Category: Mechanicals

From day one we wanted to have hydronic floor heating, our architect had used Warmboard before and seemed like a no-brainer over other approaches. 1 1/8″ plywood sub-floor with channels for 1/2″ PEX and a thin layer of aluminum on the top to her spread heat evenly. Looks like Warmboard offers a turnkey package now that includes heat loss analysis and an appropriate boiler, but we just got the system design, panels, tubing, and manifolds from them (through the architect as part of their package). Then our plumber helped us pick out a boiler and installed that and the tubing and manifolds and controls.

I think a fair number of people don’t bother with zones for hydronic heating, and with high efficiency condensing boilers they are most efficient when you don’t use a thermostat and just make your adjustments at the boiler, pretty much set it and forget it. But we like sleeping in a cool bedroom, having a toasty floor in the bathroom, and being able to dial back areas of the house we are not using (just two of us in the home), so we opted for five zones with thermostats, (1) master bedroom, (2) master bath, (3) living area, (4) upstairs bedrooms, and (5) upstairs loft. Warmboard produces a really nice set of plans and instructions that show the panel layout and also the tubing layout, highlighting where custom grooves/channels will have to be cut with a router (they provide templates). There was a little back and forth with Warmboard re zones, and also a panel layout adjustment to make sure channels were running perpendicular to joists in one room (1 1/8″ is more like 1/2″ at channels, so I don’t think you want those running parallel to floor joists).

Despite the fact that the architect was familiar with Warmboard there were a few issues with their installation of the subfloor panels. First, they used the plans provided by Warmboard as a general guide, but did not follow them closely, resulting in the need for additional routing of channels (adding cost and reducing effectiveness of the aluminum layer) and creating a couple of “cold spots.” Perhaps following an outdated set of plans they also installed a few panels with channels running parallel to the floor joists, I caught this and asked that they be pulled up and re-done. That required ordering some additional panels, which took some time to come and interrupted/complicated further work while we waited for those to come in. Finally, the installer ignored the Warmboard guidance that a 1/8″ gap should be left between the ends of the panels, the reason for which became clear later on as panels expanded and caused some buckling that did not subside. We still have some very noticeable high spots in the floors.

Our construction manager was worried about hydronic (PEX) tubing getting damaged during installation, so we completed the interior (blown closed cell) insulation before tubing (a little under 3000′) was installed. After installation and testing we insulated under the main level, encasing the tubing below the subfloor in closed cell foam. We then protected the tubing by covering the floors with the cheapest 1/4″ 4×8 material we could find.

For a boiler we selected a German engineered and made wall mounted Viessman Vitodens 200-W B2HB 57 (57 for roughly 57kW I think, which is about 200 kBTU, we did not do any formal heat loss calculations, I suspect it was overkill going with the largest version of this boiler). The boiler provides hot water to the hydronic heating system through a Viessman mixing valve and three circulators connected to three Warmboard manifolds. The manifolds seem quite nice, though the site glasses for flow rate adjustments get hard/impossible to see through pretty quickly. Each loop has a Stellantrieb 24 volt actuator that is controlled by one of two Taco ZVC403s, which are in turn controlled by five Nest thermostats (I failed to install wiring for these and construction manager/installer didn’t catch this, so we had to run wires after drywall was up, which was a pain).

As I mentioned before, the boiler could control everything if we only wanted to have one heating zone, with that approach you would not need the thermostats or Tacos or actuators, and you could still dial some areas of the home up or down by adjusting loop flow rates. The boiler has an outdoor temperature sensor and you tweak slop and offset to adjust a “heating curve” that determines how hot the water delivered to the hydronic heating system is. Each manifold has temperature gauges at input and output, so you can see how much the temperature is dropping, which indicates how much heat is being left in the area being heated. The installer did initially make a mistake with circulators for the hydronic system, with the manifolds having actuators that are opening and closing the circulators are deadheading, in some cases frequently/for extended periods of time. The solution was to install circulators that are designed to handle deadheading, in our case they used Grundfos ALPHA1s. I ordered a Vitoconnect 100 from a local supplier and installed it so I can monitor and control the boiler remotely (installer did not know much about Viessman equipment, a Viessman tech helped with some things, but I don’t think he really knew about remote monitoring/control either).

The boiler also feeds an 300 liter (79 gallon) Viessman Vitocell 100-V indirect water heater. The construction manager floated the idea of tankless water heaters, but then you need to plumb gas to those, where are you going to put them, and they are expensive. For me was simpler to just have an indirect tank that is large enough to fill up a bathtub. Indirect tanks are simple, super low maintenance, and last longer than a gas fired water heater, and are not too expensive (though ours was made in France).

