Evaporative cooling installed

Fortunately the rain and hail held off today, and the crew arrived at 8am to start work installing our evaporative cooling system.

There were 4 blokes on the job, and managed to get everything installed by midday. This is the Braemar 550 with 7 vents. The one thing about the Braemar is that the unit is simply a huge box - some other designs have a sloping lower edge so they sit a little closer to the roof. This makes them appear visually smaller - but has the side effect of being a tiny bit noisier too. Anyway, the shape of the box wasn't really a factor in choosing this unit, since we're not going to spend much time staring at it from the street. At least it's a matching colour (Slate Grey) to our roof tiles!

Still got a pile of old ruined fence sitting in the front - the fence guy injured his back and hasn't been back on our job for a week so far.

The end result - the boss was good enough to spend a bit of time discussing vent placement and where things should go for the best result, so I was happy for him to advise us. The main thing was that we want as much flow as possible down through the stairwell, and it's not necessary to have the main vent directly over the stairwell void. This is because this big evaporative unit pushes a huge amount of airflow into the house, so the main thing for whole-of-house cooling will be keeping the upstairs windows only a little bit open, all the upstairs doors open, and the downstairs windows wide open to get maximum air exchange.


So now we can bring on Melbourne's heatwaves without fear! The smaller bedrooms have a 12" duct, the master has a 14" and the ensuite a 10". The leisure area upstairs has a 16", and the stairwell void, a massive 18" duct. Getting some window blinds is the next priority. I rang the bloke today about the flooring from the last post - he said he'd call me back, never did. Anyone who's been following the blog knows how shitty I get about bad customer service...

T&T

Evaporative cooling booked in

So far in Melbourne we've had a couple of moderately warm days - mid 20s or so? In our house, we found the ground floor very comfortable - not hot at all, which is a big benefit to the thermal mass of a big concrete slab. Upstairs - bit of a different story. Quite warm, even with only 2 west-facing windows. Definitely need some proper cooling for when the massive Melbourne heatwaves hit!

Anyway, this is something we planned for back when designing the house. The cost for refrigerated AC as provided by the builder was something like $20,000+, and the large running costs of AC are a bit offputting. We pulled out the tiny Breezair evaporative cooling unit that was in the old house we demolished, installed it in the top floor of my parent's house and was surprised at how effective it was.


So for anyone wanting a quick comparison between evaporative and AC, here goes:

AC pros: Gets very, very cold, even on the hottest days.
AC cons: Expensive to run, recycles the air.
Evaporative pros: Cheap to run, cycles fresh air through the house.
Evaporative cons: Possibly will struggle on the very hottest 40+ days.

And the arguments to and from could run for years - if you're so inclined to read more, check out this great lengthy discussion on Whirlpool. I love being ice-cold with AC, but I figure we might only need it a few days a year. So the plan is to install the evaporative cooling upstairs and maybe add in a split system AC downstairs if we find we need it. We paid for upgraded roof trusses, roof water & powerpoint for future evaporative cooling installation, but after speaking to a few evaporative installers, they said it doesn't really make much difference. Oh well!

Anyway, I'd booked in a few quotes today.

Coldflow were meant to be first, but seeing as they couldn't even be bothered turning up or calling to explain why no-one came, they're immediately off the list. If their attention to detail and customer service is this bad even before making a sale, why would I ever bother buying anything from them? Thumbs down. Weather World didn't want to send someone out, so they emailed a quote for a Breezair 210 with 8 outlets based on floorplans I emailed them prior.

Finally, Maroondah Heating & Cooling had the final visit of the day, and got the job. Damien had a peek up into the roof, spent some time measuring up the rooms and discussing the various options available. Ultimately we settled on the Braemar 550 with 7 outlets; with specific attention to the size of the outlet in each area plus placement of the unit itself, he reckons we should get pretty good cooling to the whole house including downstairs - here's hoping! Installation is booked in for next Tuesday. Chose the Braemar instead of the Breezair as they're made by the same company (Seeley International), but the Braemar have fewer problems due to their fan design.


And for those still at decision-making stage, should you get evaporative cooling done through the builder? Well, Metricon wanted $5500 for a 5 outlet Bonaire Summerbreeze, which was undersized for our house. Our quote for a 7 outlet Braemar was over $1000 less than that, with the top-of-the line unit.

