Building envelope: Windows

Windows are one of the most important parts of the building envelope. Despite the effectiveness of modern artificial lighting, a room that has no windows feels dead and uncomfortable. Windows bring a room to life by bringing in natural light and connecting people to the world outside.

Natural Light

When available, natural light beats artificial light. It is generally brighter. Even on a cloudy day, outside will be brighter than your average living room. Natural light is dynamic — it changes throughout the day and throughout the year. This gives life to a ream that static artificial lighting cannot.

Our home has a great amount of natural light. With no artificial illumination, the light is better — brighter and more even — than in our temporary living space.

Wings of Light (107):

• Problem: Modern buildings are often shaped with no concern for natural light — they depend almost entirely on artificial light. But buildings which displace natural light as the major source of illumination are not fit places to spend the day.
• Therefore: Arrange each building so that it breaks down into wings which correspond, approximately, to the most important natural social groups within the building. Make each wing long and as narrow as you can — never more than 25 feet wide.
• Our house is not long and narrow — in fact, its main body is a square. Each side of the square is 32' long. Thus, we are violating the letter of the law. But how do we rank against the spirit?
  
  The reason for the 25' width restriction is that in an average room, significant amounts of light only penetrate about 12' from the window. A 25' wing with windows on both sides will just barely get enough light.
  
  Fortunately, our home uses several techniques to allow above average light penetration. Our ceiling is 10' high, and the main windows in the living room go all the way to the ceiling. Walls are mostly white. These factors together allow more light to go in further and reflect effectively. As the picture below shows, this results in a living space that can be illuminated primarily by natural light.

Natural light on the main floor

Indoor sunlight (128):

• Problem: If the right rooms are facing south, a house is bright and sunny and cheerful; if the wrong rooms are facing south, the house is dark and gloomy.
• Therefore: Place the most important rooms along the south edge of the building, and spread the building out along the east-west axis. Fine tune the arrangement so that the proper rooms are exposed to the south-east and the south-west sun. For example: give the common area a full southern exposure, bedrooms south-east, porch south-west. For most climates, this means the shape of the building is elongated east-west.
• In our home: We have a great southern exposure. We took advantage of this by making sure the southern wall of our main floor has a lot of windows. Because we have an open floor plan, we are able to get large amounts of natural light even with a fairly square building layout. The picture above looks from our living room toward the kitchen. The window nearest the back corner of the kitchen is about 27' feet away, but it is still well illuminated — and we haven't even taken the protective films off of the windows yet.

Light on two sides of every room (159):

• Problem: When people have a choice, people will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are lit only from one side unused and empty.
• Therefore: Locate each room so that it has outdoor space outside it on at least two sides, and then place windows in these outdoor walls so that natural light falls into every room from more than one direction.
• In our home: Having windows on multiple sides evens out the light. If light only comes from one window, there will be a high contrast between the window and its surroundings. Most of our primary rooms have windows on two sides. (See the floor plans below.)
  
  However, since our home doesn't have crinkly edges (they are not energy, material, or labor efficient), we could not achieve this everywhere. For the most part, the impact of this was minimized by putting rooms that aren't as important in the non-corner positions. Where non-utility rooms have ended up with windows on one side, we are able to mitigate issues by using glass doors to help borrow light from other rooms.

Light on two sides of the living room

Upstairs windows.
Yellow arrows highlight windows.

Main floor windows.Yellow arrows highlight windows.

Views

The primary views from our home are to the west. In the background, we have a view of the Cascade mountains sitting above a view of the not-so-lovely Factoria mall. In the mid-ground, we see a lot of trees with some limited views of our neighbors to the sides. Overall, it's a pretty good view, and something to take advantage of.

Looking west from the living room deck

Panorama looking west from the living room deck

Panorama looking west from the master bedroom

Zen view (134):

• Problem: The archetypal zen view occurs in a famous Japanese house, which gives this pattern its name. [A Buddhist monk has a beautiful view, but it is only seen in passing as you enter the home.]
• Therefore: If there is a beautiful view, don't spoil it by building huge windows that gape incessantly at it. Instead, put the windows which look onto the view at places of transition — along paths, in hallways, in entry ways, on stairs, between rooms. If the view window is correctly placed, people will see a glimpse of a distant view as they come up to the window or pass it: but the view is never visible from places where people stay.
• In our home: We mostly failed to achieve any Zen views. Our windows, especially in the living room and bedrooms are large to let in the light, but they make for gaping views. To some degree, this was unavoidable — the views and the light were coming from the same direction.
  
  However, we did manage to apply a little of this philosophy in our stairway. We intentionally placed our stairway to the west. This cuts off some of the western view from the main living spaces. Instead of having big gaping windows in the stair tower, we choose to use multiple smaller windows. These break up the view, and because they are smaller the view shifts as you use the stairs. This gives the view a bit of mystery and dynamism that it would have lacked if we'd made the more predictable decision of having the west wall given over to view with the stairs pushed to an interior wall where they wouldn't effect the view.

Breaking up the view with smaller windows

Windows overlooking life (192):

• Problem: Rooms without a view are prisons for the people who have to stay in them.
• Therefore: In each room, place the windows in such a way that their total area conforms roughly to the appropriate figures for your region..., and place them in positions which give the best possible views out over life: activities in streets, quiet gardens, anything different from the indoor scene.
• In our home: A challenge of our site is that it is fairly heavily slopped. The second picture below is taken from our main floor — ground level on the entry side but, as the picture shows, rather high by the time you get to the other end of the building. Thus, all the life we look out on is rather distant.
  
  But almost every window, expect those on the north facing the neighboring house, are fortunate enough to have a view of the nearby trees and, eventually, our gardens.

