Let's talk about Country Living - Page 5

Lived before in a little patch about 2 miles away. Level yard, bigger house, better internet.

After my mother passed away, moved into her old house on a hillside, crappy internet, smaller house, but more livable space.

Surrounded by neighbors before...hated it...you didn't step out in your yard without everyone knowing. Neighbors here are farther apart, and never go outside much. I am rural, but not with the main road running by just out front, a small grocery store only about 2 miles away, and a mini mart across the street for when I run out of milk...walmart is around 4 miles up the other way, the kids school only 2 minutes away.

SO has a trailer about 2 minutes away up over the hill on a dirt road in the middle of the woods...I store most of my scrap there and that's probably were we will end up when we retire. Right now it's a mix of convenience and privacy that won out...that and when you get 2ft of snow living along the main road has it's perks...like plow trucks and no week long power outages.

Up here, for mortgaging, the banks only look at the value of the house and a very small chunk of land around the house. The rest of the acreage isn't valued at much.

The property you are looking at may be valued the same way...implying that the house is pretty recent and pretty decent. Maybe?

As you and others have mentioned before, you can spend a ton of time fixing up a house, so one that is ready to be lived in might not be a bad investment.

It would allow you to keep focussed on scrapping and maybe even step up the volume a notch to keep that mortgage serviced. Does it have any outbuildings?

Also--if things got tough could you subdivide it and sell off, say, half of it to keep the other afloat? No limitations on lot sizes in the area?

Jon.

Sledge, after reading many of your old threads and the responses here, my recommendation would be to look for land first and a home second. If you find the land you want, build the core of a house you want to live in and then build the rest of your home as finances and time allow. You can also buy a pre fab home to place on the property. If you buy a fixer upper, take your time as you remodel. Sometimes it is better to level the original home and start from scratch.

Our ranch was purchased for less than $ 100,000 within the last ten years. It includes four bedrooms, two baths, 50 acres, a 50 x 100 shed, a 20 x 30 shop, and two grain bins. In addition we purchased two quarters of land separately. We are in the process of upgrading the home and property. We looked into all options and decided I could remodel this home instead of removing the structure. The blue prints have been competed and the materials are purchased when they go on sale. Needless to say our shop is full of plumbing, electrical, and structural materials. When the present project ends, the remodel will be in full speed.

The lesson is to think outside the box. Many of us have tunnel vision and cannot find other options. Knowledge of the east is limited, but it assumed you can find a niche or crack in the market to create your dream home. Good luck.

Another thing to remember is that asking price in real estate is not necessarily what they will take. Sometimes you can buy property for 75% of what they are asking or even less. It won't hurt to make an offer but be prepared to buy if they accept, I've been surprised before by someone accepting an offer that I made.

If you want, you can find out the county appraisal of the value of any property at the courthouse. The tax appraisal can be found at the tax assessor's office. They don't mind you digging around and will help you as everything there is public record. If you're really digging, you can find the mortgage amount and possibly the last sale of the property. Sometimes they write the sale's price on the top edge of the deed. That is in the probate office. If you have any of this information, you can make a better shot at an offer that might work.

Patriot, are you talking about moving to your ranch in the Rockies? Sounds like you're gonna become a real back-in-the-bush kinda guy!! I really like your pre-planning in nabbing building materials (presumably when you spot a sale on something). You won't regret it, unless the Boss springs an ECO or two on you. (=engineering change orders....my wife's name is Eva, so she calls them Eva change orders!) I'm working with lumber I purchased at least 5 years ago from the company I used to work for.

Its great to have lots of space in the outbuildings....which I DON'T have. And I hate tarps. They are expensive and the ones that I can afford don't last very long. I have to double-wrap all my hay for the wife's nags.

Not long after I got laid off I picked up a contract to sell off a big planermill in town. I took home a lot of leftovers from that sale at a penny on the dollar and, yes, I had trouble squirrelling it all away so it wouldn't get weather damaged in storage. Still trying to dig out from under that in my shop. Anyone want any 24" diameter trimsaw blades? Picked them up for those who like to paint scenes on them.

