Spring

I just noticed that the last photos on the blog included huge piles of snow. Well winter is over, spring is here! I have several large projects that have fast aproaching deadlines, so any work done on my house has been spontaneous and unnecessary (I have very interesting and productive bouts of procrastination). It has mostly been limited to work on the "front yard". Here is a quick summary. Enjoy.

First there was a garden. The parking lot is going to be repaved soon, so the raised garden beds had to be moved. Together with shop-goers Amanda, Jennipur, Josh and Dave, we tossed some rocks up on the concrete pad and extended the garden bed that was started last summer. It is nice to see more fresh dirt ready for plants! This summer much of the industrial landscape will be transformed and beautified.

Next came the safe. This thing has been sitting out here unopened for longer than any of us have been here. One warm spring night, curiosity got the better of me. Wielding a cold chisel and hammer, I started in on the steel exterior. By the end of the evening I had made it through the first layer of steel, about eight inches of concrete, and managed to punch a small hole though the inner layer of steel. Two musty Polaroid photographs of early CAD drawings of alien looking structures were all I could manage to fish out before I gave in for the night. The next evening with renewed energy and sore muscles, I enlarged the hole with a sawzall and retrieved the rest of the booty. Unfortunately, there were no bags of coins, gold bouillon, or stacks of cash. I was really hoping to find the money to hire myself to finish the house. Instead I was left with a soggy moldy mess of years of business records for a company that owned the building in the eighties. Nothing even worthy of blackmail. The worst part of it is that the hundreds of rubber-banded bundles of check copies I handed out really felt like those wads of cash you see in movies. Now I need to figure out how to get rid of it... Oh well, at least I know.

I have been hoarding half of an old lamppost for a couple of years now. I have always wanted a street lamp outside of the house. The idea seemed enchanting when it was out in the woods. Now I think it will go very nicely amongst the rock garden beds. I have just been waiting to find the right base for it. Last week Josh, the blacksmith, came home with some big steel pipes from a demo job he helped with. One of them looked perfect to finish the lamp post. It even had a big bolt flange on one end.

After a few hours of digging through the scrap bins and some welding, I had a complete post! Luckily we had even left the perfect little curve in one of the garden walls to mount it in. 

Now I need the lamp. I had been envisioning some sort of twisted iron light perched on top.  Something like what you might see in a Tim Burton movie. Today I found these.

They are hand blown glass globes inside of a steel structure. The glass bulges out around the steel. The perfect start! Now I need to come up with the rest of the design.

With some help from Josh, I'm sure we will come up with something interesting. He is already scheming.

Once these jobs are finished in the next few weeks, I will jump onto finishing the exterior of the house. I have some siding to finish, a bit of trim, a new coat of paint and the roof to think about!

A door to the past

What's on the front door? Where did it come from? I don't know its origins, but I do know that it is one of a set of twins. The other one lived out the end of its life as a passage through a fence to the neighbors house where I grew up. This one spent that time as the front door to one of my dad's coworker's wood shop. Now it is here.

126 is the street number of the Firehouse, where the early stages of construction happened. These are the actual street numbers from an old door that I found in the basement. 

While it was not built at the Washburn shops, I did do a lot of daydreaming about the plans of this house while working in the Washburn shops. The Washburn Shops were the foundation of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute when it used to be a free institution. Students would learn the fundamentals of engineering while working in the shop, producing goods for the industries of Worcester. I spent much of my senior year in a temporary office set up in the welding shop in Washburn.

This doorknob was also an artifact from the basement of the Firehouse. This style once adorned all the interior doors there. 

Paneling

 Over the past week I have been picking away at some paneling for the gable walls. I had some extra shiplap pine that was too twisted to use, so I ripped it into narrower widths and put a tounge and groove joint on it to make v-joint paneling. I also bought a new shaper for the shop that I really wanted to try out.

