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!

Review of Q1 2012

The first quarter of 2012 is over, and it was a quarter of great progress. It was the quarter of rough-in work.

Framing was completed:


Plumbing was added:


Then HVAC:


Fireplace:


And electrical:


Windows were installed:


And then siding:


The timelapse for the quarter shows all the exterior pieces coming together.


We spent a lot of time on design this quarter. Some of it was just-in-time design, such as the electrical and lighting. Framing changes were made based on 3D models of the interior. The master bath won't be installed for awhile, but the tiles need to be ordered now. There was a steady stream of small decisions, such as the fascia color for the roof trim. Many design discussions are ongoing as we take our high level design ideas and then refine the details as we gather samples, compare colors, and work through every individual piece.

The rough-in work is nearly done, and we are anxiously awaiting insulation and drywall. These will mark the beginning of the finish phase of the project. Each successive stage will appear to move at a slower pace, as more care is taken to perfect the details. Several areas may be in-progress at the same time, though. To accommodate this change, we will replace our weekly summaries with weekly overviews focusing on a single area. We'll go into details on individual elements, providing more background and design information, plus in-progress and final pictures of the installation. Our photo gallery and timelapse gallery will still be updated regularly with each weeks' progress.

Dirt-moving and Inspections

Not a lot of interior work was done last week. Rough-in is nearly finished, so time on site was filled by inspections and corrections. Outside, more siding was added, the decks are closer to being finished, and dirt moving for landscaping was started.

More electrical work was done — in theory, but not in practice, the last of it. The electrical panel was labeled, and the connection to the main service is nearly ready to go. We asked for a small correction in the media room, and a larger circuit put in for the kitchen for an electric-powered stove. Temporary circuits need to be added for space heaters to dry out the interior before drywall. This will all happen this week. However, the electrical inspection was approved, along with most other rough-in inspections. Mechanical required a small correction around the fireplace, but everything else that was ready has been approved. The only remaining inspection is for framing, which requires some work from the insulation installer this week.



More siding was installed on last week, including the lower south side, the north side of the garage, paneling around the stair tower door, and some paneling around the living room windows.



Nicer weather provided an opportunity for more progress on the deck. The living room deck was evened out, sanded, and is now ready for the finishing stain. The upper deck was completely finished, including staining. The wood has darkened and is a richer color now. The finish looks uneven in the picture because it was still drying.



The most important work last week was dirt-moving. The entry-way was filled in with dirt and can now serve it's stated purpose of letting people enter. The driveway was smoothed out, so it can now support a concrete truck pouring the slab for the garage floor. The front yard in general has been leveled, and prepped for hardscape and landscape. The area between our house and the neighbor's is being prepped for landscaping (which has been designed). Finally, our backyard has been smoothed.



The camera wasn't pointed quite low enough to capture the dirt being moved, but you can see the movement of the excavator. The end of the week shows the finishing work being done on the rooftop deck.



Poplar has been delivered for the windowsills, which will go in soon (before the drywall). Fire breaks (to keep fire from spreading in the walls) need to be put in this week, then the framing inspection can happen. Now that the entry has been filled in with dirt, the entrance through the garage can be sealed up, and a blower can be put on the front door to find and seal any leaks in the envelope of the house.

Siding and Wiring Conduits

Last week mostly saw work on the exterior siding for the house. The electrician came by for just a bit to work on some of the last details. However, a few more questions came up, so the electrical work wasn't quite finished last week.

Quite a bit of the lap siding was installed, including the north side, upper level on the east side, the north-west side, the upper south-west side, and the upper south side.



We acquired the exterior wall washer light we're going to use on the west side of the house at night. We tested it out one evening after dark, and it should do a good job highlighting our house.



The last major piece of wiring (I believe) was getting conduit for future cabling run. The endpoints are in the living room, kitchen, office, master dressing, and second bedrooms. These run down into the crawlspace, except for the office, which runs directly into the server closet. The server closet then has a single conduit that runs into the crawlspace. The media room has a conduit that runs from the closet up to the projector mount to send video up there.



I spent some time exploring the crawlspaces under our house. The crawlspace is quite generous, and there are plenty of pipes, ducts, and wires running under there. The space is large enough that we added some stub points for lights. Under the garage you can follow the electrical wiring back to the central electrical panel.



The timelapse shows the siding installation (the work later in the week was covered by a blue tarp to protect from the rain). You can catch a brief glimpse of snow falling Tuesday morning.



Next should see more work on the siding. We are hoping to have the inspections finished up soon; maybe this week if we are lucky.