Once I get my house renos outta my hair its onto that new shop!! Even got the bridge crane beam squirreled away for it, with the travel motors and 5T electric hoist!

Jon.

You might want to look into the particulars of the geothermal and how it works. The theory is that once you four feet down below ground level the temperature holds constant. In many places that's around 50 degrees. You can extract heat from the ground with the right equipment.

It's a bit exotic. That usually translates into heating equipment that's expensive and complicated. It's a job to find anyone qualified to work on it and critical repair parts can end up on backorder -or- simply not be available anymore.

One of the big things that gained popularity when energy prices went up was the pellet stove. It's a fairly simple machine but i know quite a few homeowners that are having problems getting parts & service when they break down.

One of my neighbors has a Renai. It's got to be pushing 94% efficiency but the control board failed because of a power surge. That's a 375.00$ dollar repair part.

This past week i got called in to troubleshoot a wood stove that wouldn't draw. A wood stove is about the simplest thing you would run into but it was one of the fancy high performance / low emission stoves. The customer couldn't figure it out so he contacted the place that he bought it from but they didn't have a clue either. It turned out that the air inlet chamber system was plugged with ash.

One of the health care facilities that i worked for had a solar hot water system where the panels literally blew up. A control board failed and pumped cold water up into glass tubes in the collectors that were already pre-heated to over 400 degrees. The system was off line for about four months while the repair parts were being fabricated back at the factory.

Moral of the story: Keep it Simple Sam. A house is one of the biggest purchases that you'll ever make. It's one thing if you've got all kinds of money. You can afford to play with all of the new things out there. Some of them are really neat ! If they don't work out it's really no big deal.You just pay somebody to repair or replace it.

Otherwise .... you're a lot better off to stay with technology that's well proven to work reliably for years on end with little or no upkeep.

Gee... i hope i'm not throwing out too much at once.

You're probably leaning more toward an existing home. There's one key thing you want to look for. Check out the foundation. What you want is a dry basement. If you see any evidence of water coming in down there just walk away. If the air feels humid down there on a dry day look it over carefully.

Water vapor issues in a house are a big hairy deal but most people don't understand them. Even people with over twenty years in the trade don't understand.

It's really too much to go into in a post here.

Just to give you a sense of why it's important though: I was working on an older home yesterday that was completely rehabbed back in 1999. The contractor that rebuilt it didn't know what he was doing and actually made a bad situation worse by tightening up the house and adding a polyethylene vapor barrier on the inside wall.

I feel like i'm fighting a losing battle with that place sometimes. The folks that own it are really great people and it's a shame that they've had to bear the cost of his incompetence. This last bill that i just turned in was over 900.00$ just for a bunch of smaller repairs and building ventilation improvements. Over the past six years they've had to lay out over 14 k. in repairs. They're probably looking at another 2 - 3 k. sometime this fall. ~ It's all because of that damp basement.~

A house built on a concrete slab that was done right can be a good thing !

Hey, Scrappah--thanks for the observations!!

You say a mouthful in regards to fixing stuff that is getting a bit on the leading edge...or, as I've had it put to me, "bleeding edge".

A heat pump is a big, reversible fridge. So it uses some type of Freon and has control boards, more so if it is convertible from heating in the winter to cooling in the summer. Hard to fix yourself without some formal training or a big service manual and a refrigerant handling ticket.

I'm not fond of pellet stoves, although they are a heck of a lot simpler than heat pumps, they still have electrics and timers. And can be noisy, especially when the little motors in them start getting older.

I would like to try a water heating system, though, where your stove is a big one outside of the house that heats water by burning wood. You circulate hot water to whatever you are heating--your shop, house, or pre-heating water for a hot water tank. These still have some electrics and a circulating pump or two but they can be put together yourself and fixed by yourself. Arranging power backup for these if the power goes out is not complicated, either.

I would also add a waste oil burner to this and a guy could even take heat off a water-cooled generator for home heating. Its not as "gee whiz" as a heat pump but all can be fixed easily.

I agree: simple is good.

