hence that hidden fastener.

Tom

Right, so when we lay it on the outside of the deck, like over there, you're not gonna see a slot. We're also gonna miter this corner and return to follow the angle of the deck all the way up, so what we'll have to do -- this will come around like that. Once we miter it, it's gone. We'll cut all these boards afterwards.

Kevin

Gone, gone, gone,

gone. Tom

Right. And then we'll have a nice border that runs straight up following the angle of the deck.

Kevin

And so, Charlie, you guys are setting screws in here three or four courses deep, but you're not actually setting them down yet.

Charlie

No, we're not. They made this nice tool that has a little cam system on it to take that one over there, and you put it right on the sleeper or a joist. Put it on, you tighten it up, and it allows you to to put pressure in all those boards, right? Do that, right? We do four or five rows at a time, and we take this attachment right here that we put on any drill. And we take it over, stand on the deck, put it over the screw... and we just screw down.

No way. Tom

Yeah.

Kevin

So you don't have to bend over --

Tom

Like at all, yeah.

Kevin

Cool. Okay. So now just -- I guess what? Just repeat the process and keep working back?

Charlie

Yeah, about 50, 60 more times.

Kevin

Yeah.

Laughs

Kevin

Boy, that's gonna be one good-looking deck.

Charlie

Gonna be nice.

Kevin

Nice job, guys. Cold weather means it's time for insulation. Charlie's team laid down foam panels before pouring the concrete garage floor. The basement will be living space. Charlie has another trick for insulating that space.

Charlie

They want this to be really a finished basement, so before we frame these, we keep it about an inch off the wall so the foam goes right behind it.

Kevin

Look at you right there. Okay, so no thermal bridging. I like that.

Perfect. Kevin

Alright, well, I know they're ready to spray because I heard the truck.

Charlie

Yeah, we have to get out of here.

Kevin

Hey, Adam, nice to meet you.

Adam

How are you doing?

Kevin

I'm doing alright. Thanks for helping us out today with this. So we don't often see the back of the truck, but we sort of get the idea, right? This A part, B part, and mix, but you have brought us a new formula.

Adam

Yeah, yeah. So recently, a lot of states across the country have adopted a new legislation that requires a brand-new blowing agent.

Kevin

And so what exactly does the blowing agent do for us?

Adam

It actually creates the cells, so it's the part of the chemistry that actually makes those cells.

Kevin

And close those cells. Because they're closed, it gives us a higher R-value.

Adam

Exactly right.

Kevin

And so the blowing agent was sort of the problematic part of the foam in the past, right? Because it had environmental impacts.

Adam

That's correct, yeah. So the impact was in the global-warming potential.

Kevin

Okay, and what about cost? Do we pay a premium?

Adam

Well, it's tough to say right now with material constrictions and supply restraints, but there's a slight premium, absolutely.

Kevin

Do we lose any of the performance?

Adam

No. The good news here is application basically the same, you know, parameters. These guys, if they've been spraying for a while, they're not gonna miss a beat.

Kevin

Well, as you say, you know, if the guys have been doing it for a while, your guys have, and so these guys are really good. Most people don't appreciate that they're real skilled technicians.

Adam

You know, you're absolutely right. They are worth their weight in gold.

Kevin

So we just heard from Charlie, how he set our stud wall off of the foundation. You guys like that detail?

Adam

Yeah, we love that. I mean, it's one of the more effective places to use spray foam, in our opinion, in Climate Zone 5, you know, where we are, with a lot of finished basements. That inch separation really allows for closed-cell spray foam to shine. You know, its characteristics add an inch. It gives you both a Type 2 vapor barrier as well as an air barrier, and it allows it to be a continuous insulation behind the wood-frame wall.

Kevin

Alright, well, he's moving along. He's getting to the end there, so good information. We appreciate the help.

My pleasure. Kevin

Thanks, Adam. Richard, it's cold outside. People are happy you're here.

Richard

Yeah, it was 36 last night, so people are saying, "How are we gonna heat this building?" So I thought we'd take a few minutes just to review it. You know, first of all, as a heating pro, you say you start with a heat loss, heat gain calculation, and that means you look at the R-value of the building, how much heat is gonna leave through the building on the coldest day of the year, and you have to calculate a total. Same thing on the cooling side for the hottest day of the year. Then the question is how do you then deliver the heat and cooling to the building? So I made this little mockup, you know, because we come up with the size of this building. So this is the basement. Here's the first floor -- living and dining room and kitchen down here, and this would be the top floor, often the sleep zones. So often, the way it gets zoned is underneath the roof would just be an air handler or a furnace, and it really zone it by system. That top-floor unit would handle the bedroom sleep zones up here. In the basement, there'd be another air handler or furnace to feed the first floor. End of story, but it's different. This house is really interesting. Here's the facade from the street right here, and it's as if we took a conventional cape house, peeled the roof off, and then pulled it -- cut it in half and pulled it apart.