Electrical Wiring, Exterior Finishing

This week saw more good progress on both the interior and exterior. The electrical wiring is nearly complete. Some exterior finishes, including siding, exterior soffits, and the rear deck all saw work done on them.

For electrical wiring, the interior line voltage work (lights, switches, electrical outlets, and a big, beefy cable for an electric car charger in the garage) is nearly completed. There might still be a few details left, but not much at all. The majority of the data wiring was completed, with Ethernet, cable, phone, and low-voltage for security or home automation run throughout the house, and speaker wire plus a bit of subwoofer coax cable run in the media room. There is still some wire that needs to be run for exterior lighting and electrical outlets, and then a few conduits for future data wiring and media room wiring need to be run. Those should be complete within a few days, and then the electrical inspection can be done.



The fireplace and gas connection on the back deck were installed this last week. The fireplace has been mostly covered up to protect it, but since part of the cardboard was detached, we took the opportunity to get a picture of it.



Some ductwork for the HRV unit was added.

Some of the exterior finish work was started last week, too. The HardiePlank and HardiePanel siding was delivered Monday morning. The panels were put up on the stair tower during the week.



It is not painted, and there may be some other details in the channels between the boards to do, but it is starting to give a feel for what the finished house will look like. The HardiePanel is being used for the lower exterior soffit, and the bit of that was installed. The upper exterior soffit was installed using a knotty cedar.



The flooring of the back deck was laid down on Friday. It isn't fully finished, but looks quite nice already, especially when it gets wet.



We finally moved the camera to a position right in front of the house. It should be able to capture all the upcoming work on the entryway, siding installation, along with all the general activity of people moving around during the day.



Next week should see electrical finished, and some inspections done. Once all the rough-in inspections are done, insulation can go in; but we don't expect that to happen this coming week. Siding and/or deck work will probably continue on the exterior. The next big piece outside will be getting the entry foundation backfilled and the driveway filled in for better support. Once you can actually walk in through the front door, the missing panel in the garage will be filled in, and the house can be sealed up and tested for leaks. Then the garage can be cleared out, and the cement slab poured in there, which will allow installation of the hot water heater. We're not quite sure on the timing of all that, though, because a bit of landscape design needs to be done on the north side of our house (south side of the neighbor's), so that all the dirt-moving can be done at once.

Lights and a Deck

This was another exciting week of work on the house. Electrical was started, including a lot of the lighting layout; and the rooftop deck was framed and finished.

Electrical wiring was started on Monday, and a lot of progress was made. One of the first steps was placing all the can lights so we could approve the positions before they were wired. We're using 6" cans in most of the house, and 4" cans upstairs (they have better sealing than the larger ones, so they won't lose as much heat through the roof) and in a few places downstairs that we want to highlight. The electrician started placing mount points for lights such as pendants and sconces, electrical outlet boxes, light switch boxes, and tying it all to the central electrical panel.



On the exterior, the deck part of our rooftop deck was built this week. The frame for the bench and under-floor was put together earlier in the week, and then the batu planks were put in place at the end of the week. There's probably still some finishing (sanding, weatherproofing/oil/sealant of some manner), but it already looks really good!



The timelapse video has a few interesting points: first the bench frame above the garage goes up, then the garage window followed by the master dressing windows are installed (the final windows in the house), and then the batu planks on the deck wrap around the bench.



The monthly summary shows the vapor shield and foam being installed, along with the windows and upstairs doors.



More wiring will be happening next week, maybe including data wiring. The fireplace was delivered, and the space has been prepped for it, so that install should happen soon (it has to be installed before the gas inspection can happen). The knotty cedar for the exterior roof soffit was delivered. The rest of the siding should be delivered soon.

Windows and HVAC

Lots of work on the windows and HVAC system this week. The windows are almost fully installed, as was a majority of the HVAC system.

The windows were only delivered at the end of last week, but by this weekend, they were nearly all installed. The two windows in the dressing room were left out, but that seemed to be because they are using the openings to deliver decking lumber upstairs. The rest of the windows were installed, including the skylight over the stairs and the various glass doors. Along with the windows, the rest of the house was wrapped in foam.



A lot of work was done on the HVAC system, and the mini-split system looks close to done. All the interior head units were mounted to the wall and hooked up to refrigerant lines, electrical, and some kind of piping (maybe to handle condensation?). The exterior units are not installed yet, but some kind of testing of the system seems to be in-progress. They are installing other ducting, such as the fan connections to the HRV system and the exhaust for the kitchen vent hood.