The main floor is rather far above the ground

Choosing a color palette

We're still a bit away from done with the house — about a month further away than we thought (more on that later). However, we're close enough to done that it's time to start thinking about a color palette.

Based on our preferences and some art we own, our color designer chose some candidate colors for us. Now we need to narrow it down to three or four colors to use for our palette. We have some ideas, but it seemed fun to gather some other opinions. Here are the colors. Let us know in the comments what combinations of three or four colors are your favorites.

Details: the walls are going to mostly be white. The color palette will be used for a few accent walls and for accents in furnishings and accessories.

slate teal

azores

marble canyon

saratoga springs

bordeaux

dreamy

Building Envelope: Ceilings and Roofs

In this post, we'll explore how patterns influenced our building envelope, focusing primarily on ceilings and the roof. (As before, problem descriptions and solutions — the first two bullet points of each section — are from A Pattern Language.)

Sheltering roof (117):

• Problem: The roof plays a primal role in our lives. The most primitive buildings are nothing but a roof. If the roof is hidden, if its presence cannot be felt around the building or if it cannot be used, then people will lack a fundamental sense of shelter.
• Therefore: Slope the roof or make a vault of it, make its entire surface visible, and bring the eaves of the roof down low, as low as 6'0" or 6'6" at places like the entrance, where people pause. Build the top story of each wing right into the roof, so that the roof does not only cover it, but actually surrounds it.
• In our home: It would be an understatement to say that modern-styling does not lend themselves to this pattern. So we asked ourselves, "What is the essence of this pattern?"
  
  Patterns of Home, a modernized look at some of the home oriented patterns in A Pattern Language, gives a clue. The roof should, above all, provide a sense of shelter. It should provide a sense of connection between the inside and the outside. A Pattern Language focuses on achieving this via living space within the roof, but another way to achieve this is to have the same roof surface expressed inside and out.
  
  Our home has two roof lines — the top and a midline. Both are true roof surfaces in that they cover interior space that is not covered by the other. Both roof lines are expressed inside and outside the house. The lower roof line defines both an exterior midline and the maximum ceiling height on the main floor. The butterfly shape of the upper roof is also expressed inside; most of the rooms upstairs have a slanted roof that continues the external expression of the butterfly roof.
  
  Equally important is the sense of indoor/outdoor transition that our roof gives at two key locations, both shown below. The picture on the lower left shows how the roof itself provides protection over our upstairs deck. The picture on the lower right shows the same sense of protection over the main entry (and as the top picture shows, the sense of that protection being part of the roof is even greater now that the roof trim has been installed).
  
  In retrospect, I would have tweaked the roof design a bit to give it a greater sense of shelter, even within the confines of a butterfly roof. The mid-line roof does not shelter the main floor deck as effectively as it does the entry, and it does not continue on the north side or fully around the west side. Not continuing the middle roof line all the way around weakened the sense of the roof really being part of the home. However, from the east and south sides, we did pretty well considering the inherent limitations of the style we had settled on.

Ceiling height variety (190):

• Problem: A building in which the ceiling heights are all the same is virtually incapable of making people feel comfortable.
• Therefore: Vary the ceiling heights continuously throughout the building, especially between rooms which open into each other, so that the relative intimacy of different spaces can be felt. In particular, make ceilings high in rooms which are public or meant for large gatherings (10 to 12 feet), lower in rooms for smaller gatherings (7 to 9 feet), and very low in rooms or alcoves for one or two people (6 to 7 feet).
• In our home: I would say that we achieved the minimum viable amount of ceiling height variety needed to say that we have variety. Much to my sadness, we don't have any nooks or alcoves which take advantage of a lowered ceiling to make them feel cozier. However, we do do use ceiling height to provide social cues and, on occasion, to give a sense of grandeur.
  
  The main floor has 10' ceilings. This is high, but anything lower would feel low in this broad, open space. To keep this area from feeling cavernous and undifferentiated, we vary the ceiling height. The entry is raised above the main floor. This gives a sense of compression and expansion that emphasizes the height of the main living area. The area over the kitchen is soffited down to differentiate that space from the dining area adjacent to it (the diagram below shows the kitchen soffit, but that only goes part way across the ceiling). The living room has a support beam which provides a natural gateway separating that space.
  
  
  
  The bedrooms have a lower 8' ceiling height to match their more intimate scale. To give a sense of the roof from the inside, all of the bedrooms have a ceiling line which follows the butterfly roof. This, along with window placement, gives a feeling of opening the rooms to the view outside.
  
  
  
  The most dramatic use of ceiling height variety is in our stair tower. The stair tower stretches the whole height of the building, and the open tread stairs really allow you to get a sense of the height of the structure. The picture below, which shows the upper 1.5 stories of the stair tower, gives a feel for the sense of height it brings to our home.

The next post will cover openings in the building envelope for windows and doors.

Site Layout

Patterns made relatively few contributions to our general site layout. The shape of our lot, its relation to the street and utilities, and the setbacks and easements imposed by the city combined to make the placing of our house fairly obvious: our house would be at the east end of a long east/west oriented lot. Fortunately, these constraints ended up being fairly consistent with what we wanted out of the site layout patterns. (As before, problem descriptions and solutions -- the first two bullet points of each section -- are from A Pattern Language.)

Site repair (104):

• Problem: Buildings must always be built on those parts of the land which are in the worst condition, not the best.
• Therefore: On no account place the buildings in the places which are most beautiful. If fact, do the opposite. Consider the site and its buildings as a single living eco-system. Leave those areas that are the most precious, beautiful, comfortable, and healthy as they are, and build new structures in those parts of the site which are least pleasant now.
• For our home: The site naturally lent itself to fulfilling this pattern. Our lot is one portion of what was once a larger lot. The east side of our property had been disturbed by the construction of two new homes to the north. The west side is mostly wooded and partially a buffer zone for a nearby critical slope. Based on these constraints, it was natural to leave the wooded area intact and build on the disturbed land.