Kevin

Right.

Richard

Right? And then in between it, we put a beautiful family room right here.

Kevin

So we kept the kids' bedrooms on one half, but then we put the adult bedrooms on the back half.

Richard

Correct, with no real way to convey, so when you look right here, here's the kids right here. Here's the master over there. There's nothing in between all this, and we don't want to take away that beautiful peak right there.

Kevin

And you don't want to install any soffits for the ductwork. We're gonna keep this all open.

Richard

Right, so we're gonna zone it unconventionally, this side versus that side, but here in the middle, look at this space.

Kevin

I love this space.

Richard

Right, this space screams for one thing, in my opinion. That's radiant floor heating, right? Okay? It's got all this glass right here. It has no space for duct work right here, and you're gonna be moving from kitchen to great room and you want to have no air movement. So from a comfort standpoint, it's perfect. So we're gonna go with that radiant system with tubing and you put your finished floor over the top of it.

Kevin

You love radiant because we don't need ducts, and when you have vaulted space like this, we don't have the heat up here. We have it down.

Richard

That's right, and with radiant here and radiant in the garage, radiant in the bathrooms, and some baseboard in the downstairs that we're gonna tie back onto, it suggests that we're gonna use hot water to also power these air handles. We're gonna have air handles -- three of these -- in the building like this. Return air comes back here, comes through a filter. Here's an air-conditioning coil to cool the air in the summer. This is actually for heating of the air. It's a hydronic heating coil, so it doesn't have a burner in it. It actually has heated water that's gonna come from the boiler to heat the building in the winter. That water will change according to how cold it is outside. Really, smart blower, so the air will come up to this T. And they'll have two motorized dampers per air handler. We're gonna have a total of three of these air handlers. Damper's pretty straightforward. Low voltage. You can see the blade damper right here that opens and closes holes tight. And then we're gonna deliver air by small-duct high velocity so air can come out of the floor, out of the ceiling, or out of the high sidewall. Just can't blow on people. Connections are pretty straightforward. They now click on, makes its connection here. Makes a nice, tight seal.

Kevin

So now the thermostat is controlling these dampers right here, so you open up for more heat, close it down for less heat. And we get all that beautiful zoning, and we get water zoning.

Richard

There's only less than 10% of American homes are zoned because it's always -- it's so hard to wire and people get scared of it. They've figured out this system pretty good. Look at this here. These are the four wires. See the colors? Same wires that the electrician is gonna use for the thermostat. The connecting of the dampers is pretty amazing. You just have these telephone-jack cords right here, so you plug that in right here. And this one includes one more thing, which is a bypass eliminator, which means you put this in the supply duct right here, and if not enough dampers are open, that it might make a little more noise. It'll open the other one proportional

to keep it nice and cool. Kevin

Very cool. Alright. Nice system. We are always glad to see you, but particularly now.

Richard

I got to to get back to work.

Kevin

Alright. Thanks, Richard. The same year our project house was built, a company here in Reading, Pennsylvania, started making stoves, and they were massive. Coal fire, cast iron, and they were state-of-the-art for their day. And today, they make commercial-grade ranges and hoods for homeowners, and our homeowners are big fans. Eliza, good to see you.

Eliza

Hey, Kevin, nice to see you.

Thank you for coming. Kevin

Oh, thanks for having us. You guys have been making stoves for a long time.

Eliza

Yeah, since 1880, actually, and we've evolved since then. Eventually now, which are where we are today, which is restaurant-quality ranges for the home chef.

Kevin

Okay. So where do you guys start? Looks like it starts with material?

Eliza

Yeah. So it all starts right here. Our stainless steel comes into the building, and it's in a flat sheet here. And from there, we start to cut it and make it into a range. This is our laser cutting machine. Each sheet is in here for only a couple of minutes. Very quick, very precise process, and gives you a nice, even clean cut.

Kevin

Moving left and right, forward and back, so sort of an -- like a CNC machine, except we've got laser and steel.

