The new place, the old works, Skyking blog

skyking1 · Wednesday at 1:19 AM

Thought I would join the fun.
Today's project: Make a spot for a future RV garage. I got out the laser and confirmed it could hit the new side sewer with gravity. Not a problem.
Currently we are pumping to a higher main as permitted. I will let them finish the system before I start to "contribute".

The property has lots of Character, meaning it is sloping a lot and every which way.
I stripped the organics and used it to form a downhill berm. Cut is about 2' at the back corner and the fill is near the same.
That is the side sewer just through our fence on the right. The excavator is hiding on the pad behind the trees. The idea was to hide this garage but keep it close.

I will address that little thin spot between the trees later.
Walk on down the yard. starts to peek out.

from the top of the cut.

I hauled in 35 tons from the nearby hard rock quarry.

looking back towards the house.

These little Doug firs are too close together. I will grab out a couple when they get good and wet this winter.

Plop them in here to patch up the hedge effect.

We got the machine cleaned up and loaded and ready to bug out to a job that I am not doing. I am just doing the CDL part. I'm done with the work BS!

skyking1 · Sunday at 10:09 PM

Warning: Geek post skip on by if you don't geek out on tech.
This morning snapshot:
I have Ground Source Heat Pumps (GSHP) that get the heat from coils of PEX pipe buried > 6' down in the clay that I excavated from the basement digs.
These are the outside loop temperatures, comes in at 56 and the heat pump takes 3 out of it and sends it back. It started out with 60+ summer heat in the ground and now it is working down to the typical 52 degree year round temps. I'll quit right there with the F temps and switch to C temps. I forgot to push that button on those freezer alarms.

The OutDoor Reset (ODR) controls the setpoint. For an outdoor temperature of 6.4 it calls for 26.6
I set up the curve for the ODR on these 4 graph points. I have since tweaked it a bit, those are the first hack at it.

This morning:

The controller does the best it can to match that to the tenth of a degree, by varying Revolutions Per Second (RPS) by the tenth. This is a moving target as it gets warmer in the morning, for example.
The Panasonic twin scroll compressor can operate down to an absolute minimum of 15, at which point the the oiling becomes the problem. Below that it can't lift oil to the upper bearings.
This brings up the second oiling problem. Running below 35 RPS for extended runs will tend to migrate oil out of the compressor and into the evaporator, and the coolant flow is insufficient to bring it back.
The solution is an oil management cycle. When the system is run below 35 it starts a timer and every 60 minutes it will rev up to 60 by default for 3 minutes.
That was making things hard to control with that giant heat spike. I got into the installer menu and set that at 45 RPS for 2 minutes and now it will cruise back on down gracefully.
This was the state of things at 640 AM

he Delta between in and out is 2.1 C. That's the heat delivered to the floors.

It was steady state by then at this load and RPS

Which translates to 4.19 Amps total, including the two pumps. ~1026 Watts.

Yesterday was cool and rainy, and needed a few KWH from the grid to keep things running. The system yielded 37 KWh and apparently we needed 43.
The rest of this month has been a surplus. Today will be a surplus. This is the smart meter interface at the PUD.

About the same time

Sisu · Sunday at 10:26 PM

That does indeed look pretty geeky. With those temp limitations it does not seem a likely fit with a Rocky Mountain winter. They apparently do make heat pumps for deeply minus temps, but so far I've avoided thinking about such things and I plan to continue said avoidance...

fubar57 · Sunday at 10:43 PM

Nice project and lots of toys in the background. I only got 8hrs hoe time in 13yrs

skyking1 · Sunday at 11:39 PM

Sisu said:
That does indeed look pretty geeky. With those temp limitations it does not seem a likely fit with a Rocky Mountain winter. They apparently do make heat pumps for deeply minus temps, but so far I've avoided thinking about such things and I plan to continue said avoidance...

The ground Source heat pump is great in rocky mountain winters. If you can dig down 7' easily that is.
They are not for everybody, you need to excavate a bunch to get the loops in. I had an excavator at my disposal and about 30,000 hours in them ( nods to

fubar57 )
I figure 80% of my time as an operating engineer was sitting in a hoe of some sort.
We held the loops down with Clay " babies" ( get me another baby! Oh that's a nice fat Baby!)

I had the hoe pack and got that wet clay down tight around the pipe. It is the best material for conducting heat, the damp clay.

My two brothers and nephew making sure we got good bedding and no stones on the PEX.
Note the tall lath in the background, those farther ones are the edge of the next loop field to the east. I needed to make a 10' wide slot to bring my sewer out deep. I marked the corners of the field with 8' tall rips of wood.

There is a total of 3500' of 3/4" PEX in 7 loops that are home run into the basement.
Below 6' earth is a consistent 52 F and it is easy to get heat out of that, relative to the subzero air temperatures.
I forgot to mention that the house has radiant heat, with 5500' of tubing under the floors and under the basement slab.

1500' of 1/2" on R10 Heat Sheet insulation.

4000' of 3/8" Pex hammered into aluminum heat extraction plates.

When the water was 26.6C this morning, the floor surface was 22C and the air temperature in the house was 20C. Those are the typical differentials at that outdoor temp.
The coldest it gets here is -5C.
I have programmed the curve at -3C to run a 35C Service Water Temperature. (SWT). I expect the floor temps to get to maybe 24? at that cold a temperature outside.

skyking1 · Sunday at 11:50 PM

Kids have to learn somehow. I put my nephew in the seat and of course he had fun for a while on flat ground with no stress. That's not real life though.
He was in the ditch and I kept offering him time high up on the pile with some pucker factor. Finally he took me up on it.
Here is that side sewer coming out about 2' below basement floor, with all those loops poking through the wall. Note the tall stakes either side of the bench. That is the edge of those loops and it is poor form to dig them up.