South facing outdoors (105):

• Problem: People use open space if it is sunny, and do not use it if it isn't, in all but desert climates.
• Therefore: Always place buildings to the north of the outdoor spaces that go with them, and keep the outdoor spaces to the south. Never leave a deep band of shade between the building and the sunny part of the outdoors.
• In our home: Our site is long east-west and short north-south, so we do not have a lot of flexibility for north/south siting. Part of the southern side of the property is taken by easements for a pedestrian path and for utilities. We have trees along the south western edge of our property, which decreases the amount of sunlight available. Despite the difficulties, we still have a sunny front yard in the east and a backyard in the west filled with tree-filtered sunlight. Neither requires going through deeply shaded areas for access. The shaded north side will be a terraced path down to the back yard.

Main entrance (110):

• Problem: Placing the main entrance (or main entrances) is perhaps the single most important step you take during the evolution of a building plan.
• Therefore: Place the main entrance of the building at a point where it can be seen immediately from the main avenues of approach and give it a bold, visible shape which stands out in front of the building.
• In our home: The location of the main entry was constrained by where we could put the garage (only on the north side). The garage also causes the entry to be nestled in instead of standing out in front of the building. We adapted to this difficulty and the site's natural elevation change by adding a large, bold stairway down to the front door. This extends the entry out so that it can be seen from all three approaches (driveway, sidewalk, and pedestrian path).

Entrance transition (112):

• Problem: Buildings, and especially houses, with a graceful transition between the street and the inside, are more tranquil than those which open directly off the street.
• Therefore: Make a transition space between the street and the front door. Bring the path which connects street and entrance through this transition space and mark it with a change of light, a change of sound, a change of direction, a change of surface, a change of level, perhaps by gateways which make a change of enclosure, and above all with a change of view.
• In our home: The design and placement of the entry were a good start for this pattern. The entry stairs (on the left in the image below) provide a natural change of level, material, and view. However, we need to make sure that this connects to all of the approaches. To aid in this, we are planning on adding some stairs from the sidewalk to the entry. These will provide a connection and allow us to add landscaping to further emphasize the sense of transition.

Car connection (113):

• Problem: The process of arriving in a house, and leaving it, is fundamental to our daily lives; and very often it involves a car. But the place where cars connect to houses, far from being important and beautiful, is often off to one side and neglected.
• Therefore: Place the parking place for the car and the main entrance, in such a relation to each other, that the shortest route from the parked car into the house, both to the kitchen and to the living rooms, is always through the main entrance. Make the parking place for the car into an actual room which makes a positive and graceful place where the car stands, not just a gap in the terrain.
• In our home: This pattern had a large influence on the design of our entry sequence. This pattern and past experience convinced us that we really didn't want to have multiple main entries into the home. We decided to just have one — there isn't even a door directly inside from the garage. The driveway, garage, and other approaches all funnel into the single (covered) entry. Architecturally, the car connection is not a positive place (i.e., enclosed on multiple sides). however, we are planning on using garden features to give it a feel of enclosure.

Next up in out pattern posts will be a discussion of the patterns that influenced our building envelope.

Our pattern language: Zones

Once upon a time, we spoke of how we narrowed down the 253 patterns in A Pattern Language down to the ~70 that we felt were most relevant to our home. Today we want to go into more detail about those patterns, starting with the "big moves", those patterns that underlie our sense of place.

Our home begins with

House for a small family (76):

• Problem: In a house for a small family, it is the relationship between children and adults which is most critical.
• Therefore: Give the house three distinct parts: a realm for the parents, a realm for the children, and a common area. Conceive these three realms as roughly similar in size, with the commons the largest.^[1]

This overarching pattern leads naturally to three others: Common areas at the heart, Couple's realm, and Children's realm.

Common areas at the heart (129):

• Problem: No social group — whether a family, a work group, or a school group — can survive without constant informal contact among its members.
• Therefore: Create a single common area for every social group. Locate it at the center of gravity of all the spaces the group occupies, and in such a way that the paths which go in and out of the building lie tangent to it.
• In our home: Our open great room acts as the heart of our home. It lies tangent to the main entry (on the right, below) and, less directly, to the back entry (at the bottom of the stairs to the left). We have other shared spaces, but this one is truly the heart of the home.

Common areas at the heart of our main floor

Couple's realm (136):

• Problem: The presence of children in a family often destroys the closeness and the special privacy which a man and wife need together.^[2]
• Therefore: Make a special part of the house distinct from the common areas and all the children's rooms, where the man and woman of the house can be together in private. Give this place a quick path to the children's rooms, but, at all costs, make it a distinctly separate realm.
• In our home: The couple's realm is a distinct space from the rest of the home. It's more than just a bedroom — our realm is meant to be an area where we can comfortably spend time alone together. It is directly across the hall from the children's realm, making that realm distinct but accessible.

Couple's realm and Children's realm upstairs

Children's realm (137):

• Problem: If children do not have space to release a tremendous amount of energy when they need to, they will drive themselves and everybody else in the family up the wall.
• Therefore: Start by placing the small area which will belong entirely to the children — the cluster of their beds. Place it in a separate position toward the back of the house, and in such a way that a continuous play space can made from this cluster to the street, almost like a wide swath inside the house, muddy, toys strewn along the way, touching those family rooms which children need — the bathroom and the kitchen most of all — passing the common area along one side (but leaving quiet sitting areas and the couple's realm entirely separate and inviolate), reaching out to the street, either through its own door or through the entrace room, and ending in an outdoor room, connected to the street, and sheltered, and large enough so that the children can play in it when it rains, yet still be outdoors.
• In our home: This is a detailed pattern. We took what was most important to us. The children's realm is a distinctly separate space. It does have access to the outdoors without cutting through the common space (by the stairs and back door), but, since that path uses the common stair case, the access itself is only weakly part of the children's realm.

