Wrestling the unruly…

February 2nd, 2012
Written by Marcus de la fleur

… PEX tubing. I better clarify this right away before the rumor mill starts grinding…

What exactly am I talking about? We shifted modes from the potable water and drain-waste-vent (DWV) plumbing to another kind of plumbing: The PEX tubing for our hydronic heating system.

While the garden apartment has a radiant floor slab, we have planned for small baseboard radiators on the 1st and 2nd floors. A network of half inch PEX tubing connects the radiators with the manifolds in the utility room.

Each radiator will have a supply line, delivering the hot water to the radiator, and a return line, delivering the cooled water back to the buffer tank of the hydronic heating system.

The catch is that we have to do this ten times for ten rooms on 1st floor, and again ten time for ten rooms on the 2nd floor. Then, multiply this by two (for the supply and return line) and you end up with 40 runs. That is a lot of PEX tubing to handle–PEX tubing that will not cooperate unless it is carefully un-coiled.

The first task was to drill holes through the 1st floor in the utility wall. These are the connections for the PEX tubing to the manifold in the utility room below. I had to carefully line up the holes with the manifold ports.

Having learned a lesson or two from the plumbing installation, we opted to insulate the PEX tubing right away. The purpose of the insulation is twofold.

  • The PEX should be protected from UV light. Because the walls will be open for a while to come, the insulation protects the tubing from any light source.
  • The insulation also helps us to deliver the heat where we need and want it — in the radiators. Because any heat loss from the tubing occurs within the conditioned space, it may be, strictly speaking, not much of a loss. Still, we would like to maximize the system performance by effectively delivering the hot water to the radiators.

We initially looked at running the PEX tubing through the walls. That would have involved a lot of drilling through studs and way too many difficult and tight turns.

The easier route was to run the tubing under the 1st floor ceiling to each room and down the wall to the planned radiator location.

The PEX for the 2nd floor radiators is a little more straightforward and less material-intensive. The tubing also runs under the 1st floor ceiling but is then routed upwards through the floor to each room.

The simplicity of the bare bone interior suddenly disappeared. The utility wall is packed with PEX and insulation snaking all over the place.

The high tech madness continues under the ceiling with tubing spidering out into all directions. Everything begins to resemble the interior of a space craft.


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DWV details

January 31st, 2012
Written by Marcus de la fleur

Let’s leave the potable water plumbing behind and circle back to the drain-waste-vent (DWV) system.

You may recall reading about the rationales and details of the 1st and 2nd floor DWV system and looking at the installation description all the way to the roof vent.

With everything installed and documented I can now compare the schematic layouts and diagrams to the real thing.

To keep us in compliance with the Chicago and State of Illinois plumbing code, all the DWV plumbing is connected to the city sewer. But we structured the plumbing for future separation of the greywater from the blackwater without the need to open any walls. At that point we would collect, filter and store the greywater for later reuse.

Greywater stack

The future greywater system begins in the basement at the drain water heat recovery (DWHR) unit, which we placed at the bottom of the greywater stack.

The horizontal leg that currently connects the DWHR to the sewer can in the future be replaced with a small greywater collection tank that holds a sump pump and has an emergency overflow connection to the sewer.

Atop of the DWHR is a double wye, which connects to the primary greywater source, the 1st and 2nd floor showers. One leg serves the 1st floor bathroom floor drain, the second leg connects to the 1st floor shower drain, while the third leg is set aside for the 2nd floor bathroom.

If we follow the greywater stack from the basement up to the 1st floor, we find the shower drain vent that ties into the floor drain vent, effectively forming the greywater vent stack.

The leg we set aside to drain the 2nd floor bathroom continues towards the ceiling where we placed a simple wye. One branch serves the 2nd floor bathroom floor drain while the other branch connects to the 2nd floor shower drain.

Once we continue to follow the greywater stack from the 1st floor up into the 2nd floor, we can identify the floor drain and shower vent that connect to the main vent stack from the 1st floor. The stack is turning up, over and around the corner towards the main sewer or blackwater stack.

Blackwater stack

The four inch diameter blackwater stack is located in the plumbing wall with two vent lines to either side.

The two inch pipe to the left vents all of the basement plumbing. The kitchen sink vent also ties into this pipe, while the kitchen drain connects to the blackwater stack.

To the right of the stack is the two inch vent for the 1st floor toilet. The bathroom lavatory vents into this two inch pipe, while the drain connects again to the blackwater stack.

Looking at the plumbing wall from the other side, we see the 2nd floor toilet connection and vent towards the ceiling.

Moving up to the 2nd floor, the kitchen and lavatory drain are identical to the 1st floor layout, with both draining into the blackwater stack.