Sledge, moisture issues can be a b*tch, as Scrappah sez. Basically, the house has to be set on a moisture-proof base and the interior has to have vapor barriers under the internal finishing of outside walls and ceilings (usually drywall). And then properly ventilated. If you build a new house, moisture control is pretty much mandated by building codes but when buying a house these items are a crapshoot, although if the house is newer it will likely be incorporated into the building.

The house I'm renovating was built in 1930. No vapor barrier in the walls. No concrete in the basement floor or crawlspace. As I fix each room the vapor barrier goes in (on exterior walls), and the ground vapor barrier will go under the basement slab when I pour it.

Just another detail to consider when buying a house....

Hiring a certified building inspector or a professional engineer is money well spent to help with this kind of inspection. Kinda like using a lawyer when needed...

Jon.

Thanks Jon ... i appreciate it.

Our friends up in Canada have a profound influence down here just south of the border in Maine. We get all of our petroleum products from a Canadian owned oil company called Irving Oil. Irving corporation owns vast tracts of forest that was once paper company land. Just recently, Emera, out of Canada, took over all of the electricity distribution for the entire state. It's sort of a running joke but if we were ever annexed by you most of us wouldn't know the difference.

You know ... for the most part things are running pretty well. It's a positive influence.

Emera Electric has been promoting the use of heat pumps for a few years now. It's early yet, but the feedback that i'm getting from folks who changed over has been mostly positive.

As a carpenter / contractor i've got to be very careful about the new technology that i incorporate into my jobs. If a customer tells me to do it a certain way then that's what i do. If an architect specs out a job using new methods i do as i'm directed. It's different if i bring in something new on my own because then i'm the guy who is responsible if it doesn't work out. I'm cautious ....

I've been in the trades for about thirty years now. I started out as an apprentice and after five years worked my way up to journeyman. After sixteen years on the different construction crews i went out on my own.

There were a lot of changes in building technology over the years. We were doing a lot of high end and commercial work. If memory serves it was sometime back around 1982 that the practice of using a vapor barrier on the inside came down from up North.

I hate to be an a$$ but that's something to avoid using. It's been a disaster down here so we've discontinued the practice.

If you think about it things in nature always try to even out. If you heat your home to 70 deg on the inside and it's 20 deg outside that heat wants to travel out. If you shut off your heating system the inside of your house would be about the same as it is outdoors.

It's like that with vapor pressure too ! If the air is moist inside and dry outside that water vapor wants to migrate outward. It will do that as long as it doesn't hit a restrictive barrier. If it hits a barrier it condenses into liquid water and runs down. That causes all kinds of rot problems.

That's why they favor Tyvek & Typar on the outside now. It's like a fine mesh screen. The wind blowing at you from outside is air molecules which are fairly large. Tyvek stops the wind. The water vapor molecules are smaller though. They're allowed to pass through to the outside air and it all evens out.

As an example of a new thing : I used Dow Styromate on a new place that i was building one winter. I was heating the interior with a propane heater so it was kicking a lot of moisture up into the air. I noticed that there was freezing going on behind the styromate housewrap. I had to re-sheath the entire place with Typar at my cost because it was my fault. ~ lesson learned ~

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I guess the auger timing speed is a problem with the pellet stoves. From what they told me the fire was chasing up the auger into the pellet storage bin in the back ? Othertimes it was feeding too fast and overfilling that spot where the pellets burn ?

There are at least half a dozen waste oil furnaces that i know of in this area. They work really well !

The outside furnaces aren't too bad. The newest ones burn so clean you would never know they're running. The big thing with those is that they need a long run cycle so you have to store the heat somehow. It's usually done with underground hot water storage tanks that hold over a thousand gallons.

I was talking with one of my neighbors last year and his was short cycling and plugging up because he didn't have that kind of storage. He was planning on pouring a concrete slab over the dirt floor in his basement that fall. I suggested that he run PEX in floor heat and treat it as a separate heat zone. That way he could have long run cycles and store the excess heat being produced in the thermal mass of the concrete. As heat rises it would eventually work it's way up into the house anyway. Doing it that way worked out for him last winter.

There's so much new technology out there and there are so many different ways you can use it.

