Central heating: overview and numbers

Here's the last of the central heating info - we haven't had a power bill yet so will update with approximate running costs when we get that, but for now I thought I'd summarise what we think and how much it cost.

The highly attractive heating unit, just after we started the ducting

The system we chose is the Rinnai iHeat. It's a ducted system, so blows warm air into the rooms. The air is warmed by water from the Infinity water heater we installed (which will also eventually serve both bathrooms and the kitchen).

Pros:

• Keeps the whole house warm when we have the system turned on
• Warms the house up pretty quickly (much quicker than a heat pump or fire)
• Cheapest option for whole-house heating
• Ceiling vents are unobtrusive
• Very quiet
• Efficient (and hopefully cheap to run!)

Cons: 

• Blown air is not quite as nice as radiant heat
• Can't control zones separately - one thermostat for the whole house

We have made a few tweaks to improve performance, and have a couple of other things we're planning to do in the longer term as well. 

Behold the button-thing, by which the vents may be adjusted

Firstly, balancing is part of the set up, but basically just means varying how open the vents are. Each vent has a button-thing (technical term) in the middle which allows you to adjust flaps inside the grill. The flaps can be mostly closed (so almost no air flows through) or fully opened (so as much as possible comes in). To balance the system, i.e. try to get all the rooms evenly heated, you start with the rooms furthest away from the heating unit, fully opening their vents, and then work back towards the centre of the house, with the more central vents being progressively more closed. 

Despite balancing, the airflow downstairs isn't as good. There are three ducts for downstairs; one in our son's room; one in our room; and one in the future bathroom. The one in our son's room works pretty well, but is poorly located above the door. Since his door gets closed when he's napping, which is when it most needs to be warm, it works okay, but we'll monitor that for a while and may eventually move the vent. 

Our bedroom is served by a poorly installed piece of flexible ducting, adopted from the HRV. Our room is the least accessible, ducting-wise, so we plan to eventually (before next winter!) get a length of rectangular plastic ducting to replace the dodgy old stuff. Because it's a straight run but we don't have good access between the rafters to smooth out the flexible ducting we think this will make a big difference. 

The bathroom vent is currently capped, because the bathroom doesn't even have walls and we're not really interested in paying to heat the dirt under our house. Once the bathroom has been built and that vent is in action we imagine the downstairs will become a bit more temperate, but in the meantime we've still got a heat pump down there for colder days (it's probably been turned on - briefly - three times in the past two weeks). 

We noticed immediately after it was turned on that the roofspace was very hot when the system was running, and realised that some gaps in the metalwork of the heating unit meant heat was escaping unnecessarily. I rang Rinnai to check if we could stop up these gaps, and they said that was no problem, so long as we used an appropriately heat-rated silicon sealant - so out came the caulk gun and now hopefully we're not leaking money into the attic. ;-) 

Another possible future tweak is the addition of a damper so we could turn off rooms not in use. These can be operated by a wall switch and can close off a branch of the system. The advice on this is a bit conflicting - our gasfitter said the iHeat's computer would shut down if we used one, as it would detect the damper as a blockage in the system, but Rinnai's info says they can be used. We'll see how the running costs look and then potentially do more research on that one.

The position of the thermostat is the subject of some discussion - it's in the warmest area of the house, which is not ideal, but it is conveniently located... So again we're going to wait and see. Installation consisted of poking a bit of cable down the wall and plugging the wall unit into it, so if we decide it would be better somewhere else we just need to fish the cable out and dangle it down a different wall. 

Overall we're very happy - the thermostat is quite programmable, so it turns on before we get up in the morning and turns itself off at bedtime, and we are magically kept warm without even thinking about it. You can easily turn it off if you're leaving when it's programmed to be on, and you can increase the temperature and/or fans temporarily if you're feeling particularly cold. 

And the cost - well, it's a big outlay, yes, but overall not too bad considering the outcome. For us, well worth it. If you're looking for something similar but don't have reticulated gas available in your area I'd encourage you to look into heat pump central heating - slightly more expensive but still a lot more reasonable than a furnace system! 