The timelapse is not terribly enlightening; you can see the powder room window going in, and later the master bath door.



Next week should see the start of the electrical wiring.

Mechanical and Windows

This was an exciting week for work on the house, and a couple new stages are starting.

Plumbing wrapped up this week, but the inspection was delayed due to scheduling and payment issues. There's plenty of time, though, so a delay on that is not a big deal. The natural gas pipe in the kitchen was installed. The upstairs bathtub was filled with water to test for any leaks.

Various framing modifications were done this week: the fireplace was lowered to bench height, framing for a soffit was put in over the kitchen (this ended up being just for aesthetics; there is no functional need for it), the door to the dressing room was moved, the closets in the second bedrooms were shortened to provide desk nooks, the entry closet was taken out to prepare for built-ins, and interior framing against the foundation in the lower part of the house was done. Here's the interior of the dressing room, showing the corner we have for closet space now:



The exciting rough-in work this week was the mechanical system. We're getting a mini-split system, a.k.a. a heat pump, a.k.a. a ductless system, which, as one of the names describes, does not use ducts for pushing heated or cooled air around. Instead, it uses a series of tubes. We want to explain this system in detail sometime soon, but the short version is that these tubes carry heat via refrigerant and move it between the interior and exterior of the house — one direction gives you heating inside, the opposite direction gives you cooling. On the inside, we'll have units in the living room, the office, the media room, the master dressing room, and each of the second bedrooms. These all aggregate to two units outside the house:



On Friday morning, our windows were delivered! A few have already been installed, and the rest should go in fairly quickly. We can finally see what the exterior charcoal frame looks like at full scale. We were surprised at how large the windows are. The framed glass panels certainly provide a sense of scale that the rough openings don't. Also, we have a lot of windows in the living room:



The timelapse is fairly boring this week; the end shows a couple of the master bath windows popping into place.



Most or all of the windows should be installed next week, and the mechanical rough-in should continue. It looks like the next step is to wrap all the tubes with insulation.

Foam and Hose Bibs

This last week saw more progress on the exterior, and a bit of smaller progress inside.

The vapor shield wrapping was finished this week. Since we decided orange wasn't the color we preferred, they started adding foam panels over the top, giving it a more Mondrian look.



Inside, blocking was added and some framing changes made. This picture shows the blocking in the entry for the bench that will go in.



A bit more work was done on plumbing to bring it near completion. Hose bibs were added around the exterior:



and the Power-Pipe was installed:



This drains the hot water from the shower, and pushes the cold water up the copper spiral to absorb the heat from the waste water, giving you much more hot water for showers.

The timelapse shows the foam panels going up on the exterior.



The plumbing inspection is scheduled for early this coming week, so that portion should be wrapped up soon. The windows have been shipped, and should be delivered sometime this week. We finalized our HVAC choice, so work on that should start this week, too.

Rough-In and Exterior

It's been a hectic several weeks for us, and we've fallen behind here. But construction has still been (mostly) happening.

The week after our last post, the Seattle area had one of the largest snowstorms in a few years. We were stuck at home most of the week, and not a lot was accomplished on the house, either.

Since then, things have been progressing nicely. Plumbing rough-in is finished, besides any later fix-ups or changes we or the inspectors need. This picture shows the laundry room: copper pipes for water in, washer/dryer on left and sink on the right, and the black pipes for waste water. Right behind it, you can see a bit of the master shower; and the back wall will support the master sinks.



Outside, the roofing was installed as soon as the snow cleared. It is a gray membrane called VersiWeld TPO, and covers the main roof, the mid-level eyebrow, and the rooftop deck. On the deck, it will be later covered by decking and the green roofing modules.



After that, work on the rest of the exterior house started. The first step was to wrap it in a vapor shield to protect the interior from moisture. You can see the white wood around the windows on top of the shield. This allows the windows to be securely mounted — they can't be mounted on the foam that will come next.



More concrete was added. The slab at the very bottom of our stairs was poured, along with a short retaining wall extending from the north-east corner of the garage, and the foundation for our entry stairs. The wall on the left of the picture is level because it will support the flat landing from the garage, while the main stairs step down to the entry.



Changes captured by the camera slowed down in the middle of January, but you can see a nice bit of framing going up at the beginning of the month, and the orange vapor shield going on at the end.



We've been working on a lot of design stuff that we should discuss. The big things are electrical/lighting/data plans, and mechanical (HVAC) systems, both of which are up next for rough-in work. The exterior will continue to progress, with the windows on schedule to be delivered next week!