My favorite philosopher is Larry the Cable Guy

Get er Done!

no wonder us good ole, redneck southern boys get such a bad reputation...

Greg:

If you re-read your posts in this thread, you'll see that it was you who referenced Yugos and made the statement that "a customer's choice to buy a home does not make it a quality statement about the home."   In essence, you inferred that no matter how bad the product, that there are probably still going to be people who will buy it.    The Mencken quote---which is pretty mainstream, by the way---was in support of that.   I'm sorry it intimidated you.   It wasn't my intent.  


John

This horse was dead a long time ago can we please move on

Thanks, Road Block. What we are looking at, in El Paso, is moving from slab to a crawl space and using SIP's for the floor in a structural capacity. A group in N. New Mexico has had a lot of success with this and we forego the in-floor for a high efficiency unit that mounts in the crawl space. Same concept, if you think about it. The heating would enter through floor mounted vents and move its normal route, into the ceilings. We could move (circulate) air with fans. A/C would be mounted as well underneath. We have a lot of options on particualar units. We do not do basements here and the garage would go unheated. If we build the garage out of SIP's as well we do not need to cool or heat it here.

The savings are not necessarily significant, but the process is cheaper than in-floor radiant.

Again, thanks for the note.

Greg,
Years ago, FHA did some housing using the same method of forced air heat. You seal the crawlspace, and blow the conditioned air into the crawl, and out through floor registers. It should work better if you insulate the crawlspace floor and foundation walls and not the floor of the house. Then you would get radiant heating of the floors and warm air flow through the floor registers.

Wes;

we just finished a home that was built a similar way ( at owners request) the sealed insulated crawl space is used as the return air plenum with all supply ducts being overhead ........it is going to be blower door tested next Thursday by FSEC for energystar rating. I'll keep you guys posted about the results

I would be concerned about sealing the crawl space. For one thing unheated crawl space has to be ventilated. Here we can simply open the knee wall and use some subltle wiring to keep the critters out. Secondly, you are starting to accrue additional costs that (I don't thinnk) have a return. If you undermount the HVAC and insulated the duct work, with the SIP's as the structural floor, you have a pretty tight envelope.

We are going to give this a test run on my own house. I will keep you posted. These old adobes were built with crawl spaces and I love them. You can wire and plumb under the house. You can add systems later. It's a great process. So as I knock down the old house and build the new, we will use it and see if it is worth taking on the road...

Greg;

If you seal the the insulated crawl space and use it for a plenum -  it is now conditioned space. we also poured a 2" slab over 6 mil vaporbarier to keep area dry. Research has shown that it is the best way to handle crawlspaces as apposed to the old school thinking of ventilating the area which allows for moisture and the nasties to infiltrate thru the floor system.
If you run duct work thru a hot humid attic or crawlspace it is the worst possible design in hot humid climates

Fair enough. Which is why I qualified my opinion by saying, what we do here... We don't do moisture, or for that matter humidity, in the desert. How do you condition the crawlspace? Do you move air through the space?

Greg;

The supply air comes thru the ceilings cool air falls to the return air vents in floor or base boards, then free flows to the return side of the air-handler intake mounted on the floor deck.

I saw a reversed  set-up 30 years ago in upstate New York using the insulated (walls) crawlspace as a supply plenum for heat. It makes for a nice warm floor.

A good commercial contractor can even do work on a business site that is actually open for business with very minimal disruption.