Costs:

System install (Infinity water heater and iHeat system, including commissioning) - $10,547.88

Extra vents - $184.71

Electrical work - power to the Infinity and iHeat units, decommissioning heat pump - $500 (approx)

RJ45 cable and connector for thermostat - $16.80

Cable ties - $92

Recovered $$$ from sale of both HRVs and one heat pump (less Trademe fees) -  -$1748.27

Central heating installation

Budget: $10,000

Timeframe: 6 weeks (mostly waiting for gas to be hooked up)

Who did the work: Us (4 days), gasfitters (1.5 days), sparkies (half a day)

Actual cost: $9,593.12

Learnings: Installing ducting isn't very hard, though it is a bit unpleasant spending a lot of time crawling around in attics. Pay attention to how things are working after installation as small tweaks can make big improvements in performance and efficiency. 

Central heating - running the ductwork

Our gas got hooked up a week ago, which means we've had seven blissful days of a temperate, evenly heated house. 

Before that could happen we had to run the ducting, as part of the deal we struck with the gasfitter. This took us a few days - partly because our work is often interrupted by a small person, and partly because we hadn't done it before so were working things out as we went. 

The first, doubtful join

The first snafu was on the very first join. We put the small one down for a nap, climbed into the roofspace, got the duct tape out... And second-guessed ourselves. The gasfitter had given us a quick lesson on how to tape the ducts up when he brought the kit around, but we wanted to refresh ourselves. So we googled. And (possibly for the first time ever), it wasn't helpful. 

Ducted central heating is most common in the United States - but all the US videos we found recommended against using duct tape, instead suggesting mastic glue and cable ties (the adhesive on the tape softens when exposed to heat, meaning the tape can let go when the system is in use). However, the videos all used metal junctions (ours are plastic) so we weren't sure if the advice translated to us. 

After a bit of (read: extensive) discussion and a chat to the gasfitter (who stood by the use of tape only) we decided we would get some cable ties, and use them with the tape for good measure. 

(aside: it seems ridiculous calling them "cable ties" when they are wrapped around a 350mm diameter duct, but - correct me if you know otherwise - that seems to be the term used here. I guess sometimes bunches of cables might get that large?)

Once we got into it, running the ducting was pretty simple: the objective is to keep the runs as straight and smooth as possible, so a little bit of thinking ahead is advisable. Though not what we did, with the benefit of hindsight I'd recommend laying out as many ducts as you can to see where they sit before connecting any. As well as trimming the ducting to length, hanging bendy bits (e.g. where it joins the ceiling vents) to ease the angle of the bend is recommended. 

This is a mostly-done shot - we hadn't finished hanging the ducts yet.
It's very hard to get good shots of how they run because everything's a bit crowded up there.

We were hoping we might be able to reuse some of the ceiling vents from the HRV, but these weren't ideally placed; most of them were close to doorways, and the heating vents are supposed to be as close to the outside of the room as possible. We have reused one upstairs, in the dining room / kitchen, which has three vents in total so one in the middle made sense, and currently both downstairs bedrooms are using the HRV holes, because we were loath to cut new holes in the recently painted, good condition gib... But we'll see how performance goes and move them if we need to. 

The trickiest part of vent placement is working out where they can sit - that job really needs two people, so one person can check out location in the room and the other can check for joists etc in the roofspace above. We did a bit of knocking and talking to try to roughly work out where we were, and then I would drill a hole from below in the centre of the proposed vent hole. My husband would then check from his side that the hole wouldn't hit anything and if it was good I'd draw a circle (the vents came in boxes which included a template, very helpful, though we could have made our own). 

Once the hole is there you poke the duct down through it, tape/cable tie on the vent, and push it into the hole. We also had to do a bit of jiggery-pokery (technical term) on a few of the holes, as our old house has several double ceilings so the clips on the vent didn't always work as perfectly as they ought. 

We also had to construct a return air duct - basically a chimney which takes the cooler air back up to be heated again. This has to be central (and is a large part of why the outlets need to be on the outside) so has consumed a large part of our hall cupboard. Our box is built out of MDF and chipboard; MDF on the visible side, for a good paint finish, and chipboard because we had a lot of it going to waste and it will do just as good a job. The most important functional outcome was for the box to be airtight, so plenty of sealant has been applied to all the joins. 

Because we would have boxed it in anyway we chose to build the box to the top of the cupboard and attach the duct at ceiling level, rather than ducting from lower down.

The inlet vent, which is mounted on the size, sits in a nice, snug hole - it has to be removable so the filter can be cleaned, so the lesson here is measure twice, cut once! Once the wall had a hole in it we cut pieces of MDF to line the cavity so the air goes into the box rather than up the wall. 