These patterns describe the defining zones of our home. In the next post, we'll look at some structures that define the physical layout of our home.

^[1] All of the patterns in have the form: context; problem statement; discussion; conclusion; related patterns. Our pattern posts will have just the problem statement and conclusion; we refer you to the book for the rest

^[2] Yes, this book, published in 1977, is full of heteronormative assumptions. Just try to ignore them.

Soundproofing

Not every home has a media room. This room is dedicated to enjoying video games, shows, movies, and music. It can handle an intimate group — just the two of us — or a larger group — a Rock Band party. One way a media room differs from a family room with a TV is the extra effort put into isolating it from the rest of the house. As much as possible, activity in the media room shouldn't disturb the rest of the house.

Basics of Soundproofing

Let's start with a quick review of sound. Sound travels via vibrations in air and solids (and liquids, but houses generally aren't built from liquids). When a sound wave hits a wall the wall will vibrate, which will cause the air within the wall to vibrate, and transfer sound to the other side of the wall. The sound wave vibrates the studs in the wall, providing a second path to the other side. There are many ways to decrease the amount of sound transferred:

• Decoupling elements: If the drywall on the inside of the room is not directly connected to the outside of the room, then there will be no solid pathways to transfer sound.
• Absorption: Loose material in the empty spaces of the wall help absorb and deaden the sound attempting to travel through the air cavities in the wall.
• Adding mass: Heavier materials require more energy to make them vibrate. By adding mass to the walls, more of the energy from the sound will be absorbed by the walls, and less energy will be available to transfer through the wall.
• Damping: If it is more difficult for the wall to vibrate in the first place (i.e., it doesn't respond as much to the sound waves), then less sound will be transmitted.

This information was summarized from a more in-depth article from the Soundproofing Company.

The Walls

The most important element of a soundproof room is the walls. In the world of soundproofing, there are many wall options and many trade-offs. We chose a solution that is simple and cheap.

The lower part of the walls are formed by the concrete foundation; the added mass of these walls help to reduce sound transmission.

We added soundproofing insulation to the interior walls. The materials and labor for the R-13 insulation was cheap, so we insulated all the interior walls in the house. This will help absorb sound traveling through the air cavities in the walls.


We looked at several wall damping solutions for the media room. A popular solution is Green Glue, a compound put between two layers of drywall to dampen sound. The material is cheap, but it does require a second layer of drywall and extra installation time. Because is is inexpensive and not difficult to install correctly, it is popular in do-it-yourself solutions.

A second option is QuietRock. This is an all-in-one damped panel that is installed in place of drywall. Installation is exactly the same as drywall, but the material costs are more expensive.

Another option was Resilient Channels. These are attached perpendicular to the studs, and drywall is attached only to the channels. This allows the drywall to flex a bit and dampen more of the sound. It also provides decoupling from the studs. The channels are cheap, and installation is not too much more complex than just drywall. Care needs to be taken to prevent the screws connecting the drywall to the channel from touching the studs (this would prevent the flexing and decoupling of the drywall).

We chose channels because of the price and because the installer is familiar with them. Sound isolation clips can be used with some kinds of channel and provide extra isolation, but they add material and labor expenses. We decided channels should be good enough for the level of soundproofing we want. If we want something more, adding Green Glue plus a second layer of drywall is a relatively straightforward addition that we could do later. It wouldn't require removal or remounting of the existing drywall; it is simply a second layer added on top of the existing drywall and channels.

The Details

Walls are the most important part of soundproofing the room, but the details are also important. The mass of a solid core door prevents sound from easily travelling through it. A gasket around the edge of the door provides a strong seal against the frame when closed, and less sound is able to travel through the gaps around the edge of the door.

We avoided can lights because those allow sound to travel through the ceiling. Surface-mount lights allow a solid layer of insulation in the ceiling and nearly unbroken drywall on channels.

The attachment points of the projector mount and screen can negate the advantage of the channels, if screwed into the studs through the drywall. The projector mount is mounted directly to blocks in the ceiling. The drywall will be installed around the mount and a bit of sealant will provide a flexible interface between the drywall and the mount. The screen should be able to attach directly to the drywall without going through to the studs. It is heavier than the projector but spread over a larger area.

Carpet is an easy flooring choice. It provides extra soundproofing, is comfortable, and provides better acoustics. A hard floor would reflect more sound.

Sound travels well through the reflective walls of vents, but fresh air is critical in a tightly-sealed room. We are using a supply and return to the HRV system to provide fresh air into the room and evacuate the stale air. The supply will be tucked into an open portion of the closet, while the return will be in an enclosed portion of the closet. The closet should help muffle the sound that makes it to the vents. They both go to the HRV, which we assume will not transfer too much sound into the other ducts attached to it. Bends in the ducts will also help absorb sound.

Overall, not a lot of changes were needed to provide extra sound isolation in the media room; we mainly had to spend time considering details. From that, we should get a reasonable level of soundproofing without too much extra cost.

Electrical & Wiring Design

One of the areas that requires a lot of design work is wiring: the electrical system and other wiring such as phone, cable, and data connections. It is important to get this right before the walls are sealed up because it is difficult to modify later. It is the system that has the most end-points, will have the greatest effect on day-to-day life, has more flexibility now than it ever will, and has had the least design or input so far.

