32) Sauna, Painting, Tile & Nest
March came in like a lion and left like a lamb as it always does. Three northeasters early in the month dumped several feet of snow, to be followed by a week of really sunny weather (The tracker set a record of 43 kWh one day!). By the end of March things were starting to melt and you could actually believe spring was coming. Two geese flying north seemed to think so.
House-wise the crew used the lift to move the hot tub into place. It looks great! The room itself isn't insulated yet, which has to wait for the 'green roof' membrane to be emplaced. For some reason there has been a four week delay in getting this critical piece. But in the meantime it's wonderful to contemplate how it will be when full of hot bubbling spring water.
The Finnleo sauna kit arrived and the guys put it together in a single day. Jason works here on the sauna flooring:
It's small, but I think it'll be perfect for two people. The three windows will give 'sweaters' a great view of the woods and the bottle wall.
Glenn Soule spent the month painting like a crazed Vermont DaVinci. Arriving a 7 am and sometimes not leaving until 7 pm. In fact it's Easter morning as I write this and he's up there painting the trim right now!
Once the walls were painted, installing the flooring could begin. Shawn and Dan started laying the hardwood birch floor on the upper level first:
A close up of the beautiful patterning of the birch:
Stair treads are in birch as well:
Cabinets arrived at the end of the month and were stored in the basement prior to installation:
A nice snowy shot of the cottage from the west:
Dave jumped on the tiling mid-March. Notice the two shower niches for your shampoo and such:
The porcelain tile in the bedroom came out very nice, really looks like walnut planking. We chose tile over wood on this floor for heat transference and retention.
Jason getting started on the cork flooring in the exercise room:
The finished product. Soft on the feet!
Contemplating the Bottle Wall:
On March 18th, just three days before the spring equinox, the solar tracker set a record for production: 43.55 kWh. Check out the chart below, the jags in the curve show where the tracker moved every 15 minutes to stay aimed at the moving sun:
This interesting chart, from Green Mountain Power, the electric company, shows what was happening power-wise each hour on the record-setting day. Blue columns are consumption, you can see that between 7 pm and 7am, when the sun wasn't shining we were a net consumer of electricity. This was solely to power the geo-thermal pump that was heating the house. Normally the consumption for heating was about .75 kWh per hour, totaling 7 kWh per day. ( At 15¢ a kWh, that's just over a dollar a day to heat the entire house!) It's high here because the windows were open to air out the paint fumes. But look at the dark green bar which show the power incoming from the tracker. Light green is power returned to the grid.
Nest, probably the world's most innovative producer of home control products, just came out with the Yale Nest lock shown below. It can be controlled over a cell phone and will allow guests to have their own codes to enter the cottage. No need for pesky keys! Since the front door is of exceptional thickness, 2 3/4 inches, I built this mock-up to make sure the lock could be modified to fit.
We finally succeeded in wiring the Nest Thermostat. It took about a week. The complexity of the geo-thermal heat pump made it problematic. Many thanks to Jason who spent hours online viewing wiring diagrams to figure it out. Like the lock, the temperature on all three floors can now be controlled remotely. I love this thermostat! It lights up when you walk by to show the inside temp, it displays the inside humidity and the outside temp as well.