This is the least pretty part - the big return air vent - but it's no worse than a heat pump... I guess most heating systems have ugly bits.

We're pretty happy with how it runs - we're still fine-tuning a little but it's glorious to get up to a warm house... We are keen to see our first gas bill though!

I'll share a bit more about the pros and cons, the fine-tuning process and costs next week... Stay tuned!

Streamlined kitchens

We're pretty fond of a fairly minimalist, modern, and streamlined look, especially for kitchens. This week's job has been building our kitset cabinets into the surrounding walls to hopefully achieve something close to that.

This is both an aesthetic preference and a practical one; two metre high cabinets in a 2.7m high room leave a nasty dust-and-grease gathering gap that I am not at all a fan of. One way to solve this problem (at great expense) is to get custom made cabinetry built in for you by a carpenter. That's expensive.

Another way is to buy kitset kitchen cabinets and build them in yourself!

This does take a bit of skill, which we're still gaining but luckily we had my dad here helping (read: taking charge) this week.

It's also time-consuming; it took Dad and I three days, though we did also get a couple of other small things done in that time. I won't pretend to be the world's best apprentice, but hopefully I still sped things up!

My first accomplishment of the week was breaking one of our windows... Well, really it broke itself, the frame split and came clean off its hinges when I opened it. But it still slowed us down a bit... It's not really warm enough at the moment to leave a giant hole in the wall overnight.

Gorilla glue and duct tape got us there in the end... Super pro solution but it worked! 

Anyway, our cabinet fancifying technique (which we've now applied to two kitchens) is basically to build little walls around the top of each tall bank of cabinets, and then gib them in.

It can be pretty fiddly, especially in an old house where nothing is square, but (to me) the end result is well worth it, and takes the bog-standard cabinetry up a few pegs, as well as eliminating a few surfaces off the cleaning schedule, which is always welcome around here!

(side note: I love the look of open kitchen shelves, which are pretty popular at the moment, but just can't come to grips with all the dusting)

The first step was to slightly move the pantry. Because (naturally) I had changed my mind. I had originally thought I wanted the gib flush with the cabinet carcass and the doors sitting forward... And then decided that for the pantry and oven that the gib should be flush with the doors. So all the screws came out of the pantry, and some of the food I'd enthusiastically packed into it had to come out so we could scoot it back 10mm to permit everything to line up. On the bright side, I do think it looks good, and we gained 10mm of extra floor space in our kitchen. Woop woop! 10mm!

Step two was attaching the over fridge cupboard to the pantry, and then we did the timber framing up top. This follows standard wall construction methods, with a bottom plate (on the cabinet), top plate and studs. Remember to leave a 10mm allowance for the gib if you're picky about where it sits... I am. ;-)

Then we had to patch the messy bit of ceiling above the pantry where we'd changed the ducting. Although this is completely closed in from the kitchen I'd rather not have any risk of roof-dwelling creatures invading the space behind the pantry. So our brand new jigsaw (because what would a week of DIY be without a new power tool?) got its first workout and the ducting is nice and snug now.

We also made a side panel to box the ducting in behind the pantry, and a sort of lid that sits above the fridge, because it's a bit more complete that way and it'll help us keep all our precious heat in the bits of the room we're using.

Because we didn't want to lose any more room than we had to to wall framing, and the fridge cabinet was firmly secured from above, we chose to make the wing wall out of MDF. The framing at the top is the same as for the other cabinets, and at the bottom it's secured with little brackets screwed into the floor. These will be hidden by the fridge (and are the same as are used with standard melamine kitchen panels - which wouldn't have been tall enough and wouldn't be paintable so got vetoed).

Please don't rob us - we don't really have any valuables, the safe is for chocolate and (sadly) is empty anyway... 

Then the gib went on - another fiddly job. To keep the edges neat we used metal external corners and capping so that we can neatly stop and paint up to the cabinet (masking tape will be involved in that job, methinks!).

I guess maybe you want to see some photos? I forgot to tuck our super flash duct tape drawer handles away for these ones so apologies... Real handles coming soon!

And so the next job for the kitchen is some plastering and more painting. But first we need to finish the ducting for our gas central heating before the gas gets hooked up on Thursday (oh how glorious it will be to have a warm house and hot water to the kitchen taps!).

