Rennovation

The darn glass has cracked in my Charnwood multifuel stove. It started with a little crack and soon developed to a full blown glass falling out of the door sized crack. This is a right pain as the old screws holding the fixing plates in place are just stubs of their former glory. So I've let the stove go out and cool right down. Taken all the glass out and have had to drill the four screws out and re-tap them. Only managed to do two of them today, but that's enough to get the new glass back in with one of the two screws in each of the glazing bars. It's a good enough hold for the moment and I'll have to work out how to safely drill the other two without breaking the cast iron doors.

Interesting though the price of new glass: the two local fireplace shops in and around Newbury stock glass at over £96 for just one door; Charnwood themselves are cheaper even including delivery; but I ended up searching the web and got the glass and the gasket for £20. It's a wonder these local shops get any business - if their stove prices are the same as their glass prices it won't be too long before all of their potential customers look in their showroom, get a price and then compare it to web prices.

My other gripe for today is why is the price of wood and coal 50% more in West Berkshire than in Somerset or Devon - even from the same branded shops?

When my house was built and designed, they forgot completely (as they do now) that the south facing aspect of the house would gain the most sunlight. So they built the house with almost no windows on the south side. In real terms though this has protected the house from the very heavy rain and wind we get up here in the Downlands. What it has not done though it to make the most of the light, with many of the largest windows and doors on the least lit parts.

One of the few windows on the south side is the bathroom window. We have yet to put in effective passive ventilation for this room and it can get a little steamed up. A wipe with a clean cloth usually stops the big drips of water, but one thing that does annoy me is the black mold you get especially on uPVC surfaces (don't blame me for uPVC windows they were already there and I'm not going to throw something into landfill on principal).

I do have a chemical black mould remover, which smells nasty and you can just tell doesn't do me, us or the environment any good. I've also tried steam cleaning, but to be effective it needs to be done once a week and I don't fancy hauling a steam cleaner up there for that task alone. The last option considered was actually something stumbled upon almost by accident.

During the renovation of the house we went for basic white suite and white tile combination (as we could get them cheap, and found a load of tiles on Freecycle). Now I'm ok with white - it's clean, simple and well err white; but the wife - oh no - she wants a sort of black and chrome look to mingle in the white. Ok bear with me here I'm getting to the point... part of this scheme was a blind to cover the window. We wanted a blackout blind as the neighbours next door are a little creepy at times so we looked at a few (Ikea, freecycle etc) but ended up choosing our own fabric and having a blind made for us. Our fabric selection was simple - no light was to get through and it had to match the colour scheme - in this case black.

Getting to the point of this blog though, the black blind is thick and matt and it absorbs a surprising amount of heat. This heat when applied over a period of time is enough to dry out the window area and keep just about all of the horrid black mould at bay. You do need to leave the blind down during the day for it to work, but we are mostly out during the day so it's not a problem.

So my tip here is that to cut down on the black mould and damp issues around your south facing bathroom windows (I wonder how many people actually have south facing bathroom windows?) try using a thick matt black blind and leave it down when your not in the house to let the sunlight kill off the mould for you.

I don't think actually being carbon neutral is possible at the moment, but heading in that direction is a great idea. To date I've done a lot of the infrastructure changes to the house in prep for the bigger things that will greatly help:

1. Complete renovation of the central heating. The upstairs has oversized radiators (that can run at a lower temperature) with TRV's all around*; the downstairs is now using Osma's underfloor heating system with heating sensors in each room. The underfloor heating also includes cold spots (unheated areas) for the dog and pets to lie down without baking.

2. Good levels of insulation. The walls have been insulated with cavity fill; the loft has only 100mm of insulation (will be upgraded to 500mm when the loft based infrastructural work is complete); and the ground floor has the very cosy 50mm osma underfloor heating insulation. The biggest change we noticed was the ground floor - even without the ufh on the floor was no where near as cold.

3. A ratings. All our appliances are A or A* rated. We have a built in kitchen with high efficiency technologies including an induction hob; and our laundry has A* rated washing machine and tumble dryer. Do wot? A tumble dryer in a carbon neutral home? Well it's one of those things that comes with a big family - you need clean and dry clothes and you can't always rely on the weather. We have a White Knight A* rated tumble dryer - cheap to buy, cheap to run and all parts are apparently marked for recycling.

4. Wood is good. We've used wood just about everywhere we can. Real wood that is, as un-manufactured as we can get. My theory is that by using wood from a sustainable and local source we are locking up carbon for a good many years and at the end of it new tree's will have grown to absorb even more carbon. So we have an engineered oak floor downstairs. This is a kind of oak ply, with a layer of oak, and two layers of pine. It's very strong, works well with the ufh and is very easy to clean and keep clean. All the skirting, doors, architraves etc are real wood (not mdf) and where possible we have reclaimed wood from other projects, the tip and even people moving house.

