Plumbing with PEX and Tankless Water Heaters

Pex, pex pex, how do I love thee, let me count the ways.
1. Never a gonna light anything on fire plumbing with PEX.
2. No meth enthusiasts are going to rip it out of the walls to sell for drug money.
3. So, so much faster...especially with the cordless expander tool.

But seriously, PEX is freaking awesome, especially the Uponor brand.

Here's my super awesome and easy to read plan.

Can you see why my physic students hated my writing?

Tankless Water Heaters

We decided to go with the Navien brand. This is a Korea made unit with
some interested differences from the Rinnai and Aquastar brands we have
used in the past. These units have stainless steel heat exchangers (instead of
copper on the other brands) and a built
in buffer tank and circulation pump. That means, no cold water sandwiches'
and you can turn the flow all the way down to barely a drizzle. Try that with
a Rinnai unit.
The first gen of these units had problems but I've been convinced that these
second gen models have fixed all the issues. Lets hope.....
The unit on the left is for the basement apartment and the unit on the right
is for the main floor of the house plus the laundry room.
Yep, we are separating the water heaters. There will no longer be a single
crappy Home Despot water heater in the attic supplying hot water to the
entire house. BTW, at one point that was three kitchens and seven baths!

The tankless heaters are condensing units that required 3" venting.

It was a tight fit but we managed to get them all in one joist bay.

One of the pex manifolds.

For some reason I forgot to photo graph the other manifolds.
Remember that these are in-progress shots so no, the PEX tubing isn't
completely supported yet.

Those four 1/2" runs on that manifold run to the kitchen and guest bath
of the apartment.

Bath Tie In

I decided to not completely re-invent the wheel on this retro-fit plumbing.
Originally the two 1/2" copper lines fed the guest bath and the kitchen.
Now the kitchen has its own line.

Hopefully this means that someone can be taking a shower and someone
can be using the kitchen sink at the same time.

Above you can see the start of the utility chase.
Here's a better shot.

Water, gas, electricity all through out the house and nary a joist will have to
be drilled....I hope.
Yes, its starting to get ugly in the chase and the wires are all temp supported.
When we are done running all the utilities we will build out a wood frame for
the chase and attach everything for real.

The Tool That Makes This All Possible.

Man, if you've ever done a lot of hand expanding on 1" PEX you will view
this tool as a godsend. Annnnnd the great thing about this tool is, used models
sell for barely less than new ones.
Trust me, if you are going to do a lot of Uponor PEX you need one of these things.

The Dark Side of Uponor PEX
Like every pro will tell you. Don't use product lines that are not supported locally...
I ignored this advice and wow, now I've paid the price, twice...
Since the only way for me to get Uponors Products is from PexSupply,com I have
to order EVERYTHING online and wait......
As a first time Pex'er what are the chances that I'm going to figure out every
single PEX widget that I'm going to need?
Slim and None....
My PEX-ification of the house has had to stop twice now while I waited for
widgets...

Up Next:
Yep you guessed it, more catch-up posts.
 

HVAC Post #2 Almost Done!

When we last left the HVAC saga everything had come to a halt because we couldn't
figure out how to get the two trunk lines through this opening.

Here is our admittedly kludgy solution.

Ya, I know. We did some custom tweaking to the 8by8 trunk line for the
one system and went down to 8" semi-rigid for the other.

Here's how it looks after it comes through the wall.

We used 6" branch ducts made of alum-a-flex semi-rigid ducting.

I know that what we've shown is not 100% ideal but its the only way that
two non-pros could figure out how to do it.

But ya know what? The parts of the house that were always cold before
are now nice and warm.
The ladies of the household really, really, like the new vents in the bathrooms.
Ahhhhhh, warm bathrooms.

As for that dang gas line....

Moving that stupid line out of the way caused a major reconfiguring and
re-running of gas lines for the entire house!

 So much fun....
Are we done yet?
Almost, we have to finish supporting the duct runs and insulating the plenums
and then, of course, have it inspected...

Up Next:
More catch-up posts!

Yay DryRot!!!

In a load bearing wall!! Yay!!

Here is what the outside of the wall looked like when I pulled off the siding.

I might not be an expert but I don't think
that looks super good.

From the inside it looked like this.
See that lead pipe right there?
See all the dry rot around it?

One joist bay over...

See that freaking pipe on the roof
up hill a bit from the chimney?
That pipe is connected all the way through
the house.
Then, a some point some jackass just cut
the bottom of it and left it in the walls....

After yanking out all the punky wood the
wall looked like that.
Not a lot of meat left on those joist ends...
So an untold about of rain water must of been dripping down
the pipe and rotting the wood out underneath.
I'm betting that if the wood wasn't old growth doug fir that
the damage would of been a lot

Ya that's a seriously comprimized 4by6 header over the windows.

 
 

This is what the studs for the wall of the house looked like.
There is supposed to be a 2by4 there where theres just a little twig of wood...

Here's the big pile of crap wood I scraped out of the area.












See that window on the right.
It was set into the wall so wonky that we had to
pull it out and set it correctly.

Check out the awesome 1"+ of caulk they used on the trim
on the above window!
That's quality stain grade work right there.
















Here's a look at the repair I did.

I sistered on select structural 2by10's to each of the rotted joists.
The repair appears to be pretty robust with the floor above the area feeling much firmer.



