David Meiland

You could have a plumber install a meter for you inside the house just downstream of the shutoff valve.

If you have a shutoff valve on the downstream side of your meter (i.e. in the crawl space or basement), close it before you go to work, read the meter, then read the meter again when you get home. If the meter moved, something's up. It's suspicious that the meter started working right the day the water company came to check. I wonder if they fixed something and didn't tell you.

I really can't tell what's going on there, but my questions are, if one heat pump is somehow providing heat for water AND heat/cooling for air, how are the two coils piped from the outdoor unit? Are there controls and valves that operate one of the two zones at a time, do they both operate together, or what? Or, is it simply that water is piped through the outdoor unit in a way that allows it to harvest some heat from the unit when in cooling mode? Seems like that too would require valves/controls so that you're not sending your incoming water outside to get colder during the winter. Hell, I don't know, but someone else will.

Are you saying that water lines ran to an outdoor unit? Or that they ran to a heat exchanger (presumably that box on the wall in your indoor photo) fed by one outdoor unit? In your photo of the dead grass between the two outdoor units, there appears to be some sort of tubing connecting the two. The stuff looks old enough that I suspect a home-made design, but could be completely wrong.

Looks like a thin, foil-faced "insulation" from the U.K. Yes, you can buy stuff like that in this country, and usually with bogus claims of especially high R value in a very thin space. Some of the manufacturers have been dinged by the federal government for false advertising claims. The bottom line is, with typical fiber insulation materials (FG, cellulose, mineral wool, etc) you can get R3.5 - R4 per inch of thickness. With some foam insulation materials (2# spray foam, rigid polyiso) you can get R6.5 per inch or so. You can't get more than that, unless you start buying stuff from NASA's suppliers. There is some small advantage to the foil face in some circumstances, but the reality is that almost no one, either in mainstream building or in the high-efficiency niche, is doing much with foil faced anything. The key is THICKNESS. If you have skinny rafters, you probably need 2# foam.

Is your concern that the stovepipe goes through a panned return, and that it will pull smoke into the system, or that the return is depressurizing the room and pulling smoke out of the stove itself? Or something else?

No ****ing way.

At least.

You're safe at $2950. You can always include a hidden conditions clause.

My cost certainly would have been higher if I had to drive across the rock just to do this job, but on the other hand, I am already at the high end for work like that and it could possibly be done by a handyman at much lower rates. In fact, most of the time, in this market, that would be the case. My secret is that the guy who works for me is very quick. If I set him on something I need to be ready for him to finish it sooner than I expected and need further instruction. He went under that deck, threw in the jacks, grabbed the posts, and dug the holes while I was trying to clear a couple of voicemails off my phone. Kind of like Mike's wife, inspecting the house and finding the problems while he naps in the truck.[] John's in BC, very close to here. Doubt he has to go 42" deep... we go 12".

We did something just like that last summer, right next door to a job we were already on. They had 4x4 posts supporting a deck on precast pier blocks, that had been buried over time by landscapers and dirtmovers, and had rotted at the bottoms. We tossed some screw jacks under the deck, pulled some nails and removed the posts, dug out the holes and removed the pier blocks, threw some sonotube in and braced it, mixed some concrete and placed it, stuck some chunks of threaded rod in, stripped and installed stand-off post bases, cut the posts shorter and reset them, added a few Simpson post caps. $800 total. Very easy access. About $100 in crete, tube, hardware, the rest in time (less than a day over a period of 2.5 days). We threw the dirt on a piece of plywood and the owner threw it in her garden. Hard to see what the conditions are from your photos, but a guy could easily get stuck under there for 2 full days, and it could be more involved. Maybe you want 18 x 18 footings with wood forms and some rebar in them. Maybe the access is horrible. Maybe you need some cribbing. It could get closer to $2000. I would give them a range, and use the higher number in it somewhere.

Click to Enlarge 114.59 KB

Got me curious enough to Google. From http://www.mitsubishielectric.ca/en/hva ... orUnit.pdf Looks like you have a "multi-split" installation there, one outdoor unit, one ceiling unit connected to a bit of ducting, one wall unit, one stat for the whole thing. The ceiling unit is circulating indoor air through it, no outside air connection.

