The Finishes
So. All said and done here it is: We love it. Not everything has worked the way we had planned, of
course, and we made some pretty big mistakes as well.
1. We paid a lot of money to our "general contractor" and he really didn't do anything that we
couldn't have done ourselves. We thought we would need someone with some experience to help
the project along; what we got was one step better than a thief. This was easily the most expensive
and frustrating mistake that we made.
2. Next was the perimeter drain, or French drain. We did not install one and we wish we had.A
perimeter drain moves underground water away from the foundation of a building. In our case we
do not have footers in the traditional sense so underground water is able to find its way through the
tire walls. And when the ground gets saturated water comes right into our middle U. Several times
each spring we would come home to standing water in the middle U. The tiles and mud around the
bottom of the room were mostly ruined So, we retrofitted a drain system. We dug a trench around
the back of the house and ran it downhill all the way to the ditch on the edge of our property. We
put some gravel and perforated pipe with some landscape cloth into the ditch and 'presto' problem
almost completely solved.
The original battery box was bad news too. It was above the inverter and plumbing and it was very
cramped with twelve Trojan HL-16's. Watering the batteries was a huge pain in the butt. I couldn't
see inside each cell, so I had to use a mirror and a bicycling water bottle to get water into them. And
then there was the time, when the batteries were brand new, that the installer overfilled them, turned
on the PV and left-- and there was battery acid raining down on everything. Hmmm. Maybe way up
there is a dumb place to put the batteries! So, when the Trojan batteries conked out -- after only 5
years -- I remodeled the entire inverter closet. I built a battery box on the ground to house the
HuP-1 battery -- much much MUCH better set up. I can water the batteries in 20 minutes now. I
also changed the charge controller at this time. I installed the Outback Solar MX-60 Maximum
Power Point Tracking charger. This little thing is incredible. It converts additional voltage created by
the PV panels, that cannot be forced into the batteries, and turns it into amperage that does charge
the battery. I can get 1200 watts from my 1000 watt solar array on cold sunny days. Crazy.
Water filter upgrade. The original plans called for a small Dalton water filter for drinking water and a
sediment filter to keep sand out of the system. The Dalton was too small right from the start and
provided a tiny trickle of water. Then our water smelled as if something died in it. Rain water is
really clean, but once it washes what ever is on the roof into the cistern and then sits there a while it
is not really pure. We're not sure what made the water smell so bad but we bought a 20" filter
system with a .6 micron carbon block filter and a UV purifier. BAM! $800 = clean water. We also
increased our sediment filter to a 20" dual density 20 - 5 micron filter.
Another issue: we get mice in our ceiling! We should have put hardware cloth (think chicken wire,
but with 1/4" squares) everywhere that the tires and framing came together, then used expanding
foam to seal the gaps. Mice in the ceiling sucks.
When we installed the doors I took the "brick molding" off. I wanted the stucco to wrap around to
the door jambs. The finish product looks pretty good but I later learned that screen/storm doors
typically mount to the brick molding. Oops. We use the main doors as an important part of our
summer ventilation, so screen doors would be very nice to have!
I'm not too impressed with the way that our floors came out. They looked fantastic when I finished
them but they have not held up nearly as well as I had hoped. The fix would have been to acid treat
the cement finish before using the water-based stain, and a deeper clear coat finish.. It is also pretty
slippery, and there is a product that you can add to a finish coat that gives it a little grip.
Raining condensation: After the 1st grey water planter was operational, the humidity inside the house
went way up. The first winter after the planter was fully established we got a 'leak' in one spot
inside the house. What was really happening was the moist air got through the vapor barrier that we
put in, froze or condensed on the inside of the exterior surface, melted and then ran into the living
space. So, to fix this we're insulating the surfaces to prevent the condensation. The other potential
fix is to ventilate the entire ceiling area. We did not build our roof to accommodate such venting. We
tried little vents called 'witches hats' on the small area we had the problem but they didn't move
enough air.
There are lots and lots of projects that still have not been finished. We will also build custom
wardrobes/dressers for the master bedroom out of pallets. Someday we will finish the other
graywater planter, finish the exterior planters, install storm doors on both sides of the building. We
also really wish we had a garage. And I'd like to do a master bedroom addition someday as well.
course, and we made some pretty big mistakes as well.