Outlets near floor in living room. One for data, one for electrical.

Outlets
The electrical system includes the lighting, electrical outlets, and switches. We'll cover lighting separately — it involves a lot more than just wiring.

The electrician spaced the electrical outlets about equally around the walls. Other than a few specific requests, we trusted his judgement and code for the exact placement. On the main floor, our builder had the electrician turn the outlets horizontally and place them close to the floor for a cleaner look. Upstairs in the more functional rooms, outlets are at a standard height and orientation for better accessibility. In a few locations where we know we will have desks or counters, the outlets are just above or below desk height to provide easy access for equipment.

Main breaker panel (rather full)

Other wiring
The rest of the non-lighting electrical wiring is for appliances. Nearly everything in our house is electric, including the HVAC system, water heater, sump pump, dryer, oven, and now the cooktop. We pre-wired for an electric car charger in the garage — this was the biggest cable, up to 100 amps. The oven/microwave combo and cooktop require 50 amps each, the dryer, water heater, and sump pump each use 30 amps, and each of the two exterior heat pump units use 15 amps. This adds up to a large potential load on our electric capacity. Most of these items won't run at full load most of the time, and many will run rarely. A demand-weighted load calculation showed that we should be fine with the standard 200 amp service common in new construction.

Kitchen outlet with phone (blue), ethernet (grey),
and twine for pulling cable through the conduit.

Communications
The area we had the most input on was the communications wiring. We believe cable and phone connections are becoming obsolete, so we only added a few. We have one phone connection in the master dressing room and one in the kitchen (where we're planning a communications center). We added one cable connection in the living room and one in the media room. These should cover most important use cases.

Main ethernet panel with conduit

Our dominant communication technology is digital data streams. This was where we focused most of our attention (and money). Wireless LAN is nice for quick access from anywhere, but it is not as reliable or as fast as ethernet. We have a wired access point in each major area. WLAN or long cables allow access near that endpoint. We specified cat6 cable so it will be usable for as long as possible. Upstairs, we have an endpoint in each of the secondary bedrooms, one in the master dressing room, and one in the laundry/craft room. On the main level, we have one in the kitchen, one in the living room, one in the office, and one in the garage. The closet in the media room will be the center for both media equipment, and our computer connections and servers. All of the ethernet runs from the upper two levels end at a panel in the media closet.

Living room with conduit
for future cabling

Even cat6 ethernet cable will eventually be replaced by something better. To provide future flexibility, conduits run from the media/server closet to locations throughout the house. This is tubing in the walls with a string run through it. In the future, we will be able to pull the latest cable (such as fiber optics) through that tube, allowing us to provide hard-wired access to the main locations in the house.

Crawlspace with several conduit endpoints

Conduit is harder to run and costs more than ethernet cabling, so we limited ourselves to three conduits per level. The upper level has one for each second bedroom, and one in the master dressing room. The main level has one in the kitchen, one in the living room, and one in the office. To make it easier to pull a cable through, the conduits go roughly straight down and end in the crawlspace; one larger conduit connects the crawlspace to the server closet.

Projector mount with conduit and electrical

We have a short conduit within the media room that runs from the media closet up to the middle of the ceiling, where we have a mount point for a projector. This allows us to run a video cable such as HDMI directly from the source equipment up to the projector in a convenient and concealed manner.

Sound
Wireless speakers are good enough for ambient music, so we limited our speaker wiring to the media room.

Two subwoofer coax cables run from the media closet to opposite corners of the room for flexible subwoofer placement. Speaker wiring is run from the media closet out to eight locations in the room: three in the front, three in the back, and two on the sides. Not all of them will be used right away, but we wanted to support whatever future formats might specify. The side speaker wires aren't even ended at an outlet; there is just some extra cable in the wall which could be used in the future. The rear connections end at the floor so that they can be run up a speaker stand. Extra cable was left in the wall higher up to support wall- or ceiling-mounted speakers.

Rear speaker wiring with outlets near the floor
and extra cable above

Security/automation
The final wiring is low voltage wiring for a security system. It also enables the much more interesting possibility of home automation. Door sensors and motion sensors can be triggered for security or automatically turn on lights when someone enters a particular area. Wiring for a security panel can be used to install a touchscreen for central control. Some extra wall switch boxes were installed to support programmed control of lights at several main locations within the house. All the wiring for these systems was run downstairs into the server closet. At our discretion, we can install a panel that connects everything up and provides security, automation, or both.

Heating & Cooling

"Can we have multiple heating zones with this setup?"

What far reaching affects this innocent question had! Our original plans for an HVAC system were fairly typical for a new home in the US: single-zone, central-air, powered by an efficient gas furnace with an attachment point for a future air conditioner coil. You can add zones to variants of this system, but it becomes increasingly complicated (and expensive). Yuval suggested that we look at heat pumps.

What is a heat pump?

A heat pump uses condensation and evaporation of a refrigerant to heat or cool a space. Air source heat pumps use the air as the energy source/sink. It doesn't take much to get a feel for how heat pumps can heat a space:

• Evaporating the refrigerant transfers energy from the air into the refrigerant. The loss of energy leaves the air cooler.
• Condensing the refrigerant transfers energy from the refrigerant into the air. The addition of energy leaves the air warmer.

This may make it seem like heat pumps would require the space where the energy is coming from to be warmer than the space where the energy is going to, but this isn't the case. The heat source only needs to be warm enough to transfer energy to the refrigerant, and the heat sink only needs to be cool enough to accept heat from the refrigerant.

