whole house fan and ivy

More frustration and incompetence on the whole house fan front...... I called the distributor and asked some very specific questions about the dimensions of the fan. After transferring me twice, I did get an answer, but later found out it was dead wrong! I thought about driving to the distributor, but C talked me out of it saying that they should be able to answer some simple questions on the phone but they couldn't. Of course. They did give me enough information to solve the problem however. What is really amazing is that so much basic information is lacking from their website. How do people figure out if the fan will fit without knowing how big it is?

Another frustrating thing is that the company will not refer an installer until you purchase the fan. As I mentioned before, there really is nobody to walk you through this process. I wanted to call one of their experienced installers and pay for a consultation so I could make sure I got the best fan for my needs (they are very different in price, size, performance, etc) and that it could be installed in my attic. Space is really tight up there, so I am not at all certain that it will fit.

After explaining my situation, the distributor gave me two installers to call. The problem(s)? They are both located well over an hour away in perfect traffic, which means that it could be easily over two hours in less than perfect traffic. I have had really bad luck hiring contractors who live far, and it's a deal breaker for me. They just cannot get here reliably. The second problem? The installers are electricians. The unit is a plug-in, so barring special circumstances no electrical is needed. Why are all of the installers electricians when no electrical work is normally needed? I couldn't make this up.

The problem with hiring an electrician is that they are not qualified to put the roof vents in, and very few of them can and will patch drywall. I am completely on my own on this. I talked to a general contractor already (the one decent one we worked with) and he was clueless. He advised me not to put any ventilation in the roof.

Think about this. You have a high powered fan blowing a powerful stream of air into a closed space. That won't work. Isn't that obvious? According to the manufacturer, it is really dangerous for anything with a pilot light and if the air cannot escape through the ventilation, it will escape any way it can which means it seeps back down your walls and can create a breeze in your electrical sockets. Sounds great.

I also worked on cutting back more ivy. I didn't get much because there wasn't a lot of room in the yard waste bin. We were away last week and it didn't get picked up.

Here is a before shot of the ivy. Check out the brown fence peeking out on the left edge of the ivy - that's how you can see I got a little bit done.




Here is an after shot. Not much progress, but a little every week will get the job done.



I also put down 7 bags of wood chips, and my total to date is 32 bags. Here is a before shot. You can see the bags of chips piled to the right.




Here is the after shot - 7 bags goes pretty far. I have been buying the chips at Home Depot, and in contrast to the first year or so of the remodel when I went 2-3 times a week I only go 1-2 times a month. I estimate it will take a year to get the chips down all the way around the yard, but at least I'm making steady progress. I think it is such an improvement when the chips go down.



This has nothing to do with remodeling, but it sure is funny. This is Danny sleeping on the bathroom floor. He likes to sleep on an olive green bathmat my mom got me to match my green tiled bathroom. The mat is way to small for him, but as long as he's happy...... He really was sound asleep like this - I didn't pose him and this is really his tongue!

Whole house fan and high maintenance trees

I am getting really frustrated with trying to pick our a whole house fan. There is nobody to ask - it's a specialty item, and even the one good contractor we have has limited experience with them. Wile he certainly has the necessary skills to install one, he cannot advise me on where to place it or what kind to buy. There is nobody to assess your space and needs and advise you. I've crawled into the 130 degree attic numerous times to take measurements and try to figure out which models could go where. Today the temperature was in the 90's, and I was in the attic for a while. When I came down, I lowered my legs through the trap door and even though the house is significantly hotter than outside (it was probably over 100 degrees in the house), it felt like cold air on my skin because the attic is so hot.

Another frustration is the dearth of technical information on the manufacturers' websites. I don't understand how anyone could select a fan when basic measurement information is missing. In fact, I am wondering how anyone has a whole house fan given how hard it is to select and buy one. In addition to balancing all sorts of vague information like power, maintenance, sound, insulation, etc. there is the issue of which fan can be installed where. Some need a lot of vertical clearance, others less so. The louder ones we would need to install further from the living room, but we have less clearance there. In an place we want to put it, we have to balance what needs to be moved - smoke detector, duct work, electrical conduit, etc. All of this adds varying amounts to the installation charge and we don't have hard figures on how much. Ugh.

We are thinking of removing some or all of the palm trees in our front yard. The prior owner planted 7 of them on the front lawn and removed two city trees from the grassy strip between the street and sidewalk. The trees are such a high-maintenance mess. We just paid $150 to have them trimmed, and almost immediately, another branch dropped. The branches stay hidden in leaves that are wrapped up the trunk until they are ready to drop, and they are constantly in a cycle of dropping. Every month or so, we have to spend precious weekend time trimming those trees and as they grow the branches we are trimming get higher and higher. We had to trim one branch at 9:00 at night when C got home from work because it was threatening to drop on someone or on a car. I would not have picked these trees and don't love them enough to spend so much time on them.

Grass seed and whole house fan

We just got back from 9 days of vacation and it was great. While we were gone, we had the grass reseeded in the back yard. The dogs really tear it up and it was look pretty shabby. It worked out well - we had the seeding done right after we left and by the time we returned the seeds had sprouted. There was more than a week with no 2-legged or 4-legged traffic on it.

I am still working on the whole house fan. I spend 15 minutes to an hour every weekday researching it, and at this point I still get more new information daily. As much as it is frustrating so have yet another complicated house project, I have to deal with the fact that I'm not ready to buy one yet. It just doesn't pay to spend a lot of money on something and end up with the wrong thing.

kitchen table, whole house fan

Today I got the kitchen table and two chairs set up. We have two more, but there isn't really room in the kitchen yet, and the chairs are really hard to get to in the garage. C is really happy to have regular chairs to sit in. The barstools bother his back.

I continue to spend an hour or more every day researching whole house fans. There is so much conflicting information that it is hard to sort it out (like all things house).

Got the garage door in

We got our new garage door finally! It looks so much better and I am looking forward to being able to get in and out of the garage easily now. As it was, I used to pile things up and return them to the garage in a heap because it was too hard to get in there. You had to unlock a sticky pad lock, brace the door with your knee and jiggle it open, lift it up (and hope it hadn't rained recently or it is extra heavy), and then prop it with a stick and hope the stick doesn't go through.

C's comment: "It looks like a real house back here."

The only problem is that they chipped out some of the stucco which now has to be patched. They didn't tell me this until today. The only reason it's an issue is that the stucco is already done, so any patching will be conspicuous. Oh well. We are going to put in a few windows and a door on the garage, so we'll need some patching anyway and we may paint at some point since the color did not come out the way I wanted (I wanted a much richer brown, like cocoa or mile chocolate. )

The other problem is that the motor for the opener is very low - well under 6' - and it is right in the middle of the room, which really limits what we can do with the room. We want to finish some of the space and have lots of plans for it, so preserving the headroom was a really big deal. It was the main criteria we emphasized with the installer. Now, granted, we only asked about headroom for the door itself as we did not know the motor was a factor (neither of us has ever seen it so low), but I would think when someone tells you they want headroom and why that an experienced installer would call this to our attention.

Here is the after picture:

(Only kidding, this is the before picture!)






And here is the real after picture: