ICF, well yea having a pellet furnace with an air handler and a very large hoper with an automated auger drive was the plan. This Harman is supposed to be the top of the line pellet furnaces. I don't have the luxury of burning good hardwoods like are available back east and in the NW. I we have down here is crap like aspen, Pinon and juniper. Gamble oak is hard to find, and if you buy it pricey and is never very large. I heat with wood in my "mountain cabin" at 8500 feet and we burn thru Aspen like no one's business. Ponderosa is crap. Tried that as well. But anyway, I have some health issues that are getting worse to the point now that I can't use wood period. The hauling and splitting is just too much for my joints and body. I have heard some bad things on pellet stoves, but I think the key is getting a very high end one with so the problems are not an issue. Also pellet quality is another big deal as well.

What town in NW do you live in?

There seems to be some confusion about potlites/recessed lites.

As Dana said, if you are going to put a lite in the insulation, you must use an IC (insulation contact) can. What's the difference? Your normal pot lite is just a single wall dome while an IC is a double walled can. Some are round and some are square depending on the manufacturer. They have a thermal protection system that trips if the can/lite gets too hot. Most are designed for 75 watts max. incandescent lamps so if you put in a c.p. or l.e.d. there is no way they will trip out or over heat.
http://www.lithonia.com/commercial/lif6+wallwash.html#.Ury9AyjhGS0 shows a lithonia IC rated can.

When you install them, the only proper way to do it is with a vapour hat. We use Altavac Manufacturing Inc unit SA-58 because they are a local unit but many plastic companies make a similiair unit. The units are 14" x 11" x 8" which gives you a bit of room to install and make the connections.
http://www.drader.com/acro-foam-plastics-thermoforming-products/acro-foam-plastics-thermoforming-products-vapour-barrier shows quite clearly.

To install the v.h. first cross block your truss at the location of the lite. The blocking should be as far apart as the v.h. is wide. The vapour hat has a 3" hat brim on it that you tack against the blocking/truss chord. Now install your ic can. The adjustable tracks will be nailed into the blocking but will trap the v.h. between the blocking and the track.

When you bring the wire into the v.h. do it at one of the upper corners. Make the connection as per code. Where the wire comes into the v.h., squeeze a big drop of acoustic caulking on the inside of the corner. Now squeeze the plastic around the wire and put a zip tie around it from the outside. It you have two wires, make sure some caulk gets between the two.

All inspected and everything else is done? Okay roll out your 6 mil vapour barrier and install it on the truss bottoms, sealing all laps with acoustic caulk. Cut out the 6 mil in the inside of the v.h. and run one or two beads of acoustic caulk between the hat brim and the 6 mil. All done.

There is no reason that a pot lite cannot be more air tight then an octagon box.

You may want to lay a 3 or 4" piece of eps over the can or just pile up the cellulose a little higher.

About the only place you can't use them is if you have restricted heights as at a low truss heel.

Well someone just let all the hot air out of my balloon. My wife....... I just showed her a picture of the inside head and she said "that there was no way in hell that I was going to mount that cheap looking hunk of plastic AC looking thing in the great room of our new home, period." After I told her it might save us a lot of money all she had to say was that I better find a better way around this because there was no way she was going to look or EVEN LISTEN to something like that blowing air and making a bunch of noise..... And then she commenced to ignore me for the rest of the my futile attempt to convert her, well I guess I was just talking to myself by that time because she starting reading a book.(

She is English, born and breed in buildings that are made of hundreds of years old stone, wood and steel. No things like this "cheap looking" plastic shrouded head. I will say, they could have done a better job at making the thing look better. I must agree, it is damn ugly. However I was willing to live with it, but I should have known there was no way that kind of system would get by her.

I guess I am going to back to a ducted heating system unless someone has a better idea.

Any input here from anyone?