Eliza

Absolutely. Very, very precise. So here we are. We're in the forming part of the process, and we have a piece of metal. And it's in a flat shape, and obviously, we need it to get formed into a part that looks like this.

Kevin

Cool. Look at that.

Eliza

So you can see the curves and the bends that we need to do to get it from the flat steel into a formed part.

Kevin

So his job is -- this is bending.

Eliza

This is bending and forming, yeah.

Kevin

Yep, okay.

Eliza

Per a specific diagram.

Kevin

Right, and is the computer dictating the sort of degree of the angle and all that?

Eliza

It absolutely is. You can see this operator is very skilled, though.

Kevin

He hasn't looked at the computer once.

Eliza

Yes, he knows what he's doing. So we have our formed part. In this case, it's a control panel. Sits right on the front of the range.

Kevin

The knobs would attach to this.

Eliza

Yep, exactly, but we need to attach these two end caps to the piece to get it to be a fully formed piece.

Kevin

So welding station.

Eliza

Yep, so we're doing some tig welding. This is all by hand. Very skilled welders here doing this process. A lot of great skill here. Now we have to polish it because the welding leaves a mark, right? That doesn't look very pretty.

Kevin

So you've got some air tools. Looks like a kind of mini belt sander.

Eliza

Yep, it's a sander, and when she's finished with that, she's gonna use a lighter one to really polish it and make it really blend. That's the goal.

Kevin

So we not just want to make it smooth, obviously, but you also want to try to get this finish close to this finish.

Eliza

That finish, exactly.

Kevin

Wow.

Eliza

So here we are in our powder-coating area. First, a part will come in, and we need to wash it and get it ready for the process. And then we dry it, and then it goes into a powder-paint booth. And the part hangs down actually on a negative charge, and the powder paint is positively charged. So when the operator sprays it, it adheres very, very cleanly and strongly and perfectly to the part. We're painting a color called light green. It's RAL 6027, one of the thousands of colors that are available. We even offer custom color matches, where we can match to a paint color, a vase, a plate, literally anything you want. And then finally, it goes into a 400-degree oven, where it cures for, say, about 10 to 12 minutes.

Kevin

Right, and once it cools off, off to where?

Eliza

Ready to be assembled. This is a 60-inch range.

Kevin

This is a -- 10 burners!

Eliza

Yes, and you're seeing anywhere from 25,000 BTUs. And they're capable of simmering all the way down

to 130 degrees. Kevin

Right.

Eliza

So John over here is taking our burners. They're obviously hooked up to gas, and he's fine-tuning them to be very precise. So when it arrives in the homeowner's home, it works perfectly. So here we have a fully completed range for your project. We've got six burners, a griddle.

What a monster. Eliza

They're gonna love the power that they're gonna get from the range.

Kevin

And two ovens in the front.

Eliza

Two ovens. One even fits a full-size sheet pan.

Kevin

Nice, and so custom color, which we asked you for.

Eliza

Yep, yep. It's called blue-gray, RAL 5008, with a beautiful brushed brass trim.

Kevin

So we've got blue cabinets going in the island, so that's a nice match right there. And this is a ton of BTUs for our homeowners.

Eliza

Yes, they are gonna love cooking up a storm.

Kevin

Alright. Well, I loved the tour, Eliza. Thank you very much.

Eliza

Thank you so much for coming.

Kevin

Appreciate it. Megan and Lincoln would like a solar system on the house, hopefully something big enough to power most of the home. They also don't want to see it from the street to preserve that original cape look, so the challenge is how do you hide a big system on this home? Well, helping us with that today is Tim Sanborn. Tim, nice to meet you.

Tim

Good morning. What a beautiful solar day, Kevin.

Kevin

That's the way you guys think, isn't it?

Tim

Oh, we love it. We love the sun.

Kevin

So how big is this system that our homeowners have asked for?

Tim

We're gonna put up 20 panels spread around the roof. They're 400-watt panels, so it's an 8 kW system, 8,000 kilowatts. It's gonna produce about 10,000, 11,000 kilowatt hours annually for the homeowners.

Kevin

Okay, and then in terms of power generation, how much of this home, you know what percentage of this home's power, do you think this is gonna produce?

Tim

Most days, we'll be able to give them just under 11,000 kilowatt hours on an annual basis to power on a daily basis most of the electronics in the house.

Kevin

That's a big system for a big house.

Tim

Yes,

it is. Kevin

So the real question is, where are you gonna hide 20 of these panels if you can't use that front roof?

