Vinyl Windows offer the lowest cost to performance ratio of the the three major types of windows. Vinyl has a low co-efficient of thermal transmission relative to Aluminum and while they are closer, a properly designed vinyl window (with multi-chambered extrusion) will reduce the amount of cold transmitted through to the interior of the home.
Multi Chamber Profiles
Multi Chambered Vinyl Window
Multi chamber profiles create an insulation barrier of air that reduces the transmission of cold to heat. The optimal window profiles use two and preferably three chambers between interior and exterior faces. The multi-chambered profiles also increase the strength of the profile tremendously over a solid extrusion by increasing the surface of welded seam.
A typical welded profile will yield between 9 & 20 inches of welded seam. Some multi-chambered designs offer as much as 25 inches of frame and 14 inches of sash weld seam. This results in a weld that is stronger than the extrusion itself. Some manufacturers used to offer windows with mechanically fastened corners instead of welded. These would invariably separate early and begin a freeze-thaw attack or heat induced expansion that would shorten the life of the window and reduce its thermal performance. Avoid any mechanically fastened or glued corners. Always opt for a multi-chambered , welded corner window.
Colors In Vinyl Windows
Initially, vinyl windows were offered only in offered in white. This was to keep the cost down, but it was also to prevent obviating the issue of fading and color degradation. Over time, white PVC will become yellowish with age. Some extrusion manufacturers counter this by adding some blueish color to the polymers to balance this out. If you are driving around, and see some vinyl windows with a sickly looking yellow cast these were probably lower cost extrusions and you will see the result.
Additionally, the UV is the light spectrum most affecting the color degradation so the higher your altitude, the faster the process of color degradation will occur as UV at altitude is unfiltered. Some manufacturers now offer a rage of colors including darker browns. Be very wary of darker colors, especially at higher altitudes (Rocky Mountain Regions) as you will likely see a rather quick degradation of the color. There just is not a long enough history with darker colors under longer term exposure to intense UV. PVC formulations are improving, but more time is need to judge the effectiveness of the color imparting materials before taking the plunge.
That said, I have seen some beige colors under service for several years in the Colorado region that seem to be holding up quite well. One final caveat, PVC is subject to becoming brittle under long term exposure to high heat as in a desert environment. In these areas it is critical that you get a high quality, multi-chambered extrusion to counter the effects of long periods of exposure to high heat.
Maintenance of Vinyl Windows
The most attractive feature of vinyl windows is their low maintenance. Vinyl windows do not require any exterior maintenance other than washing. Do not paint them; ever, the chemicals in the paint will likely reduce their longevity…and your neighbors will want you drug-tested.
All in all, vinyl windows are a tremendous value. I have had aluminum windows, wood windows and vinyl and I preferred the vinyl windows. It is of course a matter of choice and budget.
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PVC Form-A-Drain is a new product I ran across on while researching my page on basement foundations. The
system is composed of a hollow PVC drains shaped like a rectangular tube. The drains serve as the concrete forms for the footers for the basement or crawlspace foundation and I suppose even for slab-on-grade foundations. The systems has corners to join the straight sections and outlet systems to connect to 4″ round PVC perforated or solid pipe to drain the water away from the foundation.
Foundation Perimeter Drain and Footer Concrete Form
In addition to acting as a perimeter hydrostatic water drain, it can also serve as an evacuation vent for radon gas. This is what caught my attention first and foremost. You get three functions for the labor cost of a single installation. For me that made this something to give serious consideration to.
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Tweet ThisMany people have a negative view of concrete as a building material that supports green building objectives. It is true that concrete does take a lot of energy to produce and transport (to smaller sites where on-site batching is not feasible). Concrete does consume water during the manufacturing process. But those are narrow views that do not hold up under critical examination.
LEED sustainable design principles have five disciplinary focuses:
- Sustainable sites
- Water efficiency
- Energy and atmosphere
- Materials and resources
- Indoor environmental quality
Concrete is recognized as a green building material in terms of qualification under LEED certification principles. The five ways that concrete can help support green building objectives:
This is a video that explains how concrete fits these principles:
- Concrete creates sustainable sites.
- Concrete enhances energy performance.
- Concrete contains recycled materials.
- Concrete is manufactured locally.
- Concrete builds durable structures.
For residential construction, the main guiding principle for design over the last 60 years has been on affordability. Trying to match the overall cost to produce the home to the ability of the local market’s economic base to afford the home.
This led to design decisions solely focused on initial costs that did not account for life cycle analysis that would dictate different decisions if the installed and operating and maintenance costs were analyzed over a specific life cycle. If fact, not one has ever sat down and really focused on what is a reasonable economic life cycle to build to when it comes to residential structures for the mass market.
