We’ve been slow to start getting our park strips in order, but with summer feeling like its turning into fall, its time to start getting plants in the ground. Our yard need a lot of work at the moment, and the park strips seem like the right place to start… They’re smallish well defined areas, something that is psychologically easy to to tackle. Right now we’re focused on the Ash street park strip, its sunny and always will be. With the street to the south and limited options for planting trees due to a stop sign and power lines it is destined for full exposure as well as moderate foot traffic. So the organizing theme that we are working with is that we are planting a small meadow. Last weekend we made a trip out to Bosky Dell Natives and picked out some plants to start with, some Streambank Lupine, Western Columbine, Idaho Fescue, and Great Northern Asters with tufts of Kinnikinnick.

We prepped an area to start with this afternoon, but the ground is extremely hard, so we’re going to wait for a few days until after the incoming rain to see if it softens up a bit before planting. Our plan is to get a start with this, and then later this summer fill out the park strip with more native grasses and wildflowers including Indian Paintbrush and Common Camas.

Cardoons

Our cardoons are blooming and who knew, they are bee magnets.

This morning, we got our blower door test to find out for real how tight our envelope is. Turns out its pretty good, our infiltration rate is 0.16 air changes per hour. Infiltration is an important factor in controlling heat loss, the number 0.16 air changes means that enough air seeps into our house through windows and vent openings and other seams in the house every hour to replace 16% of the inside air with outside air. For many houses infiltration is one of the primary sources of heat loss, and one of the main strategies of passive house construction is to keep infiltration extremely low. For us, because we have such a tight envelope, infiltration makes up only about 3% of our heat loss, our big windows are where most of the heat loss happens. The down side to keeping infiltration so low, is that it limits the amount of fresh air that gets inside, we leave windows open all summer but in the winter the house will be mostly closed up… and thats where an HRV comes in, allowing you to bring fresh air into the house without the associated heat loss because it pre-warms the incoming air with heat taken from outgoing stale air.

The Test

To start with, all the windows in the house need to be closed, then a tarp is fitted on a frame that covers up one opening in the house… For us, it was the main entry. Inside that tarp are two openings, a large one that a fan sits inside of, and a small one that a thin tube slips through. The thin tube attaches to a manometer and allows it to measure the pressure difference between the inside and outside.

The fan is then turned on sucking air out of the house until the pressure inside is 50 Pascals lower inside than out. At that point you know how much air the fan is moving in cubic feet per minute, and you know the volume of your house, so its just a simple calculation to find your air changes per hour at a 50 pascal pressure difference (usually noted as something like ACH50). Then once you have that number, divide it by 20. That gives you the air change rate when pressure is pretty equal inside and out, and that is the number that is the most useful in calculating heat loss.

With the hot weather this last week comes ripening tomatillos, tomatoes and peppers… And also brings thoughts of energy efficiency. Now that we have been in the house for four months, I thought it would be interesting to put weather data from this spring into our energy model and see how its predictions compare against actual usage.

Cold Weather

Just to start with, these numbers are fluffy. To get actual usage, I took July’s usage as a baseline since it was our lowest month and figure that anything above that is a seasonal adjustment. That would include both our heating need, and additional lighting due to early sunsets. To find heating degree days (HDD), I took data from a weather station in our neighborhood and used base 55 because the internal load of the two occupants keeps the house warm when the outside temperature drops as low as 55° F. This doesn’t take into account solar gain, or heat produced by appliances. So with that, here are some very rough numbers:

As rough as those numbers are, predicted and actual do correlate fairly well and back up my hope for a sub $100 annual heating bill (my model predicts about $95 for this last winter).

Hot Weather

We don’t have any sort of air conditioner, so everything we do to deal with the heat is passive… Unfortunately, we haven’t gotten any permanent window covering solutions in place yet so our solar gain is a bit problematic when the temperature outside gets into the 90s like it has been the last several days. We are able to cool the house off pretty quickly at night and in the morning just with opening windows, but the afternoons can get a bit warm inside.

Testing

On Friday, in preparation for the Build it Green tour, we’re going to get our blower door test to see what our air changes look like. We’ve been holding off finalizing things for LEED because our yard still needs quite a bit of work, but Earth Advantage would like to complete an energy audit before the tour so that our performance score can be advertised to the visitors.

Neighbors

Some friends of ours are building a residence in the neighborhood that they expect to be certified as a passive house and are also blogging about the process. They’re also on the Build it Green tour so go take a look and say hi.

We’re thrilled that Harpoon House is featured in in this month’s issue of Portland Monthly, its for sale pretty much everywhere around town and can be read online. Anna Sachse did an incredible job writing the article and Lincoln Barbour took some great photos that really capture the space well.