*warning rant beginning here*

Finally, while he was up in the roof cavity Damien confirmed for me what I had suspected - my antenna isn't connected to the Starserve system, with the coax wires just dangling out in open space. Good job by the data installers, real good job there.


Unfortunately here is another area that Metricon is failing in after-sales customer service, having reported to my SS, my CSC and to the girl who did a follow-up courtesy call that my antenna hasn't been connected, what's been done about it? Nothing, zero, nada, zilch. I'll be writing a rather pointed letter come three-month review time, because after paying about $1500 for an antenna, Starserve and a bunch of TV points, you'd think you'd actually get a working product rather than something dead-on-arrival. And the worse thing is, a technician could splice the cables together in about 5 minutes to solve my problem. Instead, I get to complain endlessly to everyone who walks into my house about a problem that shouldn't have existed in the first place - "Yes, I know I've got rabbit-ear aerials on my TVs, because my antenna isn't connected". So, to everyone building, make sure your antenna is connected to whatever TV outlets you've paid for, because when's something broken, it's probably going to stay broken for a while. Not to mention all the other issues from the "completion" inspection - all little fiddly things which could be easily fixed but aren't, and I guess they'll just be added to the 3 month problem list.

*rant expired*

T&T

Day 86: Doors in, and brickies started early! Plus: Cooling discussion

We were a bit rushed tonight as there was a dinner seminar to get to - but getting to our house, we were a bit surprised to see.... heaps had been done!

Let's start with the chippies - they were a little busy today! Front doorframe & temp front door, internal access doorframe, rear birpart frame was all installed. Also many issues detected at Tuesday's frame inspection were fixed up today: missing noggin from study, home theater door height corrected, bed 4 to bathroom door relocated, master bed doorframe secured. Well done boys!


This pic shows our front door - love the sidelights! The temporary front door is hanging open, the final door is 2340mm high, 1020mm wide - plenty big! But now more and more of the house is coming together, I'm realising there's a few things that I might have changed - though we put in hours and hours into planning this house, you can't always get everything in! One thing might have been to get a quote on upsizing the front door to 2340x1200mm - the front door would be 18cm wider, but then each sidelight would get 9cm narrower. Anyway, can't change it now, and the current door is already massive! Another thing might have been to upsize the internal access door - it's a standard 820mm door, but making it a little bigger might be useful as I tend to go in & out with big things a lot to the garage.



Here's a pic of the rear bipart door - this was part of the promotional package, upgraded from the standard aluminium bipart door. This one is a standard door height, 2140mm I think (so is the laundry sliding door), whereas every other door is 2340mm high. Not sure this timber bipart comes in a taller door size; pretty sure we checked this with our CSC at preliminary contract, otherwise we would have got the taller one. The two sliding doors haven't been installed yet.

Now here's a question for everyone out there - if you look at the bottom of the bipart, the aluminium rails for the sliding doors are on the outside - should it be this way? It just looks like it should be inside as there's a line of black felt you can just see in the photo, but so far the chippies seem to know what they're doing :)

The other big surprise was that quite a lot of bricking had been done - one one side of the house only 1-2 layers of bricks had been put down, but on the other side quite a bit more of the wall had been done already.



This shows the home theatre room from the backyard, and looking up towards the front of the house you can see quite a bit of bricking has been done today. This was a real treat, as Monique mentioned they'd start next Monday, or maybe Friday (tomorrow) if they could! When we inspected closer, all the mortar widths were pretty consistent, and the flush finish seem to be quite even all the way around. We picked off-white mortar, which looks quite dark now because it's still fresh, but as it dries out, we should see it lighten considerably!

We're very happy to see bricking start ahead of schedule, and to see the minor issues seen in the frame to be fixed up so quickly, testament to our SS paying attention to our concerns and passing on words to the tradies to get them fixed promptly - top marks there! Let's hope the good run continues!

Finally, to respond to Glenn who asked about cooling, in our prelim contract M won't put evaporative cooling ducts to downstairs in the build (but I've heard that in NSW they will?). If you add in refrigerated cooling however, then that would include ducting to downstairs. Our plan is to install a big evaporative cooler upstairs (we added "evaporative cooling provision" to our contract which gives reinforced roof trusses, powerpoint and water point for cooling), and later add a split system AC to the downstairs open area. My parents have this setup in their 2 storey house, and it works very well - especially being able to leave the evaporative cooling on low overnight during the hot humid nights, makes it a "breeze" to stay cool! We decided to add the evaporative cooling after handover, as you'll get a more powerful, capable system with more ducts for the same price.