A little up we connect the plumbing wall vents. On the right we have the kitchen sink vent and vent from the 1st floor. To the left we have lavatory vent, the vent from the 1st floor and the 2nd floor toilet vent.

Toward the top is the vent stack connection from the showers and floor drains, before the stack turns over and up through the roof.

The only item visible on the roof is the five inch vent section of the stack.

Even though the bathroom lavatories are connected to the blackwater stack, we have a future plan for reusing the greywater from these sinks. There are simple and small filtering and storage systems, that would fit under the lavatory. The collected water would then be used for the toilet flushing,

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Plumbing installation – useful gadgets

January 24th, 2012
Written by Marcus de la fleur

Here is a little more information about two useful gadgets in our plumbing system.

The previous post lists the rationales behind the hot water routing and makes mention of a hot water circulation pump. Let’s start with that.

On-demand

I was referred to a product that would help us to cut down on energy and water waste. It is an on-demand hot water pump by D’MAND®Systems.

Typically, the pump is installed under the fixture that is farthest away from the hot water tank. It is activated with a push button or motion sensor and begins to prime the hot water line. In that process hot water is brought close to each fixture along the hot water line, providing almost instant hot water.

Graphic by: http://www.gothotwater.com/

The most common location for the pump is under a sink, which makes the installation very easy. It is shipped with the needed fittings for a quick retrofit. The package includes two flex lines to connect to the existing hot and cold water lines under the sink.

Our fixture at the end of the hot water branch is the shower, not a sink. That means that I will have to install the pump into the plumbing wall.

We did provide a hot and cold water stub to which we can connect the pump. But I am not ready to trust those stainless steel flex connectors. Not in a plumbing wall where access will be difficult.

Instead I opted for a hard plumbing connection. In other words, I used copper pipe and fittings to connect the pump.

The pump will be plugged into a GFCI outlet in the plumbing wall. Once that outlet is connected, we can pressurize the plumbing system and test-run the pump.

Pressure reducing valve

The pressure reducing valve in the shower riser is the second item I should point out. I gave this nifty gadget some mention in a previous post, but it may be
worthwhile to bring it up again.

The reason for the pressure reducing valve is the shower head, or to be more precise, the desire for a reliable 1.5 gallons per minute (gpm) low-flow shower head.

The one product we found to work really well, in that you get a stream of water that is powerful and does not feel like a trickle, is the Oxygenic® BodySpa® SkinCare™ Shower Head. But it is rated with a 2.5 gpm flow rate – at 80 psi water pressure.

To guarantee a low flow rate of 1.5 gpm for our showers, I’ll have reduce, control and stabilize the water pressure, as can be seen in the graph below.

The graph doesn’t seem to be entirely accurate, nor the dial settings on the pressure reducing valve. We found out when we were field testing what pressure would really get us the desired 1.5 gpm.

Once we had dialed the pressure reducing valve down to 25 psi, the shower head delivered the targeted 1.5 gpm low flow rate.

Should we decide to change the shower head in the future, which may require us to increase the water pressure, we can simply adjust the dial and thereby the pressure on the pressure reducing valve.

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Plumbing installation – hot water routing

January 22nd, 2012
Written by Marcus de la fleur

I mentioned the tree analogy that guides the plumbing layout in a previous post. Conventional wisdom is to have a trunk line with branches to each fixture.

In our case, conventional wisdom would have dictated three hot water branches serving the three hot fixtures – kitchen sink, bathroom lavatory and shower.


In order to minimize water and energy waste while cutting down on the hot water delivery time, we decided to rely on an on-demand hot water circulation pump. The on-demand pump, once activated, will take a few seconds to prime the hot water trunk and branch line.

But this throws a wrench (pun intended) into the typical trunk and branch layout. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but have to fall back on recent developments in the hot water routing business.

To get the most out of the on-demand system, all three hot water fixtures should line up in series on one branch with the pump placed at the end, just prior to the last fixture, which in our case is the shower. The branch in turn supplies hot water to each fixture through short twigs.


We need to be mindful of the branch routing to keep the twigs as short as possible. The shorter they are, the more it cuts down on the hot water delivery time.

Data published by my friend and hot water guru Gary Klein, which I had listed in a previous post, makes for some simple math with interesting results.

