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E14 | Concord Country Cape | Sunshine Power
01/13/22 | 23m 42s | Rating: TV-G
Richard Trethewey shares how to heat a home with its unconventional layout. Kevin O'Connor joins Tom and Charlie Silva to install a composite decking material with the ease of a hidden fastener clip system. The basement is insulated with environmentally friendly insulation. Kevin tours a stove factory in Reading, PA. Solar panels and their inverter and battery backup are installed.
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E14 | Concord Country Cape | Sunshine Power
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.
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