5. Electrical overhaul. We've had all the switches and sockets replaced with some decent MK ones. Half were broken, didn't work well, or were just too filthy to clean. While this doesn't save carbon or the environment (as the swiches and sockets require a lot of nasty things in the manufacture), it's better to be safe, and by buying something that will last for some time - i.e. MK stuff - I hope that they won't be changed for at least 30 years. We have also added the provision for extra isolators required for solar/wind power.

6. Central Heating boiler powered by wood. Central heating here is solid fuel. There is no gas in the area and I'm loathed to move to bottled gas or oil, both of with seems to be controlled at the moment by unstable loonies. Burning coal is in some ways good - it's a local product and there is a very efficient distribution system. But as pointed out in an earlier blog - coal chucks out a good wodge more co2 than gas and it's a messy business dealing with coal. A 50/50 mix of coal and wood is however very low carbon compared to gas, but for co2 neutrality burning just wood is good (as the new tree's that are planed absorb as much co2 and the ones you are burning - well that's the theory). So the solid fuel stove has been upgraded and repaired with new seals etc and we burn logs, wood bits, and some manufactured wood chip logs. All of which are by-products of the wood industry.

Things to do...

a. Solar hot water - not just for hot water though, I want this tied into our heating system as I'm sure it can provide enough to heat the UFH most of the year.

b. Thermal store. Part of a above I guess, but these are expensive at the moment, so I'll keep looking.

c. P.V. I'm gonna get a small <100W panel and see what sort of output I get.

d. Wind. likely to be out at the moment due to the noise and planning issues.

e. Grey Water. I've eyed up a couple of 1000 litre storage containers. With them buried in the ground I should have (given enough rain water) enough to flush the downstairs loo, supply the washing machine and water the garden.

Like most in my area, I have a multifuel stove as my primary heating source. I burn coal and wood, with coal as my primary heating fuel. There are some clear pangs of doubt though towards my use of coal. We've all been told how nasty it actually is, but it is a local product (from within our country) and not shipped/piped half way around the world. Should I be doing anything with my coal to reduce my carbon footprint?
Continue reading "Improving the carbon footprint of your..." »

Well the fedge has been planted today. Willow, between 2 and 3 rows deep. To make it dog proof I’ve added a wire fence (provided as leftovers from a local farm) nailed to a few wooden posts and a gate from Scat’s in Newbury. The posts are not straight, but it’s dog proof and when the Willow starts to take it should hide the posts just nicely.

It’s already created a nice screen bordering off the upper half of the garden from the rest. The neighbours were also very curios as to why I put lots of dead sticks in the ground. In the few weeks it's been in the ground we have had quite a bit of green leaf growth and it's already looking very good (see second picture below).

Lastly, we have used up some of the spare in a bit of a dead space to create a bit of shelter from the sun. It's a south facing line, so we are going to let these grow a bit in height. The dog has access to dig up and eat these if she wished, but seems not too interested. She has bent a few down by sitting/sleeping on them though.

Continue reading "Dog Proof Fedge" »

I've given up trying to get a wood pellet stove. The main suppliers out there are only interested in big business and refer to 'local installers'. Those local installers are just about impossible to get hold of and when you do their prices are in a different league. Mark up's on the products are incredible and labour is twice the cost of a standard wood burning or multifuel stove (although just about the same effort is required to install a wood pellet stove).

Supply is also a little too unpredictable. A few companies might be able to supply me, but only in bulk, and a few more can supply small bags, but at a cost which equates to twice that of coal. I want to be leading edge with my sustainable approach, but not at the cost of living essentials, or making the cost inappropriate for anyone else to repeat.

So the hunt is now on for an alternative. At the moment burning wood (logs, compressed products) seems to be one of the better options.

British Gas came out for the third time today. They are finally getting around the move electricity meter. It’s not exactly the engineers fault, but that of their ’system’ and their ‘process’. You phone them up, speak to someone who has absolutely no idea what you are talking about, they then log a call about something they could find on their system that seems to match what you were talking about, and finally an engineer turns up expecting to change a light bulb and not a whole electricity meter.

It’s amazing how such large companies get lost in the procedure. The call centre staff seem to be there to take calls and manage calls, and not to get the customer as quickly as possible to an engineer who can actually help or qualify your conversation. I wonder what it would be like if I could call my local British gas site, get a call logged and then speak to an engineer straight away. How much time in failed appointments would be saved?

To fit with our new lifestyle most of our old possessions have to go. There are two key reasons for this: to maintain the ‘only what we need’ principal, and to get rid of our external storage. Most of our possession’s are now in from storage and there is a general Christmas feeling in the house when boxes, that have been in storage for over a year, are opened. It’s amazing how much you miss stuff that you’d forgotten about. Our DVD collection for example extends to at least 20 DVD’s (ohh wow), all of which have been in storage. Once out of the box the girls cant remember how they survived without them (well almost). We’ve played tug of war with the girls over daft DVD’s they are not really interested so that we can get them on ebay.