  • The hot water twig to the kitchen faucet is about 36 inches long, delivering hot water from the primed branch in less than 1 cup (0.64 cup, to be precise). The corresponding hot water delivery time is less than 2 seconds at a fixture flow rate of 1.5 gallons per minute.
  • The hot water twig to the bathroom lavatory is about 40 inches long, delivering hot water from the primed branch in less than 1 cup (0.71 cup, to be precise). The corresponding hot water delivery time is less than 5 seconds at a fixture flow rate of 0.5 gallons per minute.
  • The twig to the shower head also is about 40 inches long delivering hot water from the primed branch in less than 1 cups (0.71 cup, to be precise). The corresponding hot water delivery time here is less than 2 seconds at a fixture flow rate of 1.5 gallons per minute.

I think it is fair to say that this qualifies as almost instant hot water delivery, once the on demand pump has primed the trunk and branches.

The priming would be initiated through the push of a button, typically first thing in the morning on the way to the bathroom, or in the early evening after the first person is back home from work. Anyone else using hot water after the priming and first use literally has instant hot water. That instant hot water lasts for two hours or more, thanks to the pipe insulation we used on our plumbing system.

This is not your typical approach to plumbing installation. It requires getting used to and focus on the part of the plumber to avoid falling back into the conventional trunk and branch system, which does little for water and energy conservation.

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Plumbing installation – pipe insulation

January 18th, 2012
Written by Marcus de la fleur

Plumbing lines in conventional projects are rarely insulated. That is despite a number of good reasons to do so.

Pipe insulation will prevent condensation on the cold water lines and heat loss on the hot water lines. With that in mind, we plan to generously insulate all cold and hot water lines.

It doesn’t take much to slip the pipe insulation over the pipe sections during the installation. Remembering to do so is sometimes hard part. Once an installer is on a roll, it is easy to forget about the insulation. Ten feet of copper piping later, he either suddenly remembers, or I get to remind him.

There are small areas around the turns and connections that do not receive pipe insulation yet. We want to leave the copper tubing in these areas accessible so that we can safely solder everything together. Once the plumbing is finished and pressure tested, Cathy will again fit insulation around these spots until all tubing is nicely wrapped and covered.

There is another good reason for slipping the pipe insulation over the lines during installation.

Without pipe insulation plumbers tend to install the copper tubing right next or very close to the framing. That makes it easy to attach the pipes with brackets.

The problem is that there is no room left for pipe insulation.

If the copper tubing can’t run next to or close to the framing, wood blocks are used to attach the brackets.

Again, there is no room for pipe insulation at the wood block.

If the pipe insulation is slipped over the tubing while it is installed, these problems disappear by default.

It makes everyone’s life easier, once the ‘getting used to it’ hurdle is tackled.

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Plumbing installation – pipe size and fittings

January 17th, 2012
Written by Marcus de la fleur

At this point, and for quite a while, it is all about getting ready for the open cell foam insulation on the 1st floor.

Each unit is separated from the others by an air barrier – a two to three inch layer of open cell foam in the ceiling. There are a few tricky areas that represent a potential breach in the air barrier envelope.

One of the bigger potential breaches is the plumbing wall.

The plumbing wall is meant to be sealed between floors with spray foam insulation. That is once all the utilities (mainly plumbing) that run through it are installed. Half of the plumbing (the drain-waste-vent system) is in place. What is still missing is the fresh water or copper plumbing.

Plumbers usually know what to do with their eyes closed – as long as the project follows conventional construction practices. If you have read a few blog posts, you will have noticed that our green rehab project is miles away from being conventional.

To get over the road bump called green building technologies, I needed to be on my toes and communicate our goals and objectives frequently to my contractors.

Pipe sizes

The conventional wisdom is to have a large trunk line – one inch or at least three-quarter inch. The branches from the trunk line are typically sized three-quarter inch and run up to every fixture. Often the pipe is reduced to a half inch just prior to the fixture. These pipe sizes would assure sufficient flow rate to the fixtures and reduce the potential of undesired pressure drop.

For the sake of energy, material and water conservation we want the copper pipe size reduced as much as it is permitted by the Chicago Plumbing Code.

Pushing the code to its limits is rather counter intuitive for most plumbers, who are used to giving preference to the larger pipe sizes. Thinking and approaching the installation in terms of energy, material and water conservation did seem to take some effort.

Long sweep elbows

Pressure drop is an issue not to be ignored when going with the smallest permitted (or reasonable) pipe sizes. To reduce friction and turbulence in the piping, we have to leave the common and inexpensive 90 degree hard turn elbows behind and switch to the less common and more expensive 90 degree long sweep elbows.

Another option is to use 45 degree elbows where it makes sense.

The long sweep elbows are typically used in hydronic heating systems, not so much in fresh water plumbing. It was thus a good idea (and necessary) to check that no hard turn elbow found its way into the plumbing by accident.

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Window trim installation

January 13th, 2012
Written by Marcus de la fleur

This is one of those tasks that I have to complete before we can continue with the insulation installation.