 

Super Duper Victorian Exterior Restoration part 1

This post could be subtitled,
A Paint Job Only An Insane Person Would Agree Too

Since the end of August we've had a crew of painters helping me prep the house for paint.....
We've been removing the paint inch by inch by inch, with heat guns and carbide scrapers.

We followed lead safe rules all the way. Plastic tarps entombing the areas we are working in.
Then during the day the paint glop gets swept into a hazardous waste container. At the end of the day we hepa vac off all the plastic, then roll it up tightly for reuse and then we hepa vac'd off the surrounding area just to be double safe. Our mantra has always been, paint chips only on the tarp.
As far as I know there has never been a release of lead paint dust, chips into the environment at large.

The Painting Methodology
First we take as much paint off as we can with the heat guns and scrapers.
Second, we Jasco every single inch of the exterior of the building.
Then on the now lead free building we did a light sanding with orb sanders.
This is the time where all the dry rotted trim is fixed, missing trim is fabricated and things are put back the way we think they should of been in the beginning.
Then, the entire house is coated with a layer of penetrating epoxy from Smith&Co.
Then on goes a quality oil based primer.
Caulking wherever its needed.
Two coats of color finally.

I've heard it said that a good paint job is 90% prep.
Check Out This Prep Work

All of the following shots are after just heat scraping.

 One of the great things I like about these guys
is that they do the entire bottom 10' of house before they call for the scaffolding. Why pay for scaffolding when you don't really need it?



South Side of House

 Crap new wood next to the old growth redwood.
Gee, which type would you pick to build a
house out of?

Fugly, Those BS boxes below those BS Ionian
columns...

 Big Front Window.

 Porch

 The house was red at one point.

 Porch Ceiling.
The wood here is just gorgeous...

 More Porch

North Side












The above shots was how the house looked the morning that the scaffolding company came.

Up Next:
Wait till you see how absolutely beautiful the old growth redwood looks after its stripped fully and sanded....









 

HVAC Madness!!!

The first of many catch-up posts.

Holy Moly Batman have we been doing a lot of HVAC work.

Because our stupid network attached storage drive also chose to fritz out on us at about the same time my computer went belly up you're going to have to imagine the following sequence.

Hey, look, its the old furnace room, lets demo the entire heating system and remove it.
Yay, that was fun.
Then a LOT of work (and money) later...

Here's the close-to-being-finished furnace room.

We took out one old over sized furnace and in its place are two new two stage condensing furnaces.
One furnace is for the basement apartment the other is for the main floor of our unit.

Take a look at all of that sheet metal work! Lucky for me (not him) a good friend of ours who is a custom car fabricator got laid off work just as I was about to start this project, he's a good with the sheet metal.

Question: Since I am a madscientist and he works for me, does that make him my minion? Or how about my Igor? When he's not working very well he's my mexi-can't. Is that going to get me in trouble with the PC police?

We built the furnace stands, and figured out how to do all that crazy ducting in as small a space as possible. The vents on the sides are the intakes and on top of the furnaces is the uh, out-take? We never could decide what to call that.

Shot of the two trunk lines headed towards the back of the house.

We had Golden Gate Sheet Metal make up the rectangular trunk lines because on this stupid coast nobody stocks them...in the Midwest or Northeast these things are standard, not here...










Closer up shot of the duct craziness.

We had to do a lot of custom on the spot metal work to make all this fit.

















If you peak behind the furnaces you get.

The intake manifold for the basement apartment.

A shot looking through the basement intake plenum.

We did it like this so the furnace would pull air from both sides of the apartment.

















The furnaces have to be vented with 2" PVC.

Here's how we decided to have them penetrate the one hour fire barrier.

Then they run inside a joist bay.

 And exit on the exterior wall in these cool dual concentric vents. I think its a much cleaner look than four separate pipes sticking out of the wall with elbows on them.










Here are the two trunk lines that run towards the front of the house.

The branch ducts come off the top of the plenums so the entire branch runs are all contained within the joist bays.











Still many problems to solve.
Like how to get two trunk lines through this much space.

Yep, all that plumbing is just exactly right in our way!!!!
Hurray!
We're going to have to move the gas line and the sewer stack we believe.









That's it for now.
Next up, (maybe) painting, or Halloween or...

Sorry!!

Yes well, its been a while since we've updated the house blog...
Its just been work, work, work, around here I tell you.
Well that, and my computer crashed and I've been so busy I haven't had a spare second to fix it until recently.
Have you ever been so busy that you think, 'Okay now....when exactly was the last time I showered..?'
We've had non-stop house work going on around here.
A whole heaping helping of paint prep going on.
There has been a ton of work on the HVAC in the basement.
Of course there was Halloween.
Then more HVAC and more paint prep and on and on and on.

Oh, and I've learned that my back is much, much worse than we thought. Yay!
Got a recent MRI that shows that I basically have no discs left between L4-L5 and L5-S1. As in, its almost bone on bone....yay...  :(
Also, one other disc slightly higher up is starting to bulge and causing a different type of pain.

Oh, and, remember that whole, 'Can we finish the basement apartment and get it rented out before we totally run out of money thing...' Ya, we're running out of money....hurray...

Coming Soon
I'm going to do a burst (I hope) of blog posts that will catch us up.