Build it Green Tour

We’re also thrilled to announce that we are going to be on this year’s Build it Green Tour. The tour is a showcase of sustainable building in the Portland area and this year’s themes are small homes, affordable construction, and passive house standards… We’re two of the three and close to the third (passive house), so needless to say, we have some incredible company on the tour. Highly advised for anyone interested in green building. It’ll be on September 25th and tickets are discounted if you purchase by August 12th.

Aphids

The tulip tree just across the sidewalk from our yard has recently been suffering from a tremendously bad aphid infestation. Apparently its a multi-year infestation that sort of blooms every summer and has gotten so severe that the honeydew from the aphids causes us to have to hose off the deck and the sidewalk every few days to keep them from getting too sticky. We’ve been releasing ladybugs to try to take the aphid population down and will probably keep releasing them… Its an extremely large tree and the only way we know to reach most of it is with flying insects.

The past several weekends have been spent in the garden creating raised herb beds, (at long last) constructing our compost bin and transforming the hard-packed, sod-covered, weed-choked corners of our yard into Harpoon Gardens. While our worm bin has been able to handle some of our kitchen waste, the addition of a new compost bin was long overdue and well-timed for the declining fava bean plants and pea vines that have just come out of the garden, as well as the scraps from all of the summer produce that we have been lucky enough to eat out of our front yard and the farmer’s market. We constructed a simple wooden frame with chicken wire sides to allow our future compost pile to get lots of oxygen, and placed it near our back deck for easy access from the kitchen.

One consequence of adding footings to stabilize our pergola was that we no longer had a fully plantable strip between the structure and the north side of our garden. Since we have a fairly small lot to begin with, and about half of the lot is shaded by the large tulip tree on the east park strip, we are attempting to leave no sunny spot unused. Our solution was to build two 32″ raised herb beds. We have incorporated many herbs into the front slope of our yard, including rosemary and thyme, as well as annuals like basil and cilantro into our vegetable garden. With the addition of our two herb beds, we now have room for French tarragon, anise hyssop, lemon thyme, marjoram, winter savory, oregano and garlic chives. We also added a layer of soil and planted chamomile in between the beds, as well as blue hyssop, which have edible blue flowers and help attract bees.

We have noticed many ladybugs around the garden lately, which are a welcome sight. Unfortunately, they may be more present because we have an abundance of aphids - a source of food for ladybugs. Our neighbor pointed out that the honeydew that we have noticed the past few days on our back porch is caused by the aphids that have taken up residence on our tulip tree. For the next few weeks, we will try hosing down what we can reach of the tree with a strong spray of water every few days to see if that helps.

Ladybug feasting atop a cardoon bud.

Soleil explores the semi-feral parts of the backyard.

Just a quick update, nodding onions, self heal and yarrow are in full bloom on our entry ecoroof. This ecoroof was a bit of an experiment. Sedums are the standard go-to plant for ecoroofs, hardy drought tolerant succulents that thrive in poor soil. As a result they’re pretty much always used, especially on ecoroofs that aren’t irrigated. So for our entry, we decided to try something that doesn’t have any sedums and instead went with an assortment of native wildflowers and grasses. As this progresses we’ll see what is able to make it through the summer and what pops back up again next spring, but right now its all looking great. The Douglas Asters are yet to bloom, and it looks like we planted a little too late to establish the Oregon Iris and Camas in time for them to bloom this spring so hopefully they’ll go next year, the strawberries looked happy right away and continue to do well.

We were able to take advantage of the great weather this weekend to finally paint our window frames and on Monday our contractor had a couple guys come out to paint the windows that require being up on a tall ladder. We’ve always intended our window frames to be black so that they visually recede behind the siding, but since installation back in October we have been unable to get everything together to get them painted. So for the last eight months our window frames have been popping with the off white of the factory primed coating.

In order to get everything painted, we disassembled all of the operable pieces discovering that many (especially the sliding doors) were shockingly heavy.

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Painting the basement doors

Back at the beginning of construction, we needed doors fast so that we could secure the basement as well as possible and would hold up in the weather. So we picked up some fiberglass double doors. The problem with these doors, also the problem with (as far as I know) every inexpensive exterior door, is the trim used to hold the windows in. Our first complaint is really just aesthetics, they have a really decorative shape and were molded with a faux wood grain as if someone might think that the strikingly white plastic trim is really craftsman woodwork. And now that we are in painting mode, we found out that the surface rejects all but the most toxic primers. We’ve done the best we could to do without using carcinogenic finishes in our house, but it looks like we’re going to give in on this half a square foot.

Ground cover

We also went to go pick up some ground cover to complete our entryway. Hopefully this summer the gaps in our steps and between stones in our pathway will fill in with the variety of thymes (mostly elfin) and Silene uniflora that we planted.