Got to admit though .... I'm partial to simple. We always heated with oil because back when we first bought our home heating oil was only .55 USD/gallon. We were going through over a thousand gallons a year to heat our home and produce enough hot water for a family of four.

When the cost went to 2.00USD a gal. i replaced oil boiler with a new higher efficiency model.

When it went to 3.00 USD a gallon i switched us over to wood heat. Our wood stove is really simple and straightforward. We have a one storey ranch. The wood stove is in the basement. We heat the basement and that warms the floor. It's about the same as having in floor radiant heat. It's a really nice even heat. The house is warm & cozy even on the coldest days.

We still get our hot water from the boiler but i made a pre-heater. The idea is that the water coming in from the well is about 50 deg. If you pre-heat it somehow that's less oil you are using to run the boiler.

I put a hot water coil on the side of the woodstove and that thermsiphons into an 80 gallon stone lined hot water storage tank. The tank i picked up off the dump and the copper tubing & fittings i bought new. Total project cost was about 120.00$ There are no pumps or other moving parts to wear out. It should last 35 - 50 years with little or no service. Even now ... that coil is picking heat up from the 70 deg air and pre-heating the incoming water some. It's worked well for the last four years since it was put in. We're now down to under a hundred gallons of fuel oil usage every year.

Sorry to derail the thread ..... I'm a geek.

Scrappah,

I don't think we are derailing Sledge's thread--much. Aren't we just beating some details of country living TO DEATH? ;>

I'm curious about what the code is for vapor barrier in your part of the world...do they require it? I would expect that your friendly local building inspector would have a rectal hemorrhage if he found something not meeting code.

I'm a mechanical engineer so on this topic we'll have to agree to disagree....I'm cool with that. Sometimes bitter experience can trump theory and I'll be the first to admit it!!

On the subject of pellet stoves, there were two thoroughly trashed stoves on the place when I bought it. We rebuilt one but found it needed more draft than a short chimney in a mobile home could supply. (So much for the ads that suggest they can use a wall vent like a propane heater!) We used it for a winter and it worked...kinda. Smoked back some. The fire isn't supposed to work back up the auger very far because the storage bin is gasketted and airtight. We found that seemed to work ok. Never overfilled the fire pot because we ran it very low or it would cook you out. The noise of the little gearmotor that drove the auger and the computer-type fan drove me nuts. And pellets aren't that cheap. Its out in the farm scrapyard now.

Remote water heaters? I wanna do one, combined wood/waste oil. There's a Yahoo forum about waste oil burners that use low pressure air and siphon oil into the airstream. It works well on oil that isn't squeaky clean and lots of guys retrofit old oil-fired hot water boilers with these puppies. House insurance and maybe some laws require waste oil burners to NOT be in the house (maybe not UL approved) so guys do the remote furnace thing or even have them in the shop to heat the house.

Up here, at least, many municipalities have banned the outside stoves because most manufacturers have gone the way of controlling the heat output by throttling the draft down very low and causing the wood to smoulder and smoke like h*ll. Your neighbors don't appreciate that when you're on a small acreage. But they are cheaper than the kind you're talking about with decent water volume for heat storage. Your idea of putting the heat into a concrete floor to store it was a very good one.

On heat pumps, don't forget that the electrical company is in business to make money. If they can get you to put in one, that means you have to buy your electricity rather than natural gas or oil for heat. But I'm a cynic. They don't give a cr*p if your complicated heat pump gives up on Christmas eve. Or if the power goes off and leaves you high and dry.

By the way, heat pumps will not necessary provide all the heat you need in cold climates. If you don't have enough buried heat exchange the heat pump may not be able to pull the heat out of the ground fast enough. So you need gas or electric backup heat anyway.

You have a great idea in pulling extra heat off your stove to preheat water. I had a co-worker who did this years ago, but he used a heater coil that was right inside of the stove, so it could nearly boil the water. He forgot to allow for overheating, and when the hot water tank got fully hot, the heat started to migrate up the cold line.....until it came to the toilet tank. It melted the plastic flush valve and flooded his basement!!

All good fun. And it keeps the cobwebs cleaned out of the head, thinking about new ideas! Thanks for your contributions!!