There have been some studies, but the market has never really focused on this previously in establishing a target sustainability for building homes to. The focus has been on costs, profit to the developer, profit to the builder and profit to the financing entity. to be fair, there are so many layered costs dictated by housing regulation, that has made it almost an impossibility to make these considerations very high in priority. Part of that is attributable to the structure of regulations that deal with the development of housing for the larger market.
But, getting back to concrete. Because it creates very durable structures, first and foremost, lands it in the sustainable category. It would be hard to argue that building a home that lasts 2-300 years is not worth the expenditure of resources required to build that home. Properly built and maintained, this is definitely an achievable goal, we have examples all over the United States and Europe towards this end. One thing about concrete is that it is not a very friendly DIY material to work with. The skills, and equipment necessary typically exclude it as a DIY project.
Next, final production of concrete occurs close to the site of installation, again this is in conformance with LEED principles. Concrete can also contain recycled concrete as an aggregate although there are greater opportunities to expand this practice. The highest profile example of large scale concrete recycling back into a redevelopment occurred in the late 90′s and early part of this decade in the redevelopment of Stapleton International Airport from the main airport in Denver into an urban mixed use suburb. All of the concrete from the runways was recycled back into this and other construction projects in the Denver urban landscape.
To be sure, there are new technologies and ways of thinking, such as precast panels used as basement walls.
Precast Concrete Basement Walls
So analyzing concrete as a sustainable material is perfectly valid and in the case of residential foundations and homes built in high-risk areas (Florida and coastal hurricane zones) certainly support green building objectives. There is no currently available material that can offer the durability of concrete under the stresses of soils that are subject to expansion forces that can destroy a foundation. Building a foundation that can be viable for 2-400 years allowing the recycling of the basement over that lifespan, further establishes the viability of concrete as a green building material.
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Tweet ThisPresent Needs
Floor Plan programming is the beginning process to designing your home. It is where you sit down and specify the various rooms that you wish to have, the number of people that will live in the home and the capacity of the various rooms and their essential functions.
For instance, if you think about your master bathroom, and both of you work, it’s essential function is to provide enough space and facilities so that you and your spouse can both get ready for work at the same time. Continuing on this path, if you have 3 very young children all within a year of each other, you had better certainly provide a bathtub for all to be bathed in at once now, but you had better allow for additional facilities for the time when they mature and have to all go to school at the same time and have to all get ready at the same time (hint jack & Jill bath, separate tub area 2 sinks). See this page for more advice on decorating a bathroom.
Future Needs
If you do not sit and do this planning before hand you may very well design a house that will suit your needs today, but fail to do so five years from now, requiring either a new home or a major remodel. It will be less costly for you to plan this functionality and facility requirement in advance.
Even if you think your budget will not allow for all the possible contingencies, it is best to proceed in this manner to really focus your priorities to ensure you have designed a home you can live with.
This planning should occur before you engage a designer or Architect to produce the actual floorplan. They will be charging for their time to make revisions, so having a program that was well thought out and discussed in advance will save you money at every step of the way. The most costly thing to impact your project will be changes so proper planning from the start will go along way towards maximizing your dollars.
Once you have committed to a plan, stick to it. At the very least, make your second step be the construction of a budget. More about that next.
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Tweet ThisDesigning Your Home
Before beginning the process of designing your home, you need to do some upfront visioning about the type of home you want, the budget that you are comfortable spending, and the program requirements that the home has to meet.
Program Requirements In Home Design
The program requirements that your home must meet are the functional needs that your will require. It is important to think about these in detail at the beginning of the process to help you keep focused throughout the process. The reason for doing this early on is that you will have less of a chance of being distracted into decisions that will, in the end, not meet a basic program requirement. This is especially important to do before beginning the process of drawing the Architectural plans.
Whether you buy an off-the-rack set of plans or opt to have an Architect design your home from scratch, to some degree that will involve paying someone to produce the drawings from scratch or modifying an existing plan to conform to your program requirements. Time spent in planning on the front will reduce the time to accommodate your changes/requirements in the plan and that translates to money saved.
Detailed Functions
Your program requirements begins with the number of people that will live in the home (present and future), the facilities therein that will be required to service those people and the broad outline features that you desire in your home. It is alright to load up on features, but a more useful method of doing this is to do a matrix of features with a priority assigned (1-5) you assign to that feature.
Functional Space Requirements
Include the size of the kitchen, number of full bathrooms the number of 1/2 or 3/4 baths, any powder rooms, media rooms, family rooms, number of bedrooms, number of sinks in the bathrooms, number of showers occurring at the same time, etc.
Design Features
Include items that will enhance your enjoyment of the house, the comfort and usability and the level of customization. This can extend to items such as:
- Home Theater Systems
- Home Automation Systems
- Tankless Water Heaters
- Multiple Dishwashers
- Alarm Systems
- Heat Pumps
Once you have developed both a functional requirement and a features matrix, you can start the process of thinking about the budget and budgeting for these specific features so that you can start to relate them to the overall budget.
The Value of Bubble Diagrams
Bubble diagrams are a useful tool in the beginning stages of designing your home. Before you can begin defining the spaces with walls on the floor plan,you need to understand the relationships between the spaces as you picture them in your mind.
Architects begin with a bubble diagram. The bubbles represent interior spaces and their importance and relationship to each other. You can do simple ones with your Open Office Draw tool (free download) or the Microsoft Paint program on your Windows computer. These will be easier to change and manipulate, but you can do them with plain old pencil and paper also. You can also do them by hand.
Defining Relationships Between Spaces
Larger bubbles mean larger rooms, overlapping bubbles are spaces that are accessible from another space. You can also let every bubble float free and draw connecting lines to indicate access and flow.
This exercise will save you time and money later if you are drafting your own plans or paying a designer to do them. This process is critical and precedes the others and is reiterative ( it is cheaper to make mistakes here) but it will help you clarify how you want the space to relate and flow and will be very helpful as floor plans are drawn. Go ahead, have fun and draw away.
Once you have completed these exercises, you are ready to start thinking about building plans.
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Photovoltaic Shingles
Massive changes are coming to an energy code near you. Under a Federal Law under consideration in the Congress (H.R. 6279). The law requires the model energy codes establish minimum targets of increases in energy efficiency as mandates of the Federal government on the order of :
30 percent in editions of each model code or standard released in or after 2010
50 percent in editions of each model code or standard released in or after 2020.
The law also mandates that if the body that governs the IECC model energy code that is the basis of almost all energy codes in the various states do not achieve these goals, the Secretary of Energy is commanded (within 12 months) to institute a Federal energy code that achieves the mandates. The law will have the effect long term of mandating that all new buildings have solar panels, photovoltaics or wind turbines installed on all new construction.
The law will also mandate the enforcement of the new mandates on states could risk the loss of Federal funds. It also does not fully fund the regulations and structure to oversee all the enforcement that will occur under this law.
Funding shall be considered adequate, for purposes of this paragraph, when the Federal Government provides to the States at least $50,000,000 in a year in funding and support for development and implementation of State building energy codes, including for training and enforcement.
Of course, the problem with all this is that what is good for one area of the country is not good for another, but the imposition of Federal regulations on issues that are local in nature many times distorts the solutions and results and brings massive inefficiency to the markets. The other problem, it adds costs to the system that will in all probability far exceed the laudable goals.
There are provisions in the code that will make it necessary for all new “buildings” to consume “zero net energy”, by the year 2050. Well this will be enormously expensive to attain. If they include residences in this provision, imagine the cost of adding solar and wind systems and what that will do to the cost of building that home. It will exclude many first time home buyers from being able to purchase or build their own home and will drive rents up dramatically.
You should get educated about this bill. It will start to have an immediate impact in the next 2-4 years. It couls cost you personally and it is not necessarily the best method to move the country towards energy efficiency. In fact there is no technology that gets us to these goals without dramatically higher costs of energy. This bill is more about a stealth method of impsoing limits on green house gasses than it is about energy efficiency.
Solar, Photovoltaic, Wind and other methods of generation that are available to make a new building “zero net energy” have not reached the stage where they can fill this role in an economically efficient manner. The reason we do not have them in place in a massive way is that the market is waiting for the economics to change for that to take place. No amount of government intervention can force that to change. Only massive investment in the technologies and adoption that brings economies of scale that lowers the cost of these technologies can do this. Otherwise we could end up with massiv energy inflation along the lines like we have seen sscoiated with food and corn ethanol. This is the example we must all consider when moving down this road.
There are other methods of moving forward towards these goals. The better approach would be to embody incentives towards the investment in these technologies. Tax credits and other mechanisms, modulate investment into technology in a market efficient manner and avoid the kinds of distrotion you see with mechanisms like mandates and regulation.
Expanding the credit for Solar generating systems will do more towards these goals. Adding a credit for the installation of wind turbines and establishing a registry for manufacturers to concentrate information on available systems would increase the use of this technology. There is a serious shortfall on readily accessible information on wind generation systems and there is apparently a lack of independent independent research and ratings for systems that consumers like to see before committing to such a large investment. There will also have to be a change of heart in zoning commissions and HOA committees to allow expanded use of Solar Panels, Wind Turbines and Photovoltaic. This is one area that Federal Legislation could be of benefit in supporting and expanding investment in these technologies.
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