There’s no more turning back now. Eastside Bungalow will officially have a new heating system this winter. After a weekends of hanging out with visiting family and friends we had a productive day this Saturday. We started installing the heat transfer plates for the PEx tubing. Since it went fairly fast and we made good progress, we ran into the remaining duct work quickly. So at the end of the day, we decided that it is time to commit.
About 1/2 of the main trunk.
The heat transfer plates come without holes so they need to either be drilled or punched. We went for the punching method and A. found this punch for sheet metal. Since the aluminum is pretty thick, the small handles don’t give enough leverage and the design easily contributes to jamming ones hands. So we just stuck some conduit pipes on the handles to extent them which makes the hole punching process an easy job for me to handle.
The punch with extended handles
I do this over and over while A. puts up the plates.
A hole punched
This is what they look like installed.
We are pretty excited about this stage of the project. We are done sistering all the joists on the south side of the house and we are about 1/3 done with installing the plates. With some motivation today we might get this side close to done. This will set us up well enough that if the weather starts turning, we can finish the installation in a few weekends and have heat. We figure that we can make it through the shoulder season with just this side of the house having heat. The other half is smaller and has only the bedrooms and bathroom where we don’t need a lot of heat, especially during the fall. We can work on the northside on those rainy weekends we’ll have in the fall and heat is only going to go into the bedrooms for now since we will want to replace the subfloor in the bathroom.
And an update of butterfly:
This is what hatched out of the pupa. A Black Swallowtail Butterfly.