We went up to our upper ecoroof for the first time in two months over the weekend. This roof is entirely sedums in an attempt to make it as low maintenance as possible and they were planted by throwing piles of cuttings around and then waiting to let them root. So now coming back up two months later, we’ve found everything thriving and surprisingly red. The same species are down in a little patch on our lower ecoroof, but those stayed green. The redness apparently has to do with lack of water/poor soil, the upper roof has gotten the same amount of water as the lower (only rainfall) and has the same soil, but is way more exposed and probably dries out much quicker.

We went out and purchased an extension ladder on Saturday morning and are really excited to be able to get to the top more often. Our plan was to install a library ladder to the outside that would allow access from our lower ecoroof, but have since changed our minds and decided that what we really need is a hatch that opens up from our bedroom. Not something we can actually afford right now, but it’ll be the first big project once we have a little money to work with.

Wood Finish

This weekend was also a big weekend in that we finally started dealing with all of our exposed untreated wood around the house. All of our windows, interior doors, trim, and handrails are raw wood and we’ve probably put off finishing them for too long already… For now we’re only tackling the first floor with the upstairs to follow once we’ve recovered. After having felt pretty settled in the house we’ve already managed to make the downstairs feel like a complete construction zone by masking off all the windows and trim and moving all our stuff into piles in the middle of the room. But the plan is to do one coat per evening and be done Tuesday night.

It’ll be nice when the city stops breaking things in front of our house. Its all in the name of a modern sewer (no more terracotta pipes from the 1890s) which is a pretty needed infrastructure upgrade, I’ve just never gotten used to having the house shake every morning starting at 7:00 while the crew busts up the street surface.

Missed Opportunities

This is all part of the Oak Basin Sewer Project, which is just a project to replace one of the oldest sewers in the city that will end in having our streets patched with a pretty standard asphalt surface. Along Ankeny, green street facilities were constructed as well as pervious pavers along the sides of the street…  These are things that should have been done everywhere that work was being completed, or better yet the Bureau of Environmental Services could have followed the lead of a pervious street project completed in Westmoreland where they replaced six hundred feet of asphalt with pervious pavers. This would be a convenient time to undertake such a project because half of the street is already being torn up, and were they to come back later to install pervious pavers or green street facilities there would be costs that could have been avoided plus material wasted in the process.

I suspect that that kind of street redo is fairly likely some time in the future because that is the direction that Portland is heading. Like many old cities, Portland has combined storm and sanitary sewers in a lot of neighborhoods and there are policies in place to separate out the stormwater and manage it where it falls. That is what the Ecoroof Incentive Program is for, that is what the Clean River Rewards Program is for, and thats what the use of green street facilities is for. But for most of the project area there wasn’t any work done to make this separation, so runoff from the streets will continue to flow into the combined sewer. The result is that we are ending up with a new sewer but not really a better, more responsible one.

We’re slowly making progress with the various pieces of finish work that need to be completed, and recently we finished off painting our stair risers. Not the cleanest painting job ever… And it took a little while to take care of, but we were able to knock it out by ourselves, with paint we already had, costing us basically nothing. For months the risers have been just unfinished MDF waiting for us to pay attention to them. Additionally, there are a couple of walls that had been painted during the first round, but have since been torn apart for various reasons including things like digging for a buried light switch that had been accidentally covered with OSB sheathing (its in a shear wall) which was then covered with sheet rock. So despite the patches, those two walls needed some new paint.

Our Current To Do List

There’s still a fair amount of stuff thats currently hanging over our heads that we know needs to get completed before we’re going to feel solidly moved in. My big priority right now is shelving, Katherine’s is getting clear finish on our remaining exposed wood… Both of those are going to have big impacts on how we use our space. Since moving in we have been living in a sea of boxes, we’ve worked it down to be more of a medium sized lake but we still have a serious amount of books and tea that need a more organized home. And as for the wood, we have a lot of it, and large amounts of it are still raw. Our windows, window sills, handrails, and exposed beams are all in need of some sort of protective coat and until that happens we risk staining things through general usage. Plus it would be great to be able to put some potted plants up on our window sills.

Then once we’re on top of those, we’ll be tackling window coverings which will be a great improvement over the fabric that we currently have pinned up. I’ll be making something that is basically a roman shade that is operable from the top and bottom so that we can balance a need for both light and privacy. And then there is the paint we need to put on the outside of the windows. Once we have a little money to spend we’re going to get our contractor back out to deal with the four windows that require being up on a tall ladder. We can deal with the rest by ourselves and hopefully will in the next few weeks.

Also

Seen from our sleeping loft a couple of days ago: