Air Exchange - ERVs and HRVs

If you've been reading the comments, you'll see that my last posting brought an excellent question from reader Terry Smiley.  She asked whether we were going to use an air-to-air heat exchanger in our house as they had done in their SIPs house in Montana.  The short answer is yes, but it was not easy to decide exactly what to use.  Building a very tight house is great for energy efficiency.  Unfortunately, it also introduces some potential problems that need to be dealt with.  Probably the most important of these issues is making sure you have enough fresh air in the house.

HVAC and Plumbing

In addition to the electrical and roofing, the past few weeks have seen quite a bit of work done on plumbing and HVAC (Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning). Apart from deciding on what kind of heating and cooling system to use (we are going with geo-thermal), we also had to determine where all the vents are going to go. The HVAC company basically figured out where they wanted to put everything but then wanted to do a walk-through with us to find out where we will be putting furniture (you don't want a couch right on top of a heating vent). The only room that gave us trouble was our office/guest room. Since this space is designed for dual use, we aren't exactly sure where all the furniture will go in this room.

Roofing and Electrical

Well there's been a whirlwind of activity on the house lately. Basically, the house is getting it's circulation, respiratory, and nervous systems put in (that's plumbing, cooling and heating, and electrical). Thus, the bare walls are no longer so bare. There's now a whole ton of pipes and tubes and wires running all over the place. If that wasn't enough, they finished the roof in the middle of all this as well.  I decided to break all this down into two posts. The first will focus on roofing and electrical.

Finished Roof (Click image for more photos.)