Tim

That's been a challenge and is a challenge in every home. Can we go up on the roof and take a peek?

Kevin

Yeah, sure.

Tim

One of the enhancements of solar over the years, Kevin, has been more aesthetically pleasing.

Kevin

Yeah.

Tim

So you don't see any white lines anymore. You don't see any metal on the frame. It's a beautiful, all-black system.

Kevin

Hopefully, it's just gonna make it sort of blend into the roofline, not as noticeable.

Tim

Exactly.

Kevin

And then in terms of efficiency, when you go to all black, I don't know, does it help or hurt the efficiency, and what efficiency are we at these days?

Tim

It's 20% efficient. What that means is 20% of the sunlight that hits the panel is going to turn into solar power.

Kevin

So 20% probably doesn't impress a lot of people when they first hear it, but we've been putting these things up for years. And not that long ago, these things were 15%, 17% efficient, so that's a pretty big jump.

Tim

That's where solar has gotten improvement over the years, has gotten more aesthetically more pleasing, but it also has gotten much more robust in terms of electricity power.

Kevin

So I'm looking at a lot fewer than 20 panels. You got more to go up, so where are the rest of the panels are going?

Tim

We're going on that other roof over there, so we'll have 11 over there, 11 panels.

Kevin

That looks like it's facing a street.

Tim

That is, but you won't see it from the street because the pitch is so slight.

Kevin

Oh, okay. So that's how you hide them all in here.

Tim

That's correct, and we meet the homeowners' expectation of give me the best productivity and give me something that's aesthetically pleasing to the house.

Kevin

And in this case, give me almost enough power

to run the whole house... Tom

That's exactly right.

Kevin

...throughout the course of the year.

Tim

That is indeed correct.

Kevin

And eventually, everything gets pushed down to the basement...

Yup. Kevin

...via these wires?

Tim

That is correct.

Kevin

And we've even got a battery system going in?

Tim

We do have a battery system going in.

Kevin

I want to take a look at that one. Hey,

Sam. Sam

Hey, Kevin.

Kevin

So you are the engineer that designed the system for us?

Sam

I am. I am.

Kevin

This is the brains right here.

Sam

This is the brain. So, this is the inverter. The solar power comes up from the panels that you saw on the roof down through this, and it can either go straight into the battery to charge the battery or it can go convert to AC and go into your home.

Kevin

Okay, well, battery is relatively new for us, so this is what interests me here.

Sam

Yeah, so that's a battery cabinet.

You can pop that off. Kevin

Okay, thank you.

Want to see what's in there. Sam

Yeah, exactly. So these are the individual battery modules. It looks like two, but there's actually four stacked right there.

Kevin

So what, you've got two and two?

Sam

Two and two, and then you can see there's a little bay for two more if you want to upgrade.

Kevin

And in terms of capacity or load, however you guys talk about it, what is this providing?

Sam

Well, there's two things. You talk about energy, the capacity of energy. So this is 12 kilowatt hours of energy, and it also provides power -- five kilowatts instantaneous power.

Kevin

So roughly this thing, if it was drawing all of could those five kilowatts, it goes for about 2 1/2 hours or so.

Sam

Yeah, if you wanted to power this entire house, which would be a lot, you'd drain the battery pretty quick. So what we like to do is set up a backup load panel or an essential load panel, so you take your bare essentials, what you need -- boiler, a fridge, lights, probably the Internet, for most people.

Kevin

Definitely the Internet. Kids will kill you otherwise.

Sam

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, so if we try to keep that essential load panel at the bare minimum, we always aim to try to back up the house for around 24 hours.

Kevin

Okay, that's very cool, and these days, they're super smart, right? You've got a lot of control.

Sam

Yeah. So you can set the controls on an app. The system all speaks with each other from the rooftop down to the battery, or I like the system because it has an interface right there. Even if the Internet's down, we can still back up the router, but the cable might be out. So if you don't have that, you can come and use this interface.

Kevin

Beautiful. Alright. Well, like I said, solar has come a long way, and this is relatively new for us. So thanks very much for that.

My pleasure. Kevin

Alright. Well, from this point forward, it is a race to the finish, and that means a lot of interior work still has to be done to get this house ready for homeowners. So until then, I'm Kevin O'Connor for "This Old House" here in Concord, Massachusetts.

Kevin

Next time on "This Old House," our project is awash in craftspeople as finishing touches are checked off the list.