There was a little bit of a learning curve with this equipment. Took me awhile to figure out that the hydronic system shuts down (power to circulators is cut) when the DHW loop kicks in. And when it is warm enough outside the power the the hydronic system circulators is shut off. The settings for the boiler are pretty extensive, I am sure all of this can be controlled/changed.

Then we had a couple of leaks that were bad enough to cause damage to the sheet rock in the garage area below the mechanical room. First leak was coming from the condensate drain line at the bottom of the boiler, and drove me crazy trying to figure out what was causing it, took lots of photos, took the boiler apart, calls to Viessman, etc. Turns out the problem was that the installer connected the drain line from the boiler directly to the neutralization box (our drains are PVC, not sure we really need the neutralization box, but at the very least we are being good citizens by not dumping acidic condensate into the sewer, and this boiler generates a lot of condensate).

Our construction manager got started with and was still running a plumbing business, so this was a pretty trouble free trade for us. We knew that we would have to pick out some things before the rough could start, and we were on top of that, and in addition to picking out things in most or maybe all cases we ordered fixtures and roughs and other so everything was on site and the plumber could proceed with the roughs.

First part of the rough in was waste lines. For that we had to finalize the location of toilets, sinks, bath tubs, showers, dishwasher, and washing machine. The plumber also coordinated with the sub putting in the heat pumps system (for condensate lines).

The architect plans were pretty close for all of this, but we did work with a kitchen designer on the kitchen design and while we were doing cabinets for the kitchen we increased the scope to include bathroom vanities and the laundry/mud room too, so we used adjustments that had been made in those drawings.

I guess I would describe the aesthetic we were going for as modern European, maybe a touch of Japanese minimalism, and choices here were mostly consistent with that.

Early on we decided to use wall-mounted toilets for three main reasons, (1) ease of cleaning, (2) clean look, and (3) ability to set any bowl at a comfortable height (we went with 16.5″ to rim, which is about 17.5″ to seat top, I am tall, wife is not so tall). After we doing some homework we settled on Toto Aquias, which appear to have been discontinued (wall-mounted version, anyway), but seemed to get good ratings for doing what they are supposed to do without extra fuss, and are elongated (and not rectangular, definitely not a fan of square toilets). I ordered them from supply.com (now Ferguson, my approach on fixtures was to figure out what we needed and order online for most things). Toto makes (or made?) an in-wall system/tank, but Geberit is the 800 lb gorilla in this space so we used Geberit in walls, ordering them from Amazon.

For consistency we used Toto sinks, same cotton color/glazing as the toilet bows. I initially ordered LT540G sinks, which are 21.25″x14″ undercounters, but when they arrived I realized they were enormous, so sent them back and ordered LT542G sinks, which are 19″x12.375″, which is a plenty big for our vanities, which are 22.25″ deep. Same sinks for the 2.5 baths, so four of them. These Toto sinks are a similar shape to the Kohler Ladena, which I liked and was ready to order (easy to clean/pleasing curved shape), but I figured might as well have the same glazing and as it turns out the Toto is available in a slightly smaller size that I think works better (I’d prefer to have a little extra vanity top space than a giant sink).

While I am taking about sinks, for the kitchen we wanted a decent size single basin undermount stainless sink. We could have spent more money on a Franke, but the Elkay sinks seem to be high quality and made in the USA, so for kitchen and laundry room we went with Elkay stainless sinks. For the kitchen an EFRU311610, which is 16 gauge, has tight corners (low radius in the lingo), center/rear drain placement, 30.5″x16″ at the bottom and 10″ deep. In the laundry room, which has a Durat (like Corian) countertop we went with a PLA19190 drop-in sink, and to keep things simple for that sink used an Elkay faucet, their LK2000CR, which fit with no drama.

For the master shower I thought that use of (somewhat expensive) Schluter system components would save on labor, not sure that really panned out, but the Schluter system stuff is nice and I am a sucker for German engineering. So I did my own (curbless, something we specced early with architect, which was good, because shower floor area had to be dropped, doing that later would have been hard to impossible) shower layout, including a prefabricated bench, and ordered Schluter Kerri-Line linear drain and a solid grate. I also ordered Kerdi prefabricated/sloped shower tray, several shower niches, and some membrane, corners, etc. It was harder to find this stuff online, I think I had the plumber order most of it from a local plumbing supplier.

For the master bath tub I locked on to the idea of getting a Duravit Paiova tub early in the design process. It comes in a bunch of different sizes and configurations, a few of which are available in the USA. The one I wanted was a whirl tub, which of course was a discontinued model in the US. But I lucked into finding one, must have been a leftover, it was steeply discounted and must have been sitting in a warehouse for awhile, I grabbed it and it works great, and it has both water and air jets.

