Root Cellar Latch and Hinges

The latch assembly

The latch, hinges and inside-release push rod

The root cellar door as it is presently configured. A latch and some honkin' hinges'll round it out, eh?

After trolling for months on eBay I finally found (and won for about $40) just the sort of handle and hinge arrangement I've been hoping to find for the root cellar door. I worked for a bunch of years at a Whole Foods Market doing various physical plant kind of stuff and was familiar with this sort of hardware meant for big heavy doors. Since we built the root cellar I've been inspired by the "antique cooler" vibe and knew I'd come across the right hardware sooner or later. Buying this sort of thing new you'd pay a couple hundred dollars just for the latch assembly; probably the same again for the hinges.

The rod with the round disk at the end is a push-release that allows someone inside the root cellar to activate the latch and let themselves out if somehow the door were closed with them inside. A nice safety feature.

We've got a lot going on right now and installing these parts is not super high on the priority list, so I'll look forward to putting them on when there is a little more time. They came from someone out in California. I wonder what their story is.

Lights, camera... LIGHTS!

Felton rendered this ugly tangle into an elegant flow channeled into the electrical panel

The light in the root cellar. This is particularly satisfying to have working because it is otherwise super dark. Now we don't have to mess with headlamps to find what we're looking for

Lights at the peak of the second floor ceiling

On Friday, Felton did the final piece of the house electrical wiring project by wiring in all the various circuits to the electrical panel. It was a bunch of work and he worked longer then his usual afternoon session in order to complete the work he had started. With great fanfare he put the coverplate back on the panel and then proceeded to flip the breakers one by one.

With this, most of the light switches and outlets throughout the house are now live, including the smoke/carbon monoxide sensor system which must be wired in by code. In a couple of cases the breakers wouldn't flip, so Felton has to come back and trace the problem, but hopefully that won't present any major obstacles.

Temperatures

The thermometer shows the temp outside (48.4), the temp inside (61), the humidity inside (55) and then the time and date

This whole super-insulated house project is one big experiment in heating and energy use and I'm curious to see how the experience pans out. I'm also not sure what to expect. And so it is that I've been watching with interest how the house has been maintaining temperature over the last couple of months as the fall has progressed and the outside temps have dropped.

We have not yet turned on the heating system or started a fire in the woodstove, but I suspect we'll be doing so pretty soon. This morning was the first time the house dipped into the 50's after bumping around the the low 70's and into the 60's over the last couple of weeks. I'm pretty happy that we've been able to get into the second half of October without feeling the need to heat the house. I've lived in houses in Massachusetts where getting though September was always the big challenge, so being where we are I am pleased that we've not needed to heat yet.

To actually fire up the radiant heat system we need to get the boiler to sense demand via a thermostat which we have not yet installed. I'll be working on that tomorrow.

Today's weather held out the possibility of being sunny, which could warm the house up through solar gain, but at the end of the day it was still only around 61. I look forward to doing some solar gain experiments to see how much increase in house temperature we can expect on a sunny day.

On a related note, I've been keeping an eye on the temperature of the root cellar. Through the summer months of July and August the root cellar pretty much stayed constant around 60 degrees, but started to cool off through September down through maybe 55, and now in October has dropped a few more degrees. It seems to me that the root cellar responds pretty readily to changes in air temps outside, so I'm thinking that it might make sense to install smaller diameter inlet and outlet fittings on the air supply and vent pipes. They are currently 4" pipe and I think we could go down to 1" pipes and still provide enough air movement while constricting the rapid movement of large quantities of air.

Wrapping up Insulation

The temperature chart in the root cellar

My insulating get-up. Note fangs

Insulating the walls and ceiling of the root cellar

The rim joist area before blowing the cellulose in the hole

Insulating was a lot of work and we finished it up on Thursday. This included insulating the root cellar roof and walls so that the earth temperature is the predominant heating/cooling force in the space. I tracked the temperature in the root cellar over the course of the spring and stopped early in July when it seemed to have leveled off around the high 50's/low 60's. I'll be very interested to watch what happens to the temperature now that the surface earth temperature is mitigated and the deeper-down earth temperature remains unhindered in its exposure.