Jerry, your second group of photos... first photo... that's the Washington State Energy Code sticker, and it's showing that the house has two systems. The second one is listed on the "cooling" line but it's listed as a heat pump. Beats the sh*t out of me why a builder would put in ducted air AND a mini-split, but they did. There is almost certainly a second outdoor unit somewhere, or else maybe that thing in the attic is an electric furnace and is mis-represented on the sticker. But, you need A/C in Yakima, right? So my money's on another outdoor unit. What was in the electrical panel?

Jerry, your 1st picture is the "outdoor unit" and your 4th picture is the "indoor unit" of a mini-split heat pump. The two are connected primarily by refrigerant lines, although there is also a cable to provide power to the fan in the indoor unit. As Bill said, there is no backup or strip heat. The indoor unit in your pic does not connect to any ductwork, although there ARE mini-splits that use short lengths of ductwork (at some efficiency loss compared to a ductless installation). If there is warm air coming out of a ceiling register then there is something else going on. There are systems where one outdoor unit supplies more than one indoor unit (again at some efficiency loss) and I suppose it's possible that your installation has one outdoor unit supplying that indoor unit AND a ducted unit in the attic, although I would not expect to see that (more likely to find multiple indoor units of the type shown in your pic, fed from one outdoor). What you could do is shut off the breaker supplying the outdoor unit and see if both heat sources switch off simultaneously. As Bill also said, these things work well. You can look at the specs for BTU output at given outdoor temps. Here in our moderate climate they are the bee's knees, probably 250-300% efficient a lot of the year. In your climate I would expect to see the high heat models, which are still quite efficient. How big is the house? Is the indoor unit in an open-plan area? I might expect that to serve up to about 1000SF of reasonably insulated house.

There might be plenty of unscrupulous behavior by inspectors, but what evidence is there that regulation reduces that?

I think it may be a firmware issue, or some other flaw. Put a brand new battery in mine and the battery indicator shows low right away. I've given up trying to return them for one that doesn't do it.

How would that window be correctly installed? Anyone got detail photos that show it?

You guys should have been hitting the commercial job sites, stealing bigger nails. My dad never had any really big ones.

Hard to tell how thick the foam is, or what type, but I don't think I'd be concerned. If the foam is not thick enough to be above dewpoint on the warm side, or has gaps/voids/separations in it that allow conditioned air to condense on a cold surface, then it will be much less forgiving than it would be with fluffy (or no) insulation. If it's open cell foam, vapor can migrate into the foam until it finds a cold surface, under some conditions. Some problems with spray foam can be impossible to see until there is a major problem and water comes running out. There are probably a lot more cases of sealed attics than there are floors, so it is fairly easy to find stories about attics with spray foam and moisture problems. The main issue I see there is that it will be a nasty job to remodel, repair plumbing or wiring, etc. In the future, that insulation job will get damaged by tradesmen trying to do what they need to do, and it's unlikely it will get fixed. I would only spray-foam something like that if I had brought EVERYTHING completely up to date first.

As far as I know, the GE Protimeter stuff won't be repaired by the company. They will replace it if it's still on warranty, or offer to sell you a new one at a slightly reduced price if not. At least that was my experience. My first SM failed barely within the (two year?) warranty period and they simply sent me another. A few months longer and I would have been SOL.

You did better than a lot of stuff I've read about. People are embedding flanged windows into walls with layers of foam and siding, without thinking about replacing windows in the future. Sounds like you thought of that.

People are inventing all sorts of ways to install windows. Many of them look like time bombs to me. In the future, when some carpenter has to peel back layers and layers of materials to replace a failed window, it ain't gonna be cheap.

There is a lot of info out there on "innie" vs. "outie" windows for folks building thick-wall homes. Many seem to prefer innie or in-betweenie.

Meant to address to Randy, not Tom. Simply providing information, he can decide if it's useful or not.