You may recall that we had the closed cell foam recently installed. Next up is the open cell installation.

The open cell foam will be sprayed on top of the closed cell foam that’s already in place, up to the back of the studs. The little gap between the studs and the oak trim is our problem. To be able to spray the foam we need to have a surface to spray against. With the gap as it is now, the foam would get all over the place, making a mess.

We needed to close that gap. We had the additional trim at hand already, thanks to The ReBuilding Exchange. Cathy had already cleaned the trim so my next step was to figure out how to make it fit.

Because most of the pieces were not long enough, I needed to join them. I squared the short ends that I was about to join and got my dowel kit out, including the right sized drill and dowel center pins to align the dowel holes.


Once the pieces were joined together, I needed to cut them to the right length and depth. Not an easy task in an old building where hardly anything is square.

Cutting the length was actually  relatively easy. But cutting it to the right depth…

My solution was to mount a strip of 5/8 inch drywall to the adjacent stud. This allowed me to hold the trim piece in place and mark where the drywall meets the trim.

I had to repeat the procedure for the other side and the trim header too. This way I was sure to cut the trim to the right depth.

The original trim was joined into one piece: The trim header was attached to the top of the sides. I took this as a clue and decided to join the trim extension the same way. To put the three pieces together, I laid them out on the floor, squared them and joined them with finishing screws.


To get a good and even connection between the original trim and the extension, I again used wood dowels.

I now could lift the extension into place.  I pushed them tightly onto the wood dowels, making sure everything was straight and square, and attached the new trim to the adjacent framing with finishing screws.


The gap is plugged and another item struck of the to-do list. The next line in the list says: Plumbing. Hmm.

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Paint stripping – Part 4

January 11th, 2012
Written by Marcus de la fleur

All the salvaged oak trim we purchased at The ReBuilding Exchange had paint on it. Actually, it was less paint but more lacquer. Still, it all needed stripping down to the original oak.

After a couple of quick tests, Cathy determined that the SOY Gel quickly and easily removes most of the lacquer.

To remove any residue and the stain, the palm sander with a 80 followed by a 120 grit sand paper became handy again.

Within one weekend, Cathy had cleaned up the entire batch of salvaged trim.

No, this is only part of it; there was more, much more. I tell you, she was moving fast!

Now it was up to me to keep up with her.  I needed to find a way to use the salvaged trim to extend the original trim all the way to the new wall depth.

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An expensive gap – or not?

January 8th, 2012
Written by Marcus de la fleur

Great! We had invested quite some time in cleaning up and restoring the 100-year-old oak trim around the doors, windows and window sills only to discover that we were quite a bit short of trim around the windows.

We actually realized that a while back, but it became acute at this stage.

What do we mean by being short of window trim?

The original trim fit the depth of the original walls, which had no insulation. To reduce our energy needs, we will add insulation to the walls. To be precise, 6 1/2 inches of insulation. That means that the wall moved by 6 1/2 inches into the building (plus the drywall depth).

oak

This is a gap we have to plug. With the nicely restored original trim, we have little choice but to turn to oak again.

I almost had a heart attack when I looked at the prices for oak board in the lumber yards and home improvement stores. This was about to become a very expensive restoration project indeed!

To introduce what happened next I would need a sound track that announces the arrival of super hero figure: The RX man (or woman for that matter).

On one of our frequent trips to the ReBuilding Exchange (RX) we began to poke around in the trim section and found a bunch of old oak trim of various dimensions that could help us plugging that gap.

We will have to see if we can fit the trim and remove the paint and stains from the pieces that need extra care.  But they will have a similar character with similar imperfections to the original oak around the windows.

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Paint stripping – Part 3

January 5th, 2012
Written by Marcus de la fleur

Let’s loop back to the issue of paint stripping.

Cathy told the story about cleaning up the window and door trims and removing layers of paint from the oak window sills. The Silent Paint Remover and SOY Gel were great tools to use in the paint removing process. We have in some cases, however, just a hint of paint residue left. Just enough to be really annoying.

Cathy, who has turned into a paint removal specialist, quickly figured out how to grind up and remove this annoyance. She dug up a palm sander her sister sent us when we started the project. Some 120 grit sand paper did a great job of restoring the final glory of the oak around the windows and doors with only a couple of passes.

For the window sills, Cathy used a coarser sand paper first followed by a final pass with the 120 grit. This helped not only to remove some of the more persistent paint residue, but also eliminate or fade some of the stains on the sills.

Although, what I really like about the trim and the sills is that they have their little imperfections. They tell a great story of age, of good times and bad times … They add character.

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