Employee lounge at the Sleep Inn in the beautiful strip mall section of Urbana
Jeff and I are at the Passive House training. Things are going well. Cool geeks, incredibly stringent performance standard. Today, we were looking at an assembly that included an R-40 wall (12 inch TJI studs with cellulose, OSB on both sides, then another insulated 2×4 stud wall), R-75 subslab insulation, and R-10 perimeter insulation. In this configuration, an uninsulated bottom plate created a thermal bridge that wasted 8% of the available heating load for the entire building under the Passive House standard. Yikes!
Optiwin makes the nicest windows I've seen. This is a window at a house we toured today. You are looking at a great sill flashing pan. Incredibly sturdy and designed with a counterflashing corner that goes up under the trim. This will be covered with a brown aluminum flashing piece to match the window. All of this can be yours for $100/sf.
Anyway, it’s not all hard work. For fun Jeff is testing the pH of Coca-Cola in the hotel. (That’s pH… not PH for Passive House. Get with the program!) According to Jeff this was necessitated because they have been planning on stepping up to kegs for Kombucha. The keg guy thought the acid levels in Kombucha would corrode the kegs. They’re made for Coke, so if that shit has a similar pH to Buchi, then the kegs will survive.
Internal Nauhaus Institute memo: By the way, Scobie didn’t make the label. They’re going all high brow looking for she-she crowd or somethin’. Scobie Lives!!
Anyway, here are the Coke study results:
High tech Coke testing contraption
Coke pH leveled out after the demons were excorcised
Just another mad building scientist
– Clarke
Tags: Chapter 4 - Design
Where did you pick up the ph tester?
I think the lighting of Jeff’s face with the scteen reflection is scary.
Where did you pick up the ph tester?
I think the lighting of Jeff’s face with the scteen reflection is scary.
I would love to have a sketch of the sill detail, please.
I’ll make a sketch of what I think is happening. The main thing that I liked was the quality of construction and the thick gauge of the metal. It was really sturdy.
I bought a used Omega pH datalogger on Ebay. Then I bought a new temperature RTD and pH electrode for it directly from http://www.omega.com/.
Jeff can you use your pH tester electrode on soil?