For the guest bath shower/tub we were working with a bathroom that was 6′ wide (before sheet rock and tile). Seems like a lot of tubs are 5′, but I managed to find one that was 66″ long, had a nice sloped back for relaxing, and a good size tub bottom so not treacherous to use for a shower, also nicely with a tile flange, and like the Duravit acrylic. An Americh Kent 6632, which was also available with jets and other, but for the guest bath kept it simple and just ordered the tub from a local supplier.

Plumber wanted to set tubs right away so he could get working on drain plumbing, but I pushed back and insisted that radiant tubing be installed under the tub locations, than 1/4″ cement board on top of that, then the tunes were set. I should have done a better job protecting them during construction, with blue sticky film, next time.

For plumbing fixtures we wanted something clean looking and wanted to use wall mounted faucets in the bathroom for (a) the clean look, (b) ease of cleaning, and (c) increased vanity top space. Not surprise but the product line we liked the best was from a German company, Hansgrohe, the Axor Citterio M line. Smooth, simple, modern lines. Weird there is not really much out there that compares to this, a lot of the other modern stuff has a lot of sharp angles, not my taste. So I cobbled together the pieces we needed, ordering fixtures and roughs from supply.com and even picking stuff up on eBay and Amazon (everything in brushed nickel). Showerheads I have loved Speakmans since my college locker room days, so we went with Speakman Icon S-2252 shower heads in brushed nickel. These shower heads provide really good flow and coverage and I don’t think I even pulled the (2.5gpm) restrictor out. We put the rough at 85″ above the shower floor, with a 6″ Hansgrohe Shower Arm the shower head is at about 6’7″, so tall people should not need to duck. Rainhead is a Hansgrohe Raindance 300 on a 12″ Grohe arm.

For the kitchen faucet we went with a Hansgrohe Axor Citterio in stainless. We wanted something with a spray head, but don’t really like the spearheads that pull out of the faucet. This is a cool look and a little simpler.

The connection to the water main was 1″ copper and we opted for a 3/4″ meter over the standard 5/8″ meter, a little more expensive, including recurring cost, but wanted to make sure we have plenty of water pressure. Most of the plumbing rough was with Plex tubing, color coded, red for hot, blue for cold, and brown for hot-water circulation loops. Speaking of hot-water circulation loops, plumber put in two of those (I think), one to the kitchen, and second to the master bath. I think these loops can be an energy-waster, and to increase the efficiency the plumber installed a Taco SmartPlus circulator, which monitors hot water use and only circulates at times when there is normally demand. We went through a green certification process, and I think this was required for us to get the certificate we got (more on that in another post).

Also worth noting that the plumber used a cast iron drop/waste line for the upstairs bathroom, which line comes down in the wall separating the powder room from the front entrance. PVC drops can apparently be noisy, so it is good to use cast iron where the noise could be noticeable.

With the house mostly dried-in (there are still leaks that persist to this day) it was time to get going on rough-ins. The Turkel purchase order identified MEP (mechanical, electrical, & plumbing) as a potential consultant add-on, but not sure we found anyone that we thought could do a good design job across these three very different areas without adding a lot to the project cost. So after discussing with the construction manager we committed to a design-build approach, so the MEP subcontractors “designed” and built.

For electrical, an initial design decision that we made was how we wanted to handle lighting control, with the choice being between a central “brain” with loads all wired to that brain, I guess you would call that home run load wiring, with low voltage and/or wireless to keypads, vs a more distributed system with conventional high-voltage wiring and probably wireless for doing anything fancy with controls. Our prior home had a Vantage system with low-voltage wiring to keypads and it was a little buggy and I think at least two dimmer modules/power supplies failed and were expensive and time consuming to replace. Programming was also proprietary, they make it difficult or impossible for end users to make programming changes so you are handcuffed to a contractor if you want to do anything.

That said, I reached out to a local building systems design/integration/build shop to get a proposal for a lighting control system. I think I was probably also already thinking Lutron, so no surprise that their proposal was for a Lutron Homeworks QS system, $33k for lighting plan and system and nice keypads, with that cost not including line voltage wiring. Seemed like a lot of money for just lighting control for a 2500 square foot 3BR/2BA house, and same problem with Vantage with software only made available to integrators. My wife is also, very reasonably, big on technology layer going on top of conventional systems, rather than replacing, so if the technology fails you are still in business. So I planned to have the electrician do a normal rough-in and then use Lutron RadioRA2 switch gear/controls. At the time RA2 Select did not exist, so I did Lutron’s online training to get access to the programming software. During the build Lutron came out with RA2 Select, which for our application did everything I wanted the lighting system to be able to do (remote control, scenes, and schedules) with more simplicity (100 devices was not a limitation for us given home size), so the RadioRA2 training was a waste of time. I think I added up the cost of the RadioRA2 switches and hubs we would need and it was maybe $7k or so.