What do you think of our weird kitchen building technique? Will it catch on? Or are you happy dusting the tops of cabinets to avoid the extra building work? ;-)

Kitchen - the cabinets go in, part 1

Sorry I've been a bit quiet - there's a bit of a problem with blogging renovations, and that is that when you're in the midst of the exciting stuff you're way too busy renovating to blog about it. It doesn't help if you smush a first birthday party into the middle, either (although it does help us overall since that meant lots of awesome family help for us, due to birthday visits).

Since the floor was done a couple of weeks ago we've been waiting for the kitchen cabinets to arrive. We had family arriving on Thursday afternoon; we were hoping the kitchen cabinets would arrive before that so that we'd have a chance to put the pantry in and put some things away, to free up valuable floor space. Technically they did arrive before the first guests but only by about five minutes and none of them were off the truck yet!

However, since it was my parents who were the unlucky first, the pantry was in place before anyone else arrived because my dad is not one to rest on his laurels, even when he's purportedly on holiday. The timeline was something like this:

Thursday: cabinets arrive and are stacked in the corner and ignored while our house guest helps to assemble his own bed (a Murphy bed! More on that in another post sometime).
Friday: Pantry installed, some cabinets assembled and roughly placed in position. Other odd jobs done, mainly by our guests. We should have people to stay more often!
Saturday: Remaining cabinets assembled and placed in position. Some plumbing for new kitchen done. Manic cake baking and party preparations. First birthday party for our small person. We survived a whole year! He hasn't eaten any screws yet! Woohoo!
Sunday: Sort of rest day. Some tweaking to cabinet positions, other bits and pieces. Family time.
Monday: Cabinets properly leveled and fixed in place. Plumbing completed, dishwasher installed and temporary sink (from old kitchen) installed.

Thursday afternoon / Saturday morning / Sunday morning 

Our cabinets are from iKitchen, same as last time - we like them! They have various cabinet door options (and will send you swatches for you to check out) and we like the thermowrapped gloss doors - easy to keep clean and look fresh, but also won't date too quickly. This time around we looked at getting a profile door (think farmhouse kitchen or tongue and groove) but couldn't agree on a profile, felt it might look too busy and the profile doors are more expensive so in the end went back to the plain gloss finish.

The cabinets were just over $6k including delivery - a pricey part of the job but pretty good value considering what we got. Our kitchen includes a few slightly high-brow features including drawers in the pantry, a fancy-pants pull-out for the corner cupboard and some glazed wall cabinets (which I made a mistake on so need to be re-glazed, oops). They come flat-packed (with a couple of exceptions), or you can pay 10% extra and have them all delivered fully assembled. We're cheap so you know what we chose!

The kids were all pretty keen to help too!

Installing cabinets is more time consuming than you might think, and there are some tools which are essential for a good result, but it's completely achievable for a competent DIYer. That's not really us but we had my dad's help. ;-)

I have lots more photos and detail but perhaps will aim for installment two tomorrow so that I can go and put my feet up now that we have the house to ourselves for the first time in a while. Lazy, huh?

Money stuff: creating a budget

I highly recommend forming (at least) a rough budget as part of the planning for any project. I'm not sure whether it's my project manager self or my tightwad self which dictates this (perhaps both!) but it's a key step in the planning and can inform decisions further down the track. 

Depending on the project this can be pretty easy, but when we were looking at buying a house that needs an overhaul on pretty much every front, the budget creation got a bit daunting. We went through a few iterations, the first of which was very, very rough. I don't seem to have it any more, but it was something like this: 

• Repiling - $50,000
• Kitchen - $40,000
• Bathroom - $20,000
• Reconfiguration and decor - $20,000
• Total - $130,000

I can't remember if all of the numbers are what we put down initially but they were along those lines - very high level (though I do know that's what I put for repiling because my dad laughed me out of town when I told him, and then it turned out to be only one corner, not actually a pile and only cost about $1000 to fix). 

That was enough for us to know that it would be worth putting in an offer - and it gave us a rough guide as to what the offer should be. This equation is: 

Potential Value - Renovation Cost = Offer Price

Note that we're not looking to make money (though we won't complain if we do!) - we just wanted a) a project; b) a nice family home at the end; and c) not to be throwing money away. If you were trying to do up a house for profit you'd want a significant margin in there as well - though you'd also likely not change some of the things we're changing and therefore you'd spend less. 

