Freeland carport stairs

For Nick, the owner of this unique building in Freeland, Washington, I designed a carport/shop building, and drafted a semi-resolved set of schematic* drawings for permitting with the County. It was a 5 page set drawn in 1/8" and 1/4" scales, engineered and permitted for less than $2,500.

I'm a believer that schematic design not only makes a project more affordable, building something without having studied the implications and drawn a solution is an absolute waste of time and money. However, a full set of drawings would be far more expensive.

I'm also a firm believer in the design build process, that a designs' details can evolve with the project and by doing so saves money up front not having to spend endless hours resolving and drawing details that skilled craftspeople don't need and bad contractors can't read.

Sometimes in looking at design and budget, people loose sight of the fact that without an experienced builder, the schematic plan's intent can be compromised. My designs express a language of materiality, form, function and connectivity. It can be very suggestive but vague at the same time.

Nick and his Son who lives in Pt. Townsend spend a few hours cleaning up two faces on the 24' beams-left.

I, as a designer, would like to participate in construction management and detailing all through the project, but such is not always the case. Nevertheless, with a good road map and a clear set of ideas, many builders can interpolate, extrapolate and formulate a plan meeting 90% of the designer's original goals. 90% gets an 'A' in college!

A schematic design does not detail every connection nor draw every section or even deal with every issue. Throughout construction there are numerous issues to be dealt with on a day-to-day basis. (Note: This can be true of any design, large or small, new or remodel.) On this project, a problem with the stairs lacking enough head clearance was simple overlooked. In my mind, the stairs were to be simple attic stairs not to a 'habitable space' thus not needing to be code. As the design progressed and the upstairs became a room with future uses, stairs needed to be re-evaluated but there wasn't time given the budget.

Normally, I catch issues like this during construction or project/construction management. More and more I feel that though the schematic design is the most important first step, expertise on site during the entire process is equally important.

Joe checks his placement for the 6x6 post brackets we were using for the stair footing detail.

As a result of the mishap, some steel brackets had to be cut off and re-welded and the design of the stairs had to change (always an opportunity to improve). I'm thrilled that Nick brought me in to resolve the problem which was tricky and didn't want to resolve with out mess and clutter. The completed stairs do not look like an afterthought. Not only do they appear as though there was never a problem, they're better than those I'd originally anticipated.

Quickly on construction, the stairs should be good for 50 years. The treads are pressure treated 3x12, also called dock wood. Not organic, safe to say even toxic, but the treated wood was required to deal with their exposure to the weather and their longevity reduces waste in the long run.

The pitch of the stairs is very close to that of the roof, a 6 / 12. The beams were treated prior to assembly with a Daly's product. Even though they're under the 48" overhand, they will still see a fair amount of weather.

At the top the stairs are bolted and so cannot slide or shift. This means at the base, a simple load bearing detail was sufficient (no lateral load). Instead of doing a landing or concrete pad, I chose to float the stair bases on little 6x6 post brackets and let the existing walk/drain gravel do what it would.

*schematic means a design that is symbolic or simplified.

The Grass is always greener...

The grass is greener over there. I believe this same phenomena accounts for why a sandwich with the exact same ingredients tastes better when someone else makes it.

Green grass is the American dream. Except for here where we wanted weed free planting beds. In the top soil we got from a local supplier there were grass seeds. Now that we've used 20 yards to mulch areas of the front yard, we're going to have to cover with cardboard and mulch again. Alternatively, since the grass is tiny with small roots, it can be disturbed with a rake or hoe so it doesn't get a foot hold.

For Lois, the dead grass across the street looks better than the live grass in her newly mulched yard, showing that even when the grass here is greener, it's still not as green as over there!

Storing Heat-PCM

The idea of a heat sink isn't new. What really spurred my interests was the amount of surplus heat generated during summer production of an over-sized system. To heat when it is cold and the available solar insolation is low, requires more collectors at different angles than those capturing hot water for a free summer shower. This extra heat is typically written off and shunted to greenhouses or swimming pools.

In designing a solar system to meet heating requirements for spring and fall equinox, the amount of summer surplus was greater than the heat I needed all winter long. I wanted to capture this heat. So began the quest of an economical way to store low grade energy for months on end!

Specific heat is a material's ability to hold energy. By definition, the specific heat of water is 1, meaning it takes 1 BTU to heat one pound of water one degree F. If you have a 5 gallon bucket of water and you raised the temperature 50 degrees F, you'd have added about 2000 BTU's.

Sand, tightly packed with all different sizes of material (fine/coarse/platelet/round) will have a specific heat of about .22. Water holds 5 times that of sand by weight. Clearly water is a better storage medium. It also has the advantage that it's easy to move that heat/energy. However water does have the disadvantage of being a liquid. It wants to leak, run, create pressure and evaporate or freeze. As a result, storage will run you about $1-$1.50/gallon minimum.

Steel has a high specific heat because of it's density, but also has much higher conductivity. This means that heat within the steel mass will be evenly distributed not allowing a core to maintain more heat but transferring this heat to the outer edges for more rapid loss. The other problem I found is that people who deal in old cars and scrap really don't take well to questions. I suspect there are some serious EPA logistics to be considered prior to the use of metal. Really, there is so much embodied energy in steel it doesn't make sense to bury.