A ducted fully variable speed Carrier GreenSpeed will run nearly as efficiently as mini-splits when the outdoor temps are above +10F, so it's possible to cover your average load and then some at high efficiency, but you'll probably need some auxiliary heating to manage your peak loads unless you design the system VERY carefully, and get your heat load at -5F down to under 20,000BTU/hr . Click the "Heating Capacities" tab on this tool and play around with the different compressor & air handler options:

http://www.tools.carrier.com/greenspeed/

A GreenSpeed is quite a bit more expensive than mini-split solutions too. For auxilliarly heat, resistance cove heaters are nicer & more comfortable than cheap electric baseboard, at about the same price point. Visually they blend in with the crown molding:

http://www.radiantsystemsinc.com/ga...white#list

Oil-filled slim profile electric radiators (that would look pretty familiar to a Brit, where they are pretty popular) are a bit more in-your face, comparable comfort & appearance to Euro-style low temp hydronic panel radiators but a more expensive option than cover heaters.

Mini-split heads are the opposite of noisy- they're practically STEALTHY!! If she can't stand the sound of a mini-split you're going to have to get rid of your refrigerator, and your dish/clothes washing appliances. Most of the time during the day it'll be running at low to mid-speed, speeds where a 1.5 ton Mitsubishi is almost as loud as your refrigerator. At low speed it's quieter than most US refrigerators. At high speed (say at 6AM when it's -13F outside) it'll be louder than your refrigerator, but never as loud as a 1-ton window air conditioner. The compressor units on these things are ghostly-silent at low-speed, none of the rattle & hum of what you may be used to with air conditioning compressors. Their comparative stealth is due to the DC-drive blower motors and scroll compressors which operate with a rolling action- no rattly reciprocating piston action, and no sudden changes in pressure during a rotation. They are VERY low-vibe compared to 1-speed reciprocating compressor units.

The indoor units on the RLS2=H is exactly the same unit that comes with the RLS2. Look at the specs on p2 for the loudness of the 15RLS2 at max speed-you'll see it's 45dbA.   A typical US-'merican sized refrigerator is about 50dbA at a distance of 3 feet- which is a noticably higher sound level.  At low blower speed the 15RLS2 head no more than 27dbA.

In a high-R house where you locate the head doesn't much matter in terms of it's ability to heat the space- it doesn't have to be prominently displayed in the middle of the wall by any means. Worst-case they can be hidden behind a wood or fabric valence as long as you don't restrict it's access to air. The down-side of the hidden-valenced approach is that the adjustment controls are usually with a TV-remote type remote that requires line-of sight, so you can't bump it up/down from across the room.

BTW: A guy in Quebec going through his first winter with a Fujitsu RLS2-H claims it's still putting out quite a bit of heat at -32C/-25F. See response comment #2 on this blog page: http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/energy-solutions/what-i-m-wishing-2014#post_comments

Given that you occasionally see temps below the turn-off point of the Mitsubishi units, if you go the ductless route the Fujistu RLS2-H series is probably the better choice in your location. See: http://smartgreenbuild.com/pdf/Fujitsu-RLS2H.pdf

BTW: While designing the house assemblies it's usually a good idea to keep an I=B=R type spreadsheet heat load calculation running to keep tabs on where you heat load is.  There are online freebies out there, but it's also not tough to cook up one of your own. A video primer on how to use this type of heat load calculation method can be found on Marc Rosenbaum's Net Zero Energy Class heat load page.

Note: His methods of calculating the infiltration losses exaggerate reality by something like 2x for two reasons: 

1: The CFM/50 number divided by 5 is excessive, only sorta-true for multi-story home with optimally-bad leak locations.

2: By using the specific heat of air times delta-T it ignores the "heat exchanger effect" of actual infiltration paths, and pretends all entering air that reaches the interior is at the outdoor temp,  and all leaving air escaping hits the great outdoors at the interior air temp.  Reality is much muddier than that- unless the leak points are a single round ducts,  the entering air is pre-warmed by proximate materials it passes as it comes in, and the exiting air is cooled by proximate materials it passes on the way out, and is thus a crude not super efficient heat exchanger.