Here is the finished product. It came out well and didn't take very long either. This week I also insulated the gable wall panels where the pine will go. Before I can install it though I need to properly fasten the wall panels to the frame from the inside so that they are still removable once the siding goes on (they are temporarily affixed from the outside). Remember that the roof needs to be removed to transport the house.

Finally, one last detail for the week, just in time for the snow storm, is a threshold under the door. I should have built this years ago. I have always had trouble with the weather sneaking under the door, and it only took me about 30 minutes to make.

Nemo

Another nor'easter. Worcester received over thirty inches of snow this weekend. I was ready to go enjoy the warmth of the stove and grid-free electricity when the power went out in the city, but it never did. I finally made it over to shovel out the house this morning. There was no snow on the roof or solar panel, none piled up against the house, and only a sprinkling of fine white powder that found its way under the door where the solar panel wires enter. Not bad. I had quite a bit of snow to move to open up the paths around the house though.

This drift is five feet high.

The other tiny house fared well also.

More solar data

Nothing too exciting here, just more of the same. Again it looks like on the best days of sun I have been generating about 10 amp hours of energy. Theoretically I should be generating around 50 amp hours per day this time of the year. I'm not too worried since I am still using less than I am generating. When it becomes an issue I will remount the panel at the proper angle, but right now the house is surrounded by 30 inches of snow from Nemo- not the best time to be on the roof. You will notice many days with little charge on the graph. This is actually not due to lack of sun, but is because the charge controller thinks that the batteries are full and cuts the charge. I still need to tweak the settings for the NiCd batteries.

Bottling the Sun

In the last post I mentioned that I got a solar panel and hooked up one of the old train batteries to power my lights. I finally received the last piece of the puzzle, the charge controller, and wired everything in. I am now converting the radiation from the sun into electricity and storing it for later! At night, the light looks like the light from an ordinary CFL bulb, but it it has a different feel to it knowing that it is not coming from an outside source.

The first day I just plugged the panel in on the ground to check things out. Because the main roof face of the house is 72 degrees west of true south, I would like to make a pole mount that is separate from the house to hold the panel. After the trial day I screwed it onto the roof as a temporary measure until I make the pole mount. Again, I found myself working on the exterior on a day with inclement weather. This time the whole world was glistening with ice as I was voluntarily climbing on the roof. Why does nasty weather motivate me? Even with the poor mounting angle, I am still collecting more energy than I am using on most days.

The batteries and charge controller are occupying the space that will someday be the kitchen counter.

Now for a word on the charge controller. If you aren't interested in the technical end of things feel free to skip this paragraph. A charge controller links the solar array with the batteries. In Its most simple form,  it just monitors the state of charge of the battery and cuts off the charge when the battery is full. A modern controller is a bit more complicated and since I am using non traditional batteries I needed one that I could adjust myself. I ended up buying a 15 amp SunSaver MPPT from Morningstar Corp. I picked this one mainly because it is one of the few small controllers that can be programmed. As a bonus, it loggs and stores one month of data which will be fun to observe. The MPPT in the product name stands for maximum power point tracking. Consider a 12 volt system. A solar panel meant to charge a 12 volt battery will produce around 18 volts with no load. The battery pulls the voltage down to a lower level when the two are directly connected. This will be around 12-15 volts while charging. Solar panels are more efficient when they are producing a higher voltage- closer to 17 for many manufactures. The circuitry in a MPPT controller recognizes this and lets the panel produce electricity at its maximum power point, while charging the battery at the voltage it wants. In the end, this makes for a more efficient system. Under many conditions, the user can see a 20-30% increase in efficiency.

This chart is the data downloaded from the first two weeks of use. Ignore the spike on the first day, this was due to connections being made. It is also important to note that I had friends from out of town staying in the house using the lights and it was snowing/icing almost the entire time. The two spikes on the green line show the few sunny days we had. The saddle about two thirds of the way through was during a time that the panels were covered in snow. Still producing a tiny bit of energy! Still, the battery voltage steadily climbed. The next data set will be interesting to see because we had lots of sunny weather!