T&T

Day 84: sand for bricking delivered, Frame inspection walkthrough complete

Turned up after lunch to see that we've gained another huge lump of sand in front of the garage - sand for bricking!

But the big deal today was our frame walkthrough with our new SS Monique - very impressed with her knowledge and thoroughness! Here's the issues we picked up on, and her answers. This won't make any sense to you guys, it's just so we can keep track of how these issues are being fixed!

TIMEFRAME - Next things to happen is that the chippies will be back onsite to install the front, rear and internal access doorframes either Thursday or Friday. Needs to be done before the brickies start working, which should be this Friday or following Monday. Ground floor should be bricked in 7-8 days, then scaffolding appears so the first floor can be wrapped, then first floor bricking will take another week, then cladding and eaves go in. Electrical roughin will happen about the same time as the first floor bricking, maybe. Hopefully full lockup will be at the end of April, and then we'll get a better indication of how long the remaining stages will take. With no delays so far in tiles or bricks, things are going well!

LOCKUP INSPECTION - Our SS is fine with having a lockup inspection, providing it comes after the Metricon lockup inspection. She'll keep us in touch every week to let us know when we need to organise that. The inspectors that M are using for each stage are Checkpoint Surveyors, and apparently their inspection was only just done and should go through to Monique tomorrow. Change to electrical plan: can upstairs leisure light be moved? See next.

LIGHTING - I realised that one change I made to the lighting plan upstairs wasn't really a good idea, and wanted to change the lights in leisure room to be one light point in leisure and one in passageway, which is the standard Nolan lighting plan. No worries - gave Monique a printout of the changes, signed it, and she'll pass it onto the sparkies. Also, Tina wants to finetune the position of the downlights over the kitchen island, and we'll do that at a later walkthrough once the kitchen goes in.

GROUND FLOOR ISSUES
Timber poles front & rear only held in by one bolt - not load bearing poles, only there to hold up frame until bricking done.

Floor waste to laundry - will be moved to correct position under washing machine location

Torn/open wrapping at sitting room wall - will be fixed prior to bricking, just needs more tape

Stud at meter box unsupported & loose - will be fixed (Friday?) when chippies fit doors

Missing noggin to study/family wall - will be fixed at lockup

Rumpus room door too low (needs to be for 2340 door) - to fix Friday

Also front door & internal access too low – will be fixed when doorframes put in.

Home theatre double doors: Changed so that the left door opens, the right door has mushroom stop.

FIRST FLOOR

Ensuite rainfall head wrong position – will be fixed after ensuite shower floor put in (currently a big hole)

Bed 4 door to bathroom - will be fixed - need to move over about 2 feet.

Roof access door - will be placed in Bed 4 robe, as Bed 3 access blocked.

Master bed doorframe stud unsupported & loose - will be fixed by door installers

Possible to move light position in upstairs leisure room, to have one in leisure, one in passage - done!

Other issues: Keep an eye on water patch near outdoor room - there's no plumbing in that area! Monique also pointed out the reinforced trusses we upgraded for a future evaporative cooling unit - about 5 trusses with 120mm thickness instead of the usual 90mm.

So, pretty happy with how today's walkthrough went, and Monique certainly seems well organised, and quite knowledgable about our house and aware of most of the issues we brought up.

All we have to do now is sit back, and wait for the doors to go in and then a few weeks of watching bricks going up - yay!

T&T

Day 78: Wrapping commenced, beams delivered, frame inspection booked

Got a call from our SS this mornin, and we've organised a frame inspection for next Tuesday. It'll just be us and not a formal building inspector - we're working on choosing a building inspector for the lockup stage. Our roof is meant to be complete by Friday (first and ground floor roof tiling) and hopefully doors in by Tuesday as well.

After a huge amount of traffic, got to the site to see our house has now changed colour, and is wearing a raincoat!