1. We paid a lot of money to our "general contractor" and he really didn't do anything that we
couldn't have done ourselves. We thought we would need someone with some experience to help
the project along; what we got was one step better than a thief. This was easily the most expensive
and frustrating mistake that we made.
2. Next was the perimeter drain, or French drain. We did not install one and we wish we had.A
perimeter drain moves underground water away from the foundation of a building. In our case we
do not have footers in the traditional sense so underground water is able to find its way through the
tire walls. And when the ground gets saturated water comes right into our middle U. Several times
each spring we would come home to standing water in the middle U. The tiles and mud around the
bottom of the room were mostly ruined So, we retrofitted a drain system. We dug a trench around
the back of the house and ran it downhill all the way to the ditch on the edge of our property. We
put some gravel and perforated pipe with some landscape cloth into the ditch and 'presto' problem
almost completely solved.
The original battery box was bad news too. It was above the inverter and plumbing and it was very
cramped with twelve Trojan HL-16's. Watering the batteries was a huge pain in the butt. I couldn't
see inside each cell, so I had to use a mirror and a bicycling water bottle to get water into them. And
then there was the time, when the batteries were brand new, that the installer overfilled them, turned
on the PV and left-- and there was battery acid raining down on everything. Hmmm. Maybe way up
there is a dumb place to put the batteries! So, when the Trojan batteries conked out -- after only 5
years -- I remodeled the entire inverter closet. I built a battery box on the ground to house the
HuP-1 battery -- much much MUCH better set up. I can water the batteries in 20 minutes now. I
also changed the charge controller at this time. I installed the Outback Solar MX-60 Maximum
Power Point Tracking charger. This little thing is incredible. It converts additional voltage created by
the PV panels, that cannot be forced into the batteries, and turns it into amperage that does charge
the battery. I can get 1200 watts from my 1000 watt solar array on cold sunny days. Crazy.
Water filter upgrade. The original plans called for a small Dalton water filter for drinking water and a
sediment filter to keep sand out of the system. The Dalton was too small right from the start and
provided a tiny trickle of water. Then our water smelled as if something died in it. Rain water is
really clean, but once it washes what ever is on the roof into the cistern and then sits there a while it
is not really pure. We're not sure what made the water smell so bad but we bought a 20" filter
system with a .6 micron carbon block filter and a UV purifier. BAM! $800 = clean water. We also
increased our sediment filter to a 20" dual density 20 - 5 micron filter.
Another issue: we get mice in our ceiling! We should have put hardware cloth (think chicken wire,
but with 1/4" squares) everywhere that the tires and framing came together, then used expanding
foam to seal the gaps. Mice in the ceiling sucks.
When we installed the doors I took the "brick molding" off. I wanted the stucco to wrap around to
the door jambs. The finish product looks pretty good but I later learned that screen/storm doors
typically mount to the brick molding. Oops. We use the main doors as an important part of our
summer ventilation, so screen doors would be very nice to have!
I'm not too impressed with the way that our floors came out. They looked fantastic when I finished
them but they have not held up nearly as well as I had hoped. The fix would have been to acid treat
the cement finish before using the water-based stain, and a deeper clear coat finish.. It is also pretty
slippery, and there is a product that you can add to a finish coat that gives it a little grip.
Raining condensation: After the 1st grey water planter was operational, the humidity inside the house
went way up. The first winter after the planter was fully established we got a 'leak' in one spot
inside the house. What was really happening was the moist air got through the vapor barrier that we
put in, froze or condensed on the inside of the exterior surface, melted and then ran into the living
space. So, to fix this we're insulating the surfaces to prevent the condensation. The other potential
fix is to ventilate the entire ceiling area. We did not build our roof to accommodate such venting. We
tried little vents called 'witches hats' on the small area we had the problem but they didn't move
enough air.
There are lots and lots of projects that still have not been finished. We will also build custom
wardrobes/dressers for the master bedroom out of pallets. Someday we will finish the other
graywater planter, finish the exterior planters, install storm doors on both sides of the building. We
also really wish we had a garage. And I'd like to do a master bedroom addition someday as well.