That's not to say air infiltration isn't a big heat load factor, it clearly is, but it's nowhere near the numbers Marc's calculator come up with.  Use those numbers as a "absolute worst possible case scenario", but assume the average reality will be only about half that, sometimes less.

Dana, Hmmm sounds like maybe an option. When you say pricey, how much more of a cost difference would you guess the unit itself would be, without the associated inside duct work? I found the cost of the Mitsi mini split was about $2300 online and it looked like they were simple enough that I could install it. However I could not find one of the carrier Green Speeds. I would probably want to have a HVAC company install that after I poured the pad for them.

You mentioned you thought maybe I could hide the head of a inside wall mount head ductless unit behind a soffit or something like that, but don't they blow straight out or at varying angles that go somewhat straight out? It appeared that on the video I watched it did. I am trying to figure out where I could mount one and build something that would hide the looks of it, but I don't want to block or do anything that hinder the air flow to and from the unit and reduce the efficiency. The remote control option being compromised doesn't really concern me that much. I don't mind walking over to a unit and getting underneath it to operate the remote but thanks for pointing that out.

It sounds like the noise is not going to be an issue, I guess she was thinking back to a trip we took years ago to St. Martin in July where it was 85-90 degrees and humid and they had something similar looking to that mini head and it was pretty loud but I am guessing it was probably just some cheap AC unit. Well that is good news on the noise!!!

If I can just figure out a good hiding spot, I think that would work. I am not sure if I told you or not, but I will have a small pellet stove in the ground level floor in the great room. That was pretty much for my wife who loves to have a stove in the living area. I will say it's nice to be able to come in from a day skiing or being coming in from the cold and then warming up next to a hot stove. I was thinking pellets versus wood due to the lack of having to work up wood. But it wasn't something that I wanted to rely on constantly for heat, but I don't mind using it only when things get real cold and I need it. Sorry to be repeating myself, just didn't know if you read that part of my thread.

One last question, would you entertain the idea of taking a few minutes to look at the floor plan I have drawn up? I would love to get your feedback on it.

Thanks for the links. The one that calculates the heat load looks real nice. I need to spend some time on that one.


thanks
Chad

The Greenspeeds are typically well north of ten grand for a turnkey system. A pair of 3/4 - 1 ton Fujitsu or Mitsubishi might run $7-8K turnkey, but as 95% DIY it's under $5K when you add in the mounting hardware etc, with about $300-500 for having a tech with all the tools you never wanted to own and the experience you don't have do the final system charging and testing for commissioning. Bracket mounting the exterior unit on a wall protected by the rake (eaves, if you must) of the roof, a foot or two above the anticipated worst-case snow depth means you don't have to keep digging the thing up. If you don't have sufficieent overhang depth on the roof, build a shed-roof a foot or so above the unit to protect it from roof avalanches/cornice-fall, etc. (It's amazing the number of installers who don't really get that it's more than an air conditioner, and needs to avoid heavy snow-clogging conditions.)

There are cheap noisy PTACs and bottom of the line mini-splits in rental units all over the world, but that doesn't mean you would ever install one of those in your house. If you stick with Daikin/Mitsubishi/Fujitsu it's unlikely ANY model screams anything like a $500 third-world 1-ton. The "inverter drive" variable speed DC blowers are more expensive, but many dBA quieter than any 1-2 speed 115VAC blower motor, and they try to build the rattles out of rather than in-to the cabinets & coil mounts.

The heads all have louvers that direct flow, most of have the option of a sweeping flow to better distribute the air, or a fixed direction settable by the operator. In a high-R house there's little advantage to having the direction of the output constantly changing, but in typical R7 Japanese house distributing the warm/cool draft matters on the coldest/hottest days of the year.

Upload your floor plan on some image hosting site, and post the URL here. In general, the fewer the corners and bump-outs the more efficient the building envelope, a combination of lower thermal bridging from framing, and lower exterior surface area to floor area ratio. The more bump outs angles and dormers you have, the higher-R you have to go hit the efficeincy numbers, which is why most PassiveHouse designs and many Net Zero Energy designs are your basic "shoe-box with gable" shape. eg:

http://uphillhouse.wordpress.com/about-2/ (This one is in a location with about a -5F design temp, a couple thousand square feet of heated space, heated with a single 1.5 ton Mistubishi.)