Refrigerators and freezers illustrate this well. They use a small air source heat pump to make cool spaces even cooler by transferring the energy in the fridge into your kitchen (which is, hopefully, much warmer than the fridge or freezer).

For further details, you can read this article and these not-very-good Wikipedia articles: Heat Pumps, Air Source Heat Pumps. And at this point, my facts become an amalgamation of things I have read and things I have learned in conversation — sorry about the lack of citations.

Some trade-offs

Heat pumps are fairly rare in the US today. They are more common internationally (the system we are going with is from Mitsubishi), and the systems have been around for a while. They are common enough, and becoming more popular as their efficiency is recognized, that we shouldn't have problems maintaining our system, but it is a risk.

Heat pumps, at least the ones we are considering, are driven electrically, but run at a much higher efficiency than electric baseboard heat. They are more comparable to an efficient gas furnace, but as the opening question points toward, heat pump systems are easier to configure into zones. Separately-controlled and conditioned zones are often more efficient since you aren't heating the whole house to the same level, but just the area(s) you are currently using. The Mitsubishi system provides a number of other efficiency features, such as providing a variable amount of conditioning (instead of full-on or full-off), and less heat loss in the small, well-insulated refrigerant lines versus standard ductwork.

Heat pumps require refrigerant, and refrigerants are a negative, as far as the environment is concerned. This is partially mitigated by fact that this is a long lifetime, closed system. Mitsubishi also uses refrigerant that has a low environmental impact.

Some heat pump systems, including the one we are using, are reversible — they can transfer energy in  and act as a heater or transfer energy out and act as an air conditioner. Even though we were not planning on installing an air conditioning unit at construction time, using a system which supports both functions results in a simpler, more cost efficient solution.

No ducts! The refrigerant line is hardly larger
than the wiring, and with the wrapping
it's still ~2" in diameter

Heat pumps have one more really big advantage for a green home: they don't require ducts. We are going with a fully ductless setup where the refrigerant lines run directly from the exterior units to the distribution units. This allowed us to open up the main floor by removing the need for some interior soffits. The impact on the roof was much more substantial. Because we don't need to run ducts, our home is now able to support a roof design that provides a significantly higher level of insulation. Since the roof is one of the large energy leakers in a standard home, this will result in a much tighter home. (Sneak preview: this ended up having some unintended consequences in our kitchen.)

Our system

We are going with a Mitsubishi heat pump system. Two external heat pump units will drive six interior distribution units, for a total of six different zones (one per bedroom, two on the main floor, and one downstairs). We decided not to go with programmable thermostats since they are expensive and the units we are buying support a basic level of programmability — a single day/night cycle — that is good enough for us.

Not ugly, but not exactly beautiful

This is one of the units (installed over the door of our dressing room). The units are not huge, but they are not small either. Each unit is about the width of a doorway, and about a foot tall and a foot deep. This is fine in the bedrooms and media room, where we were able to put them in fairly out-of-the-way locations (over doorways). However, we were not able to do this in the open living area of the main floor; we put the distribution unit behind the fireplace — okay, but not ideal.

This was actually a bit of a disappointment. We initially planned to do a system that used small ducts on the main floor to move the air from the distribution units to the open space. This is when green politics got involved. We're going for a Built Green certification on our home — this is a nice-to-have that gives us a verification that our home is green by some external standard and is also good marketing fodder for our builder. To get a Built Greet certification, your heating system must be Energy Star approved. However, Energy Star does not handle configurable systems well.

The exterior hookup.
The installed unit will only be 3' x 3' with a depth of 1'

Both the ducted and ductless variants of the Mitsubishi are Energy Star approved. However, what is not approved is having a single exterior unit drive one ducted interior unit and one non-ducted interior unit. Energy Star approval applies only to the exact system that was evaluated. This makes sense — variations could potentially decrease the efficiency of a system. However, approval is binary, and there is no process for getting small variants approved; the variant has to go through the full approval process, and the cost of that is prohibitive for one-offs or all possible combinations. Okay, rant over =)

Overall, we're happy with the configuration that was installed. We'll provide an update once we've moved in and have experienced how this works in practice!

Master Bath Design

Last month, we refined the design of the master bathroom. While we had the counter, cabinets, tiles, sinks and other plumbing fixtures picked out, we hadn't discussed the mirror or light fixtures, nor had we detailed the tile layout or the placement of the glass wall and bench in the shower.

Vanity

Yuval proposed an initial design that we mostly liked. It had separate mirrors raised out from the wall, with some open shelving backed by an illuminated panel between the mirrors.

He gave us a second draft which coordinated better with our shower tiles: FAP Amour Mer accent tiles paired with FAP Fusion White tiles. The Fusion White tiles have a subtle gradient texture which makes them more interesting than plain white. Yuval proposed using the Fusion white tiles for the backsplash and all the way up the cabinet wall. This was a big change from the organic pebbles in the original design, but we liked it.

Shower

We want a fixed glass partition in the shower so that we don't have to deal with a door. But which side should have the opening? With the shower head on the west wall, an opening on the east was the natural choice (and would minimize escaping spray). However, the deck door requires a step that would overlap with the shower entrance. It also makes sense to put a shower bench opposite the shower head. To accommodate these constraints, we decided to anchor the shower partition to the east wall and put the opening on the west, by the shower head.

What's next?

This design was enough to get the tiles ordered, and allow lighting to be placed. The rest of the decisions can wait until closer to when they are needed. There is still plenty left to do: finalize the the mirrors and the shelf, choose wood for the bench by the cabinets, choose the treatment for the glass partition, figure out shelving in the shower, and place and choose hooks and towel bars.