Jon.

I guess there's no harm in following it along a bit further. Heating and the particulars of building practices are an important part of country life. To me: Living in the country is about being self sufficient and living independently. You have your own water district, your own sewage treatment plant and in many cases you are able to provide for some / all of your own energy needs if you're clever.

Here in the states the biggest threat to our national security is our dependence on imported oil. If anything comes along to disrupt the supply chain, like the Arab Oil Embargo of the 1970's, we're screwed. If you look at a list of the OPEC member nations you'll see that most don't like Americans very much. We're pretty vulnerable ............

I was looking at Canadian building codes last year and you guys have done something we haven't. You've instituted building energy efficiency standards to reduce consumption. It's more voluntary here. There are government recommendations, and standards within the building industry that we embrace, but it has not been forced upon us by law. You're free to make your own choice ... even if it's the wrong one.

We have a building inspector but he's an old guy in his 80's. About the only time i get a permit is when something i'm doing could adversely affect the environment or one of the abutting landowners. In a situation like that it's always better to get a second view of things to make sure that what you are doing is causing no harm to another. Otherwise .... what you do is your own business. You're free to choose and along with that comes the consequence for your choice. You live or die by your reputation as a builder. (Bad choices have a way of coming back to bite you.)

I was trying to think of how to explain the poly vapor barrier thing to an engineer. We know that if the vapor pressure is greater inside the house the water vapor will migrate outwards. What about the reverse ? There are plenty of times when the outside vapor pressure is higher (like when it's raining). What happens when the water vapor migrates in and hits an impermeable barrier like a sheet of polyethylene ? You should be able to calculate the dew point using accepted formulas to tell you under what conditions the water vapor would condense on the back side of the poly and rot the wall.

My stuff is based more on practical first hand experience of seeing what worked and what caused problems. I stay away from poly and any foil backed kinds of insulation. Kraft faced fiberglass insulation seems to work well. Many consider the kraft facing to be an acceptable vapor barrier. Might be an alternative to poly that a building inspector would accept ?

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I know .... you have to wonder about people's motivations in regards to heat pumps. We're pretty stingy about how we use electricity here in Maine. We've got one of the lowest per capita usage rates in the nation. Part of the whole heat pump thing may be that the electric company is looking to sell more electricity.

Electricity isn't cheap here like it is in other places. The standing rule that i've always used is to stay away from things that make heat with electricity because they're expensive to run.

I've got to wonder about the " Granola Effect " though. For some folks the environmentalism thing is like a religion. They believe what they believe and they are on a mission to make the world a better place. They have no reservations about forcing their way of doing things onto someone else regardless of the cost or consequence to others. In this area they seem to favor electricity and propane because they're perceived as being clean. They are also two of the most expensive energy sources for your home.

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I get the thing about outdoor wood boilers being smokey. They were outlawed here in Maine awhile back. Some of us just smile and nod if you know what i mean.

There really isn't a need for that law. It's not a widespread problem.

The Federal Government's Environmental Protection Administration started dealing with this issue many years ago. They gradually phased in a tier system of standards that wood stove & wood boiler manufacturers had to meet. Tier 3 standards are in full effect now. It's actually a very good thing. See .... higher efficiencies and lower emissions go hand in hand.

I don't know if you ever gone through 8 cord of firewood in a winter with one of the older appliances but that's A LOT OF WORK !

If you can reduce consumption AND lower emissions that's an elegant solution.

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For whatever it's worth : I did a couple of prototypes and some research on the hot water coil for the wood stove. It's designed for moderate gain and spaced about 12" away from the outside of the stove. If i'm just running the stove intermittently it acts as a pre-heater for the boiler. If i'm running it full time in the dead of winter it will provide an 80 gallon tank full of 130 deg water over the course of a day. I've got it valved so that we can run straight off the tank -or- run it into the boiler. There's no chance of it ever getting so hot that it makes boiling hot water. (I did install a T&P relief valve at the high point simply because it's required by the plumbing code.)

It's all just fun stuff. Sometimes helpful to know if you're into the independent living thing.