I've heard talk of using PCM (Phase Change Materials),a substance with a high heat of fusion that attempts to change phases storing massive amounts of heat in the process. Wikipedia suggests 5-14 times the storage of other medium like water and sand. Salts are the inorganic version to nature's organic fatty acids, also a PCM. Transferring heat, controlling crystallization and getting a permit to pour a slab on top of 3' of a material not currently stocked by Home Depot are the problems here.

Considering the relation between salts and fatty acids, perhaps

is the most efficient means of storing heat is in grain. With livestock living a happily confined life in a crawl-space, humans would have only to dump grain into the pit and receive heat and fuel in exchange. No need for a beef freezer either.

Additional options here would be to install an Anaerobic Digester to convert the manure to

Natural Gas which could then be used for cooking or generating electricity. Finally, the high grade manure could then be used to fertilize plants for food production .

Perhaps the future of public housing could be doubled up with dairy's and beef yards where the people live over the animals, just like civilization pre-industrial revolution!

While these solutions are all worth further exploration, the best way to create power for the future is to not use so much now. Conservation is the easiest and most satisfying step towards reducing our consumption, so turn the lights off.

All images compliments of Googles Image Search, one of the best tools on the web for graphic conceptualization.

Data Collection

When I first decided collecting data would help defend against scrutiny, I had no idea it would be so complicated.

The idea of what I now call thermal ballast isn't new but like so many good ideas, without science it's guess work. Common Americans are hesitant to spend money on guesses. I believe in sustainable and the need to revise our collective way of thinking/living, so bring in the science!

Brad Hankins aka dbBrad and Ben lay 3 more sensors in the top layer of sand. Two sets directly under these and one more set above in the slab. 12 total here in the heat sink.

I'd had enough of an electrical background to have an idea what a thermocouple was. So brilliant and simple, anyone could use it. Just get the right two materials, the right kind of wire, eliminate interference, static, signal drop and deterioration, do not have any solders in line and keep all your runs the same length was just some of the advice I found. Not so easy really.


Design Build means when you can't do it, you find someone who can. On a blind call from the phone book I was pleased to find Don Colvin of Mukilteo. He found some off the shelf sensors with stainless steel casings and was able to re-solder them maintaining direct burial specifications to better, tougher CAT V line, test and record an offset (a primitive accuracy improvement based on a constant temperature oil bath). This would have been a good time to calibrate the sensors too, but with a full crew and a big tractor on site, the sensors needed to go into the ground.

Interested in the notion of an Annualized solar storage system, Don Colvin even delivered the sensors.

The sensors have been buried for a while now and all that is left is to automate the process of collecting data and interpreting it. I'm surprised at how complicated it is everytime I go through the logistics. It seems overwhelming and when I put it down for a while, it seems so simple again.

As a result, to date, data has only been collected manually, a tedious process of hooking up a gizmo with a 10 microfarad resistor, a nine volt battery, 4 terminals and an ohm meter. Resistance may be futile (Borg) but its also equates to temperatures.

The trick is to automate the system to collect data on a specified frequency. Besides being more accurate (no human error) it also gives us the chance to take extra readings, throw away anomalies and average other readings and store this information. The computing power is minimal so I intend to use an old machine (windows NT). My energy conservation side doesn't want it to run all the time either.

Lab jacks are a component recommended by Don that will manage 8 senors each. More sensors means more lab jacks. We went with 24 sensors and will need three labJacs. We'll also use LabView to manage the labJacs.

Problem include: the old computer only has two usb ports, I'd like the machine to turn on and off but this requires another piece of software and a system more prone to failure, The new versions of LabView may not work with Windows NT, and we can take readings as often as we like. But as an example, 24 sensors, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year over say a reasonable 10 year study is 2,102,400 numbers to look at and cross reference.

At this point there is far more data than sense. We need a data/sense converter in the form of an algorithm, a way to process the data and hopefully represent it in a graphical manner relative to the sensors, insulation, weather, heated space, etc, to try and understand where the heat is moving and how much heat is making it into the dwelling during the heating season.

I suspect I may be looking at stacks of printouts looking for highs, lows and numbers that don't make sense. Maybe the great idea and data will spark interest from a clever graduate student with access to a big computer!

Photo compliments of Google Image Search

In the mean time, I can measure probes of curiosity when I want to with the gizmo. One thing this has let me see is that the sandy soil here changes temperature quickly, responding to the temperature of the sky and the rain that falls out of it. Cold rains can cool the soil instantly several feet down. It's not uncommon for a 44 degree F. value to be 5' underground. This summer, sand 4' down was at 65 degree's F.

Design Build Brad

Brad's new dbbrad promotion signs are up on the Lois Remodel project.

Finishing the Floors on Bellingham Home

Kitchen, hallway, bath and living room floors after sanding, with all the photos showing the new stain except for the hallway.

Fixing up Bellingham House

Brad and crew were in Bellingham this past week making and putting up trim; sanding and finishing the floor; and moving things around in an organizational frenzy. The house will be ready, after all these months, to put on the market in January.