Garage Entry Design

The flow of people between the garage and the front door calls for careful design. We wanted a single entry sequence for everyone, whether they arrived from the street, the driveway, or the garage. To support this, we chose to forego an opening from the garage to the house. Instead, the garage will exit into the main exterior entry space.

A happy side effect of this design is that it is more green. A garage opening into heated living space tends to cause heat loss and has a small detrimental affect on indoor air quality.

However, the original design for this sequence had a fatal flaw, at least in Seattle — it was not fully covered! As shown in the diagram above, the sequence of stairs required that you join the main path, and follow the main entry steps down to the front door. The roof (indicated by the grey dotted line in the above image) does not cover the entire entry sequence, leaving you vulnerable to the elements as you go down the steps.

We considered two solutions:

1. Extend the entry roof to cover the steps all the way to the top, covering the existing path from the garage to the entry.
2. Create a shortcut path heading west, directly from the garage landing to the main entry, and put a short roof along the side of the garage to cover this new path.

Adding a larger roof has the disadvantage that it would require a post on the south-east corner, and it would make the entry darker. The second option adds more complexity to an otherwise clean design — a second set of stairs, a possible railing, a different run/rise ratio of the treads. However, our architect avoided those problems and made choosing the second option an easy choice:

Instead of just using the flat eyebrow used over the entry, we wanted to make this new section of roof a feature. A few metal supports extruding from the garage will be sandwiched with wood and support a semi-translucent polycarbonate sheet. This will allow light to filter through, while keeping off the rain. It also allows us to avoid the awkward visual that would result from the difference in height between these two surfaces. We'll use the same design of roof over the lower door to the backyard to provide some more consistency.

Here's a similar roof design from another YS Development home:

This satisfied the design problem nicely, and was finished just in time for the garage framing changes that were required to support the newly-added roof.

Greywater practicalities: Receiving

To finish up our introduction to greywater, we’ll cover the receiving system. This is my favorite part of the system. We get to think about gardens and trees!

Greywater should not be used to water above the surface (leaves, grass, etc.) nor should it be used to water food. Greywater should be used to apply below-surface watering to non-food plants. Food producing trees are an exception to the “don’t water food rule” as long as the water is applied only to the roots.

Non-pressurized distribution systems are generally well suited for sending a fairly large amount of water to a fairly small number of end points. This makes trees great candidates for greywater receivers. Trees need large amounts of water, and they can handle getting significant doses at one time.

To be most effective, trees receiving greywater should be planted in mulch basins (actually, mulch basins are generally a good idea for trees). Mulch basins allow water to be purified much more effectively than a tree just planted in the ground. A mulch basin starts with a basin with an island in the middle. The tree is planted on the island so that it does not sit in the water. The basin is filled with mulch which both prevents the greywater from being exposed to the surface and slows the flow of water, allowing better infiltration into the soil.

When greywater transitions from the distribution system to the receiving site, it should either flow into an underground chamber or directly into a mulch basin which can quickly prevent it from being above ground. This part of the system must be designed to avoid clogs, both from the greywater itself and from the material that the water is being let into (or slugs, as apparently they sometimes like to crawl up pipes).

I hope that you enjoyed this introduction to greywater. Greywater systems are not for everyone, but I hope that in the future, new homes will default to having separate collection plumbing so that more people can at least have the option of saving water.

In this post and throughout the rest of this series, I use Art Ludwig’s The New Create an Oasis with Greywater as my primary source; it’s considered one of the best resources on residential greywater for the lay reader. Other bits and pieces are mostly pulled from my memory of other books and websites I’ve read. Any mistakes are, of course, my own.

Greywater practicalities: Distribution

Once greywater is collected, it needs to be moved into the landscape. At its simplest, the distribution system could be a bucket that you manually lug to the relevant part of the landscape. However, such a distribution system is hard to use and has health concerns.

Given concerns about ease of use, ease of maintenance, health, and efficiency, the distribution system is probably the most technically challenging aspect of a greywater design system. As such, I'll just cover the bare bone basics.

Most greywater distribution systems involve a series of pipes. The simplest systems take advantage of gravity to help water flow from the collection point to the receivers. These systems require the pipes to slope. The exact configuration can be finicky. If the slope is too shallow, the water will not flow. If it is too steep, the water will run ahead of the solids (lint, hair, food particles) leading to an eventual clog.

More complicated systems can be pressurized, although some pressurized systems require filtering to get rid of any solids in the greywater. Pressurized systems can move water uphill or along areas with too shallow a slope at the cost of energy and complexity. Some pressurized systems can safely water lawns by providing water underground. However, pressurized systems tend to break more easily and are significantly more expensive.

Whether pressurized or gravity driven, the distribution system should be designed with maintenance in mind. There are lots of good tips for maintainable distribution, but there are a couple key points. First, make sure you know where your pipes are (they’ll be hard to find after they’re buried). Second, make sure that you have access points for inspections, clog removal, and other maintenance tasks. Depending on how you’re using the greywater, it may also be worth designing the system to be reconfigurable in full or in part.

In this post and throughout the rest of this series, I use Art Ludwig’s The New Create an Oasis with Greywater as my primary source; it’s considered one of the best resources on residential greywater for the lay reader. Other bits and pieces are mostly pulled from my memory of other books and websites I’ve read. Any mistakes are, of course, my own.

Greywater practicalities: Collection

The last three posts in this series are going to get a little technical (but still not very). If you only care to know the general gist of greywater, you can stop here. If you want to know a bit more about how a greywater distribution system works, read on!

A greywater system has three subsystems: collection, distribution, and receiving. Each subsystem impacts the others, but for the sake of simplicity, I'll consider each separately.