Yup, we've been wrapped! The wrap covers the ground floor all around, and from what we can tell has been done well except for an area near the meter box which is hanging loose - you can see it in the front right corner of this photo, on the side wall just flapping around a bit. It's stapled to the frame, joins sealed with tape, and sealed to window frames with tape as well. Internal surface is a reflective foil. When bricking is complete, we'll have a brick layer, a small air gap, then this weather wrap, then internal insulation (walls are R2.0 insulated) then plaster. Much better insulation than our old weather board, which had weatherboard, then plaster, and that was it! We're hoping that with our 5.5 star house, it'll reduce/minimise our need for artificial heating/cooling in winter/summer.

I got out my broom from yesterday and started sweeping out the ground floor - the amount of mud, wood shavings and general dirt was incredible! I think we'll spend our weekend just cleaning up the house, since I doubt any of the tradies are going to pick up a broom - and we don't want plaster going up locking in all the dirt/mud inside the frame! Also went around retaping the protective plastic over all the windows - right, I know it's a bit anal but wouldn't it be better for everyone concerned if our brand new windows stay brand new (and unscratched!) until handover?

Also had a delivery of some steel beams/lintels; these should support brickwork over openings like windows/doors. I think the longest one is for the garage front/rear doors, then the smaller ones to go over windows. We got rid of all standard infill for brick infills; just think it looks a bit better even though few people would ever notice it!

Other things done on site today: the water lead-in pipe has been buried (and someone removed our front tap as well?!).

Crossed fingers - hoping for no more rain until roof is complete (and ideally wrapping complete as well!)

T&T

Day 66: Ground floor windows 80% installed

Phew, what a day - too much stress at work = calm evening with a cold beer! But of course, before beer comes house (though not alphabetically) , and this is what happened to our house on another slightly warm 35 degree day.


Most of the ground floor windows were installed today:

• Sitting room (awning) windows 2x, horizontal fixed feature window
• Study window (sliding)
• Family room (awning)
  
• Kitchen window fixed splashback
• Dining room (sliding)
• Powder room (fixed) x2
• Laundry sliding door
  

Also the upstairs windows were all moved upstairs, but not installed yet. Might go by the site tomorrow - wonder if they'll do anything on a Saturday? These windows are by Southern Star in Pearl White; we picked this colour to contrast against the dark brown Austral Hawthorn bricks, and to match the off-white mortar.


This is the family room window - same as for the home theatre room, except the home theatre room windows are double glazed. This window has two windout awnings on either side of a fixed pane of glass. I was thinking sliding windows would be better as there's more airflow through them, but apparently there's not much difference between sliding and awning windows for airflow? We're getting flyscreens to all these windows, but they'll probably be the last thing installed before handover to avoid damage. If you look above this window there's a fair amount of wall height still (because of the 2.7m ceilings) which is good - as we're planning to put in a big split system aircon here, with evaporative cooling to upstairs.

Hopefully the remaining windows/doors will be installed by maybe Wednesday next week! Can't wait for the front door frame to go on, as well as the rear bi-part doors, they look fantastic even in their raw wood finish!

caroline: as far as moving in goes, our official finish date is the end of December 2010 - but we've got our fingers crossed for an August or September handover!

T&T

Electrical appointment done! And more easement problems!

Spent a couple of hours at M headquarters yesterday going through our electrical plan - we had it pretty much all laid out beforehand though, which is highly recommended if you don't want to spend days buried in floorplans at the appointment!

Of course, some things change at the appointment; I wanted a facade light on the garage, but there's a downpipe right where the light would go, not a big deal. I wanted M to quote on conduit in the home theatre room to run my own cables, but they don't offer that. I pulled out of the projector provision ($313) and just got a junction box to the roof space (to power my projector and screen) linked to a switch on the wall ($56). I'm planning to change over to Saturn dimmer LED switches in the rumpus - oooo, that's a nice light switch!

Anyway, some other results of the electrical appointment;

• 4 star gas heating with one zone, $1200 upgrade
• Antenna $360
• 20 downlights
• 4 dimmers ($82ea)
  
• 3 steplights on stairs
• 3 external junction boxes for future floodlights ($56 ea)
  
• Upgraded all light switches, powerpoints, data, TV points to Clipsal Slimline - a very modern looking design! ($13 ea)
  
• 3 external double powerpoints ($102 ea)
  
• 2 fluoro lights to garage
• 26 more double power points
  
• 9 Cat6 data cable runs ($146ea!)
  
• 7 TV points with amplifier
• Provision for futre evaporative cooling

All up, about $10,000.... how easy is it to spend money building a house! We sent through a revised plan just maing a few minor changes, and hopefully will sign off on the changes this afternoon.