Carter Scott also builds a lot of shoebox-with-gable Net Zero houses, but some have more to it than that. His are usually done with one mini-split per story. (I raced in the local night ski racing leaque last winter against one of the occupants of this one.  The outside design temp there is low single-digits.)

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that there was no way in hell that I was going to mount that cheap looking hunk of plastic AC looking thing

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I've been in multimillion dollar mansions and villas in which European designers were employed to do everything just right that use the ductless minis. They do have indoor units designed to mount more unobtrusively such as between joists. AND, there are also ways to camouflage or hide even the most common heads using common architectural details and tricks of the eye.

ICf, yea well I think my wife was under some incorrect assumptions, based on her past actual experience. If we get one of these new and nicer ones, I don't think the noise is going to be an issue at all based on what Dana said and I was also under the impression from one link I read, that you cannot try to hide them and if you do to kill their efficiency. Regardless, looks like that is not the case though either.

Dana, I have never used a file or image sharing program. I guess I could get my wife to help me out with that. Or maybe I could just email them directly to you?

thanks
Chad

hat you cannot try to hide them and if you do to kill their efficiency

If you have ever been to the design site called Houzz, I think you can do different searches to bring up pictures of rooms with ductless minis in them. A surprising number have the room unit very well integrated.

If she can't stand the sound of a mini-split you're going to have to get rid of your refrigerator, and your dish/clothes washing appliances.

Ha Ha. Right now, the sparkies have a return trip planned in which they will have to change my overcabinet fluorescents as the ballasts are emitting more noise than the minisplit heads.

I bolted the outdoor compressor units directly to the exterior wall outside the master closet. When you are in that room you can hear a faint hum if either of them are working, but I like it because you can tell that they are working in the morning. In any case, it's less obtrusive than any forced air system I have ever heard.

Yea I have been on houzz, but never searched for minis on there. But now I will. Yea looks like the noise will not be an issue based on what you and Dana have said, we just didn't realize how quite they were until now. thanks much for the heads up on the noise levels!

beetle55-

You started out this thread talking about the need for cooling since the summer temperatures in Carbondale can get into the 90's. I am on the other side of the divide from you and at 7100' (Salida), but we also occasionally get into the 90's here. The cooling strategy that I use is to open windows at night in the summer, since it always gets down to 60 F or lower at night, and close the windows in the morning. In my well-insulated house equipped with window shades, the maximum indoor temperature that I saw last summer was 76 F. Most people here use that same strategy, although indoor temperatures get higher in houses that are less well insulated.

I use a high-efficiency natural-gas furnace with ducting. I find the ducting handy in that I use it for the whole-house humidifier and the heat recovery ventilation (HRV) system.

I agree with the other guys on the down sides of pot lights. I use standard 120-V track lighting instead, which is similar to pot lights but it does not require so many holes in my air barrier (ceiling). Avoiding pot lights allows me to achieve full insulation depth throughout the attic, but more importantly it keeps a tight air barrier.

So dangling dust collectors mounted on long strips of plastic/steel making my exquisitely appointed ceiling look like a piece of crap are now similiar to pot lite that provide nice even lighting without destroying my ceiling?

If installed as above, a pot lite will be every bit as air tight as the box that you mount the track lite to. Its not magic. Canadians have been doing it for two and one half to three decades because the code has called for it that long. An average insulator can do an air tight ceiling with 6 mil poly (not you cheap saran wrap but as specified in 9.25.42.2 of the ABC) for 1800 square feet in about five hours and use about $250.00 of material. The best bang for the buck there is.

Posted By FBBP on 01 Jan 2014 07:35 PM
So dangling dust collectors mounted on long strips of plastic/steel making my exquisitely appointed ceiling look like a piece of crap are now similiar to pot lite that provide nice even lighting without destroying my ceiling?