Some our stuff is just not ebay material, and while car boots can generate some cash, in my experience the only people making money are the people on the gates collecting the entrances free. We are however doing a lot of ‘freecycle’. It’s one of those, give it away free to the first person that turns up, sites that run’s mainly via email updates. Our old fridge went in about an hour, and a load of old kids books went in 10 mins to a grandmother who wanted something for her grandkids. It’s a great idea and beats putting it in the waste or attempting to give it to a charity shop (who are increasingly picky about what they take!).

The purge ratio this week is about 5:1 - five items to ebay etc to one keep. No bad I think, but I reckon there is a second
round where some of the retained items can go….

Things are progressing quickly with the Kitchen. The rubberwood worktops are being installed in the kitchen and this somehow seems to have made the kitchen look complete. It’s a shame that the worktops have been sat in the transit for over a month as they have slightly warped. Thankfully our chippy (well the old man) is more than a match for warped wood.

Damn hard stuff this rubberwood - it’s eaten three router bits and a bunch of jigsaw blades. The router bits can be re-sharpened, but the jigsaw blades seem to be designed to be dropped in a landfil of after use (as there seem to be no recycling marks on the packaging, nor on the blades). Still, I’ve put the blades in the re-cycling.

If anyone is interested, the carpentry work has been undertaken by Gerald Hollister. You can find his web site here: Gerald Hollister's web site.

One key problem about buying a renovation project - especially one from a repossessed house - is that the quality of the house internals are rarely even ‘ok’. We new the house was bad. We viewed the house a couple of times. But nothing actually quite prepared us for the utter filth that lay behind things, under things, stuck to things etc.

The house was fumigated before we moved in (the building society who repossessed it insisted on it), but this seems to do nothing to kill the nasties living in this house. I’m usually pretty immune to flea bites - they prefer the girls, the cats or anything over smelly old me - but in this house I’ve been bitten. Bitten a lot.

Removing the stairs carpet seemed to be the pinnacle of flea activity. The stairs consisted of a lovely (sic) shade of what must have been beige carpet. It had largely been eroded by trampling feet so that in most places only the backing was visible, and through the backing appeared to be underlay.

The smell in the carpets was horrendous and there was no way that I could let the girls in the house with the carpets in. So my priority task was to remove the carpets. Bedrooms, bathroom (oh god the bathroom carpet needs an entire blog article, but I just can’t bring myself to write it), kitchen, lounge, and hall all went on day one. All floors were vacuumed, mopped with bleach, cleaner (sugar soap), and then some great stuff called magic odour zap http://www.screwfix.com/app/sfd/cat/pro.jsp?cId=101513&ts=35700&id=65263). None of this is environmentally friendly, but it just had to be done. What ever was down there had to die. So, end of week one and we had the major smell’s out of the way and the main source of all things crawling.

I had of course ignored the stairs. I didn’t think too much about it, it’s a small staircase and we were trampling dirt in and out the house so it provided a way of cleaning the boots off before getting to the living areas (upstairs). Smells persisted and the girls started to get some serious flea bites. After ruling out just about everything else, I set about removing the stair carpet. Perhaps carpet’s would be a better description though. The first layer came up to review that the underlay (so I thought) was in fact chocolate brown carpet. Hmmm nice. Chocolate brown carpet covered in dog hairs. Hmm not so nice. Chocolate brown carpet covered in dog hairs, lumps of smelly ’stuff’, and a strong smell of ammonia. Hmm, I could taste the air - I didn’t want to of course, but literally the (I’m gagging while I think of it) smell penetrated all.

Anyway, being a man, defender of the home from unwanted bugs, and all round hero, I ploughed on pulling up the carpet’s. Four layers in all. The end result was some rancid carpet just outside our front door, stairs that had to be cleaned with bleach about fifteen times, and me covered on flea bites.

It just amazes me that people live like this and don’t notice something is wrong. How could they not smell the stench? Why were they not bitten by the flea’s? Also, why did they nail the carpets down in the house? 2″ nails bent over. Why didn’t they take up the old carpets? and Why didn’t they vacuum the place once in a while?

We still have no house to buy, but I have plans. Many of them. Too

many. But here is my target for the house fabric/infrastructure

rennovation:

• Environmentally sensative rennovation
• Sustainable technologies
• A working family home
• A working family garden with veggie patch (have I been watching too much ‘Good Life’ - go flick go)

I’ve done a good study of technology available, so here is what I’m looking at:

• Wood Pellet stove/boiler for central heating/hot water
• Ground floor underfloor heating (most likely Osma)
• Thermal Store
• Solar water heating for central heating and hot water
• PV to cover base load
• Ground floor wooden flooring (clean, warm, ‘bounce’, renewable source)
• 1st floor carpets with sound proofing felt/rubber crumb underlay
  
  (which seems to contain quite a high amount of recycled products)
• Very high levels of insulation (perhaps warm roof)