I do wonder if my cost evaluation of Homeworks was fair, I never asked the electrician if home run wiring of loads would be cheaper than conventional wiring. But if cheaper it is probably not a lot cheaper.

We planned to do mostly recessed (LED) lighting and I went a little nuts looking at all of the different options, easy to find fancy small apurture LED lights for $400+ per light. Glad we did not go down that expensive path, electrician recommended we use regular 4″ airtight housings/cans (I think they were Junos), lots of options for trims, with Par20 LED bulbs. Our last house had 6″ cans with Par30 bulbs, which is a little large/retro, the 4″ trims fit nicely with the modern aesthetic.

We were a little concerned about the coolness of LED lighting, but the electrician brought over some bulbs to show us options and we were happy with 2700K LED bulbs. He installed (dimmable) TCP 2700K Par20 LED bulbs throughout, 110% beam angle and estimated life of 25,000 hours. At this point (early 2022) we have been in the home over three years and we have not had a single bulb fail yet. We did have some problems with dimming/flickering in one of the bedrooms, electrician immediately knew it was a bulb/AHCI issue and changed bulbs out for a different brand, problem solved.

Speaking of AHCI breakers, we lucked out and got our building permit right before code changed from only requiring AHCI breakers in bedrooms to pretty much all interior areas. AHCI breakers can be finicky, and they are a lot more expensive than regular circuit breakers.

The architect did quick electrical plans with minimal input from us (just go with recessed lighting everywhere) and these plans were used for permitting. Later I made my own lighting/switching layouts, and these were tweaked by walking around and discussing with the electrician.

We did stick with recessed lighting in almost all of the living areas, only exceptions to this being:

• Pendant for the dining room (Poulsen PH 5, in hindsight probably should have put two of these in, dining room table is 2.4 meters long)
• Surface mounted foyer light (purchased locally, 9′ ceiling height and didn’t want pendant hanging down)
• Stair step lighting mounted low on stairs for safety/visibility (WAC WL-LED310)
• Surface mounted area lighting for enclosed stairs to lower garage/storage level (Tech Lighting Cirque, small size)
• Surface/ceiling mount lights in walk-in closets (WAC GLO LED, small size)

For electrical outlets I did a walk through with the electrician and we decided where to put electrical outlets. He raised the idea of putting them in the baseboards, but plan was for Fry Reglet trims to create a baseboard reveal (more on that elsewhere) and that would have complicated, so we just went with standard height outlets throughout, tops of the boxes are just under 16″ above the floor.

Additional electrical roughs included:

• Kitchen appliances, for that our kitchen design had already been completed and we had already picked out appliances (including induction cooktop, which required a 50amp 240 volt circuit), so we were able to pretty accurately place the wire roughs
• Gas fireplace
• Ceiling fan
• Smoke/CO detectors (bit of a sing and dance on these, local electrical inspector and security system installer both said Nest Protects did not meet code due to lack of wired interconnect, I had to get a letter from the State Building Inspector to get the local inspector to sign off)
• Bathroom exhaust fans (Panasonic)
• Bathroom mirrors/lights
• Washer/(gas) dryer
• Boiler and HVAC (for latter, heat pumps, a sub-panel for the condensers, plus wiring for air handlers and split units)
• Master bedroom whirl/air tub
• Doorbell (which I should have done, Ethernet more important than a few low voltage wires)
• Exterior floodlights (should have done more with exterior accent and yard lighting)
• Line voltage wiring to digital speaker locations
• 60 amp circuit to garage area for EV charging, plus an 8/3 to bring 30 amps into the mechanical room for a generator (or send 30 amps to something else in the garage area)

Service was 200 amp underground from pole to panel, some large loads in the home but hard to justify 400 amp service (and local utility might have pushed back).

Finally a word on lightning/surge protection. We skipped lightning rods, I don’t like the idea of “inviting” lightning to find ground through a wire in my house that is anything less than ginormous. But we did do some things to protect ourselves from power surges, installing a Type 1 device at the meter (a Leviton 50240-MSA, which can only clamp up to 50kA, so not going to stop a direct lightning hit, but 50 kA is something …) to deal with surges coming from outside the home, and at our main panel we have a Eaton Type 2 device at the main panel, I think idea of that is to deal with surges caused inside the home, and I suppose also anything that makes it past the Type 1 device. We have some Type 3 devices for computers via UPS devices and some power strips around, but with the whole home protection I passed on surge protection options provided by the HVAC subcontractor, etc.