The pot lights that I have had in previous homes provided a harsh, narrow light cone vertically downward. Maybe that could be addressed with better fixtures and/or lights. The track lighting that I have in the kitchen of my current house allows the lights to be pointed at and into the cabinets, which provides illumination where it is needed. With the cabinet doors closed, the reflected light is softer than harsh vertical lighting.

The esthetics of which type of light and lighting are more desirable is certainly a personal choice. Luckily, we do not all like exactly the same thing. The air sealing is more challenging with pot lights than track lights, as is providing full depth insulation on the attic floor (if the attic floor is insulated). But lots of people like pot lights, and they should choose what they like.

there are nice looking dimmable surface mounted LED light readily available now that are no more obtrusive than can light surface lenses. No huge boxes in the ceiling, easier to seal, excellent light quality and much longer lasting.

Dana1-

Earlier in this thread, you said, "A 1-kw PV system would deliver about 800-1000kwh during your peak cooling season, and about 1300-1500kwh, which would more than cover your likely cooling power use ..."

Do you mean that over the two or three month cooling season that a 1-kW PV system would deliver a total energy output of 800-1000 kWh? And what does the 1300-1500 kWh refer to?

Lee, Yea I know the thread starting out on the cooling side, but that is not my primary concern which is heat. Anyway, yea I tried and did that with my rental house that I am currently living in last summer every day for 2 plus months. It was 80 degrees in main living area for several weeks during that real hot spell and easy 77 to 78 for much longer. And I work out of the home as well, sucks when you are sitting still sweating over the computer in the office...... I resorted to working in my underwear and nothing else for a while.

I don't know how badly the house is insulated, but opening windows up at night , which I did every single night and then closing them down in the AM, can only do so much.

I would expect my new house to preform better with that method of heat control, but my initial thought was to try to help the cooling issue with that long deep trench that I have to open up for the water, phone and power. It appears it is not worth the hassle or the money though and I will put the effort towards other things like has mentioned above. thanks for the feedback!

there are nice looking dimmable surface mounted LED light readily available now that are no more obtrusive than can light surface lenses.

Are they 12V or 120V? Can you point us to some of them?

Posted By Lee Dodge on 01 Jan 2014 10:44 PM
Dana1-

Earlier in this thread, you said, "A 1-kw PV system would deliver about 800-1000kwh during your peak cooling season, and about 1300-1500kwh, which would more than cover your likely cooling power use ..."

Do you mean that over the two or three month cooling season that a 1-kW PV system would deliver a total energy output of 800-1000 kWh? And what does the 1300-1500 kWh refer to?

The cooling season in a typical code min house in Carbondale is closing in on four months, not 2-3.

It's over five months in a high-R house with a heating/cooling balance in the mid-50s.  So if you call the 3 June-August months in the middle the peak, that's highly correlated to peak output on the PV, where most of the annual uptake is gained. (OK, so 1000kwh out of a 1kw system in 3 months might require a higher altitude than he has, fair enough. :-) )

The cooling loads are fairly low during most of the cooling season and the total cooling energy expenditure in a high-R house designed for low late-day solar gain can be nearly zero if one plays the night time ventilation game well.

The 1300-1500kwh is a quick & dirty WAG on the annualized output in Carbondale given optimal shading factors.  I didn't look up the weather or run the numbers on anybody's PV output estimator tool, but feel free to run one if you think there is a need for higher precision here.   Depending PV technology type there can be quite range, but that's the order of magnitude I'd expect without digging down on all the particulars.

BTW: It's +6F and snowing in Worcester MA right now, and most forecasts for Friday put the daily high in the mid-single digits, after a low in the mid negative digits, followed by -7F to -10F overnight on Friday/Saturday, which MIGHT make it to the teens (or not) in the afternoon. That's the sort of low-diurnal temperature comparison point I was making earlier, how -10F in Carbondale isn't quite the same as when it hits those temps here, even though -10F is much more common than here.  It's been tracking well below the Weatherspark.com projections for most of the day- it might not even get UP to the +5F 99% design temp on Friday at this rate.