And just when things were going well - we received approval from both council and Yarra Valley Water to build eaves over the easement - M now want us to prove there's no pipes in the easement, or we're going to pay bigtime for a huge slab upgrade. Got plans of YVW and council (stormwater) pipes and emailed them to our CSC, so hopefully that gets us in the clear!

T&T

Evaporative cooling: Hmmmm!

Well, we're at a stage where things are happening, providing we do the legwork to make them happen!

Called up our energy supplier regarding a power pit, and they put us in contact with Jemena/United Energy who handle our area. M quoted us at first $5000 for a power pit, then later $3000. United are quoting $900 (for a 3 phase supply) plus about $40 for every 1m our pit will be away from an electricity pole. I'm hoping we can get this power pit done for about $1500 as the nearest power pole is far away on the other side of the street (and there's no extra cost to run the power from across the road - phew!). So we'll get those documents for application sent off tomorrow morning.

We're also waiting on our demolition permit and building over easement permit - hoping to have them by the end of the month at latest - touch wood!

The old house we're demolishing also has an almost-new evaporative cooling unit, which was only installed Sept 18 08 - less than a year ago. Looking up the specs on the website, it has 8.4kw of cooling power, where for our new house, we'd probably need around 20kw! We went to Epping yesterday to check out some M display houses, and across the road was a 45sq PD house which had 2 large evaporative cooling units.

I'm wondering if we can salvage the 8.4kw unit we have, and add in a 15kw unit with our new house - does that make sense? We could duct the smaller unit to the minor upstairs bedrooms, while the big unit will be connected to the master suite, upstairs leisure area and a massive duct over the stairs to direct air to the ground floor. If this is not an option, well then we've got a Breezair EXH130 evaporative cooling unit for sale at half retail price!

And before you ask... no, M won't install ducting to the ground floor of a 2 storey house EVEN IF you buy your evaporative cooling from them in the contract! Probably something to do with not enough voids to get the ducts downstairs.... but then again, there are heating ducts all over the ground floor!

The other thing we're thinking about is adding a refridgerated unit to the heating, but I'm not 100% sure on the technicalities of how you do that. Apparently increasing the size of ducting and the heating unit is the way to go?

T&T

Update: Received quote on house with options!

Well, I'm rather surprised at Ainslee's efficiency so far - Ainslee is the sales rep from Lyndhurst we spoke to the other day.

As promised, she emailed up a 6 page PDF file with the major options and changes that we've requested from Sunday - not bad after seeing her just 1 day ago!

Most of the options listed are relatively easy to interpret and understand. The quote was quite comprehensive and also included tiles to downstairs ($8500), carpets to upstairs ($8500), evaporative cooling ($5000) and a few other things which we will probably do after completion. In summary, from a base price of $284k, the estimate quote is about $350k. Again, this is just for the house, no site costs or external things like driveways or decking.

Other options we're unsure of - the $600 wine rack above the fridge, the $5500 modification to ensuite, and $2500 "KDHW" upgrade to the stairs. We'll take a day or two to review things and get back to Ainslee about that. Tina isn't sure of the larger ceilings downstairs and upstairs, but I'm 100% insistent on getting them - high ceilings win bigtime! The cost to add about 15cm to the ground and first floor is about $3000, and for taller doors another $2000 or so. Still, this is definitely one thing you must do during construction - pretty difficult to add higher ceilings after completion!

I did decide to eliminate the $1300 riser for the home theatre room though - I think I can knock it up myself with about $100 of particleboard and some tools which Tina's dad has. The plan is to further customise the HT room after handover, with suede effect paint, sparkly lighty things and floor lights, motorised curtain and .... well, I can dream, right? :)

One big thing I have an issue with is with the large island bench. The standard layout is an "L-shape" bench, with a promo upgrade to stone tops. How can the large island be $8500 more?? Sure, it's a little larger, but not all that much larger...

Anyway, today at lunch, went to the bank to draw up a couple of bank cheques - one huge one and one small one. Tina's job tomorrow is to drop them off at the lawyers in the morning and settlement is due to occur at 1:30. I've booked off 2-3pm so I can go to the agents to pick up the keys - how exciting!

Will try to update tomorrow with post-settlement pics of the ol' house, though it'll be dark and electricity isn't due to be connected until Wednesday.

Tim