Collection is the process of gathering the greywater. Greywater plumbing should follow all of the relevant plumbing codes, but instead of mixing greywater and blackwater shortly after they are produced, a greywater collection system keeps the two separate. Like any major plumbing change, collection plumbing is easier to add at construction time or when you already have the walls open to modify plumbing. As such, it's worth doing during construction even if the water initially is all sent to the sewer.

The most important factor to consider for collection plumbing is conserving fall. Fall is the vertical distance your pipe travels. Since greywater systems generally rely on gravity to move water, you want the points where your collection plumbing exits the house to be higher than for the sewer system (which generally exit under ground). Make sure your plumber conserves fall much more aggressively than they normally would.

Collection plumbing needs to have overflow into the sewer system. In addition to the overflow, it's generally a good idea to add a manual diverter near the point where the collection pipes exit the house. This allows all greywater to be sent to the sewer if needed (e.g., if you only need the greywater seasonally). If you are designing a system that will also handle dark grey water from the kitchen sink or a diaper-washing-clothes-washer you can add additional diverters to allow selective water diversion. All diverters should be easily accessible or they'll never be used.

In the simplest systems, water flows directly from the collection pipes to the distribution system. But not all distribution systems are equipped to handle a large surge of water (e.g., from draining a bathtub and clothes washer at the same time). A surge tank slows the rate at which water enters the distribution system.

The opposite problem can also occur: the amount of water at a particular time is not enough to effectively flow through the distribution system. In this case, a tank can collect water and then dose the distribution system with a single large flow when enough has built up. Both surge protection and dosing require care to ensure that the water does not sit too long — think a maximum of hours, not days.

Tomorrow we'll explore greywater distribution.

In this post and throughout the rest of this series, I use Art Ludwig’s The New Create an Oasis with Greywater as my primary source; it’s considered one of the best resources on residential greywater for the lay reader. Other bits and pieces are mostly pulled from my memory of other books and websites I’ve read. Any mistakes are, of course, my own.

Greywater goals

There are lots of reasons to use greywater^[1], and every greywater system will have a different combination of motivations, goals, and constraints. Greywater systems are not one-size-fits-all so it’s important to understand what you want before you choose a particular system.

Our primary goal is to reduce the amount of water we use in maintaining the fairly extensive gardens we hope to have. Our secondary goal is to reduce the amount of waste water we send to the sewers. Our primary motivation is practical — I hate wasting water that can be put to perfectly good use. Secondary motivations are environmental (reducing water use and sewage treatment volumes) and financial (saving on summer watering).

Because practicality is my primary motivation, we want a system that is fairly easy to maintain and fairly inexpensive to install and maintain. This means that we plan to limit myself to quantities and qualities of greywater that can effectively be processed by a garden. Since storage requires delicate and expensive filtration and purification systems, we’ll focus on a system that allows us to divert water directly to the garden when needed and to the sewer when it is not needed.

As we’ll see in the next post, these motivations, goals, and constraints make it a lot easier to decide what type of greywater system is right for us.

^[1]The legality of these uses varies by jurisdiction. In general, regions in the US that do have real water problems seem to have more flexible and realistic regulations than places that don’t. Be sure to check with local regulations before building a greywater system.

In this post and throughout the rest of this series, I use Art Ludwig’s The New Create an Oasis with Greywater as my primary source; it’s considered one of the best resources on residential greywater for the lay reader. Other bits and pieces are mostly pulled from my memory of other books and websites I’ve read. Any mistakes are, of course, my own.

Shades of grey: Greywater health and safety

Conversations about greywater often start with questions: Is it safe? What about disease? Greywater is safe, but we do need to take precautions.

First, let’s talk a bit more about greywater and blackwater:

• Greywater: Waste water with a low level of solids and a very low level of pathogens or toxic chemicals. Sources: washing machines, showers, tubs, bathroom sinks.
• Dark greywater: Water with a moderate level of solids or a low level of pathogens or toxic chemicals. Greywater turns into dark greywater if it sits for prolonged periods. Sources: Washing machine water used for diapers, kitchen sink water with small amounts of garbage disposal use, greywater stored too long in a tank.
• Blackwater: Water with a high level of solids, pathogens, or toxic chemicals. Sources: Toilet water or water from a sink that has cleaning chemicals poured into it.

Blackwater and dark greywater both can, under certain circumstances, be handled at home, but it requires lots of caution and more complex systems. I plan to ignore both for the rest of this series.

That leaves us with greywater. Greywater is not very contaminated. One statistic I saw claimed that residential greywater in the US has about the same level of pathogens as drinking water in some drought ravaged third world nations. That’s not a good thing — there are very good reasons that improving access to clean water is an important philanthropic goal — but it does illustrate that the contamination in greywater is something to be managed, not feared.

The low level of contamination in residential greywater in the US can be processed by the microorganisms in the soil, but every greywater system should follow basic guidelines to ensure healthy treatment. Ludwig’s book presents two fundamental guidelines for safety:

1. Greywater must pass slowly through healthy topsoil for natural purification to occur.
2. Design your greywater system so no greywater-to-human contact occurs before purification.

From these general principles, many specific principles can be derived: don’t add non-biodegradable chemicals to your greywater, get it quickly into the soil, don’t use it to water food plants, don’t spray it directly on plants such as grass, etc.

But the bigger point is that when it comes to greywater, both disregard for health concerns and excess obsession with health concerns should be considered errors. Education combined with careful design and management can produce a safe home greywater system.

In this post and throughout the rest of this series, I use Art Ludwig’s The New Create an Oasis with Greywater as my primary source; it’s considered one of the best resources on residential greywater for the lay reader. Other bits and pieces are mostly pulled from my memory of other books and websites I’ve read. Any mistakes are, of course, my own.