Once we'd negotiated and agreed on a price with the vendor, we got a building inspection (actually, we talked one of the companies that had provided the building inspection to an earlier bidder into providing the same report to us for a discounted price, since they didn't have to revisit the property). 

When we had the building report in our hot little hands, we added every defect needing to be addressed to a gigantic list, and assigned costs to each one. 

Most of the numbers are very approximate - generally we put $1000 per day of work (which usually covers some materials as well as labour) unless we had a better idea. 

We also checked the scariest looking problem - cracks in the retaining wall at the back of the house - with an engineer. If that had required work it probably would have been $50k, which would have been a deal-breaker. 

The total (after we'd added renovations, with a bit more detail and verification - i.e. I asked my dad, which is the standard sanity check process around here) came out at $130,120 (that over-estimated pile repair ended up covering a bunch of other remedial jobs). 

This list is now our master to-do list and budget. 

A snippet of our budget / to-do list

Because I like to see how we did on our forecasts (I always liked tests at school, too; weird, I know) our initial estimates (the "Approx cost" column) is now locked down. The grey lines are things we've completed, and as you can see we're not too accurate on the line-by-line - but overall we're still about even. 

(installing the dishwasher actually cost about $40 but it was the same receipt as paint for the kitchen and I'm not that dedicated to separating the costs)

I have also categorised and prioritised each task. This helps us see, for example, all the costs associated with the new kitchen, and how much money we need to have within the next few months for the high priority items, vs in a year or two for the things further down the list. 

It might be a bit over the top but hopefully it means we won't get any nasty surprises - and it is a bit sobering seeing those numbers adding up so it probably makes us a bit more careful too. 

So tell me - how do you plan your budget for projects? Or do you prefer to just do it and hope for the best? ;-) 

Keeping warm - the curtain edition

There's been a fair bit in the NZ media recently about the warmth (or lack thereof) of our houses. The attention has mainly been focused on houses that are at the lower end of the scale, but we have a terrible track record in general, and plenty of us live in houses that aren't as warm as they should be.

In Wellington, The Sustainability Trust offer free in-home assessments which will help you target the areas you can best improve in your home. I highly recommend these if you're in the Wellington region (I'm not sure if other regions have equivalent programs, please comment if you know of any) but regardless of where you are, one of the easiest, cheapest and most effective things you can change are your curtains.

Windows by their nature are thermally substandard when compared to the other bits of your house. Fortunately, well-fitted, lined curtains can go a long way to solving this. Consumer have a great article that has lots of pointers, but the basic idea is to trap the air around the window in as much as possible, ideally with floor-length curtains fitted as close to the window as possible and with big overlaps at the sides.

Our new house had curtains on most of the windows when we moved in, but none were any good. Most were very thin - the kind you can see in through at night when the lights are on - none were thermal, and all carried many years of dirt and grime in them.

Though cheaper than, say, double glazing, good quality curtains can still be pretty pricey. If, that is, you buy them new. My strategy (because I'm too cheap to pay custom curtain prices and too lazy to make my own) is to scour TradeMe for curtains that will work in our house.

This has two downsides; firstly, the time involved in checking the new listings to see if there is something that might work, and secondly, accepting the offerings available. I don't mind the time because it doesn't take long and has the potential to save us heaps. And because the whole house needs redecorating there aren't really any existing colour schemes to take into consideration, which makes it easier to find something that will work design-wise.

Our new bow window curtains - shown in their old bay window home. 

We got pretty lucky on curtains for our bow window (aside: did you know there's a difference between a bay window and a bow window? We have the latter, though I often refer to it as a bay window to save confusion). Someone had bought a house which had recently been redecorated, and the bold, funky, custom-made curtains for their new bay window weren't to their taste so they sold them - we paid $290, but have been told that curtains of that size and quality could be $1000+ so I think we're winning. And I love them. So definitely winning.

I've bought three other pairs of secondhand curtains so far, all floor length (actually two sets are longer and will need hemming, but that's better than too short!) and fully lined, all less than five years old, and all in great condition. These sets have ranged in price from $40 to $125 - amazing value for what they are!

The only room I still need curtains for is the lounge, which will have three windows when we're finished with it so is a bit tricker. I may end up making those because getting matching secondhand curtains for three windows in the right sizes might be stretching my luck... But I have a while to watch TradeMe before we need those ones so we'll see.

Have you nabbed any secondhand bargains lately?