Many small things

The house is coming up on its second year out of the shelter of the firehouse. I am still working on it; possibly three years after I had hoped it would be finished. It has survived its second hurricane unscathed. For that matter, better off post storm. For the second time I spent the rainy pre-storm day puting a fresh tarp on the roof. This time it was an extra heavy duty bilboard avertising a heath insurance company. Thanks to the help of Patrick, always ready to lend a hand in inclement weather, we installed some temporarily permanent plexiglass storm windows in the fifty mile an hour winds. No more plastic sheeting over the windows (except the heavy double layer tarp over the skylights). These will remain until I get around to building the proper steel casements. I reinstalled the wood stove so it is cozy in the cool weather.

Ladders in and out, fall garden, warm fire, cool sunset, large timbers, greenhouse.

Call and response

Last weekend I made an attempt at the siding on the parking lot side. Didn't finish it, but I did get the trim up, siding around the window, and a plan to allow the gable panel to be removable.

I made some progress on the photovoltaic system also. Pablo at Green Energy Options in Keene, NH has helped me out with advice and supplied me with a couple of 12 volt compact fluorescent light bulbs that I am now using. So far I have just done some more temporarily permanent wiring for the lighting. 

Once the wall covering goes on all of my wiring will be neatly routed in copper tubing on the surface of the wall. For now it is functional. One of the huge NiCad batteries has taken up residence on the floor. I am still working off of the charge it had when I picked it up, but a full charge should give me 28 days of light for four hours a day. I am constantly amazed by these batteries. Check back soon for a full report on my research into pocket plate NiCads, their reconditioning and use for a photovoltaic system.

Finally, I found a solar panel! This is a 170 watt panel, more than enough power for my current usage. I am hoping to pick up a charge controller for it this week and get this charging my batteries soon! There will be much more info on how I am building the photovoltaic system in the next few weeks.

Productive Procrastination

The past month has been a busy one. The crunch to finish up work before winter has begun, preparations for the class I am teaching have been taking some time, and I have been building a piece of furniture. This furniture project has been interesting in many ways. It is a cherry pedestal that will hold a stainless steel sculpture that one of the other shop members is building. It has been fun learning, and relearning, some techniques. It also turned out to be good motivation to do some work on the house.

I have known for a long time that I am most productive when I have a deadline within sight. I can try to get things done ahead of time, but really, that time is spent doing anything other than the project at hand. Sometimes those things done while procrastinating are very important tasks that I would never get to otherwise like tuning up tools, cleaning, and practicing skills.

I was working on someone else's deadline. I knew that the sculptor would not make the deadline, but I still had to pretend to be working on the pedestal as if it would be ready in time. The real work could not begin until progress happened on the sculpture. In the mean time, I had to clear some space in the shop. A pile of old panelling that I salvaged from the firehouse caught my eye. The easiest way to take care of that pile was to strip the old brown shellac off refinish it, and install it as the kitchen ceiling in my house. That is the easiest way to move a pile, right? (to be honest, it wasn't even in the way, but provided a good distraction). But here are the results! It was a long overdue improvement to the house.

Also in this time, I built the frames for the windows in the gable ends and installed temporary plexiglass windows in them.

Unfortunately that is it for progress on the house at this point. Here are some photos of the pedestal though.

Design

Shooting board for 30 degree bevel

Wedges and rope for the glue-up

Glued!

Leg stock

Leg pattern

Legs were cut 1/16" oversize then finished with pattern bit on a router

Legs and the column after a messy glue-up

Cutting the tenon

Pared to size

Chamfer to dress up the bottom. This will get a brass
plate over it to hold the staves together and cover the hole

Mortice layout

Hanger bolts installed

Top layout

Upper brackets

A visit to the screw museum- all made right here in Worcester

A screw goes through each stave to hold the wood together,
and three more are prepped to fix the granite top in place.

Last glue-up

Several coats of Tung oil and some wax,
ready to be entwined with stainless steel
roses and graced with the sculpture.