After a couple of different tries I finally settled on wearing a dust mask, swimming goggles and a cycling cap to ward off the worst of the cellulose insulation blow-back in my face. Just as the cavity being filled nears capacity, there is often a powerful backwards shot of insulation that shoots right back towards the person doing the insulation. Its only manageable if you are well protected.

The last bit of house insulation was doing the spaces around the rim joist under the first floor--basically the band of area that is the first floor/attic ceiling around the perimeter of the house.

At this point the house is finally insulated, but we are going to do a just a little more cellulose blowing-in in a couple of spots, namely the walls of the bathrooms and a few inches under the second floor. This will be done for sound attenuation purposes. We want to minimize the sound transfer between the first and second floor and the bathrooms. Its not too much work and we decided that we'd just do it even though its a little more effort.

Root Cellar

Today we wrapped up a couple of day's work with me building the door and Joe building the shelves for the root cellar. Previous to this we insulated the shared walls between the basement and the root cellar to isolate the warmth of the basement, such as it is, from the root cellar.

I'm quite happy with the both the door and the shelves. My inspiration for the door was the typical design of a walk-in refrigeration unit such as you'd see in the back rooms of a restaurant or supermarket. They are big insulated doors which have a really wide flange around the perimeter of the door that mates with the outside wall when the door is closed. We installed the door and it worked smoothly; when you are in the root cellar you see nary an inkling of light, so it seems to seal pretty well. With a couple more tweaks it'll be just right.

Joe's shelves are beautifully crafted,industrial strength, and sized nicely for the various canned goods we will be storing. At this point we have shelves on two sides of the root cellar with room for more should we decide at some point we need more storage space.

I'll build a sliding latch for the door at some point, but for now I'm just glad we have a functioning root cellar that allows us to finally store our various goods such as saurkraut, olives, canned tomatoes, ketchups, chutneys, carrots, beets, cabbage, potatoes, celariac, and many other goodies. It is a treat to finally have the root cellar in operation. The temperature in there this evening was 37 degrees. The temperature outside is hovering just around zero. Fun.

Oh yes, we also put in the door on the west end of the house facing the garden. It looks great with the funky green color we've chosen and it sure beats the plastic tarp we were getting by with.

The wood stove has proved to be a godsend. With very low temperatures it makes working in the house bearable, if not quite pleasant if we get it really fired up.

Upcoming: The electrical panel goes in; the roofers come to install the standing seam roof; Joe and I begin building in our secondary perimeter walls along the inside of the house.

Stay tuned...

Members of the team, and the root cellar

The Supervisor

The crew

The root cellar rafters going in

The root cellar enclosed

Going at it

Today Joe and I started actual work on the house, specifically the root cellar walls which complete the structure of the basement. After months of rainy cool weather we are finally being graced with muggy humid weather in the upper 80's. Its a beast, but it feels great, like summer. We took a much needed swim in the Mad River at lunch and then again when we were done in the early evening.

Any new project takes a little while to get into a groove, and given that, we were able to get set up and rolling pretty well. By the end of the day we had both of the root cellar walls in place. Tomorrow we'll tidy up the walls and build the roof over the root cellar, which will allow for us to move onto the sill and work on the first floor deck. Completing the root cellar will also prepare us for the earthwork and grading which will happen next week.

Insulation and radiant tubing

Today was Joe's first day on the job and it went great. We were getting ready for the concrete slab being poured sometime in the next few days. We had to build a retaining perimeter around the root cellar area and a thermal break at the doorway up to the bulkhead. We also laid down the plastic sheeting, then installed 2" rigid insulation. Once that was done we installed the pex tubing, by which we'll have radiant heat eventually running through the slab. It all went really well, but took way longer then I would have imagined. Hats off to Joe for sticking it out on a long day!