December 17, 2014

Our appliances have arrived.  As I mentioned in the last blog Jane and I camped out at the house.  We even had guests one night.  Maggie, Jane's sister and our brother in law Robert came over for a visit.  We did the inflatable mattress sleep over.  They came out because as a Christmas gift and accumulated birthday gifts we gave them a night at the theatre.  We went for the dinner which was very very good and then watched the play "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Christmas Carol".  Anyway this blog is about the house so let get back on track.  Our appliances arrived...

Meet our washer and dryer.  Tim our builder suggested a tray and a drain under the washer in case there are ever any leaks.



Our fridge is a pretty standard fridge with the freezer under.  It has bags of room.

Our stove has two ovens, the bottom one is convection.  It has a flat stovetop.  The surface on this one is not as good as the old one we had at our townhouse.  Being shiny black everything shows on it.  It is cleanable but I would not recommend the black.  Otherwise we love the stove.  It has great easy to understand controls and seems to work like a charm.

Our dishwasher!  It is very quiet but it takes a while to do the dishes.  2 1/2 hours on the fastest setting.  The good news is it holds at least twice as many dishes as our previous dishwasher.

Now you've met our appliances.


















The bath was finally installed and looking very proud of itself in this picture.  We are very happy with the bath and shower.  They are comfy and spacious.  We love our tile work created by the amazing Vlad the tile guy.  Vlad used to come a the strangest hours and was found sleeping in the house a couple of times.

Our wood stove is all ready to go.  The first time we use it we need to have a good blaze for 3 hours to season the stove.  At this point we have not yet taken the time to try it out.  Our wood from our lot needs to be cut up and seasoned so wet wood is not on.

We had one issue when building the house and that revolved around our heating.  The original plan was to have in floor hot water heating.  This is made up of two components. Plastic tubing in the floors and a heating system.  Plastic tubing is set out on the floor both upstairs and downstairs and this is then covered with concrete.  This process cost about $14000 which sounds a lot.  I found out that putting in the ducting for forced air heat costs about $12000 so the in floor heat is not so out of line.  For the heater we had originally planned to get a heat pump.  I imagined the heat pump to be around $5000.  Boy were we surprised when it was $24000.  This is because you need an air to water heat pump and not a n air to air heat pump that you see outside many houses.  We next looked at the "Sun Pump".  This was  a heat pump system that uses a refrigerant based solar collector.  The idea was when the sun was out the heat pump was very efficient, better than geothermal, when the sun was not out or at night time the Sun Pump was as efficient as a regular heat pump.  It would work at night and at very cool temperatures.  The cost was $14000.  So we decided to go with this system as it was efficient and did not produce any carbon dioxide like you would from a gas furnace.

Time past and the Sun Pump did not show up.  Then we learned that the sun pump hot water tank that was supposed to deliver our domestic hot water was not compatible with the Sun Pump model we wanted???  There were more delays.  The last straw was they moved their delivery date into mid January 2015.  The Sun Pump was on a ship somewhere of Vancouver Island.  So we canceled our order and they have said they will send our deposit back.  This left us with two remaining choices to heat our floor.  We could get an electric or a gas boiler.

We chose to go for an electric boiler.  This is a picture of it below.  The boiler is the small grey box.  Boiler is not really a good term because it does not boil the water.  It brings it up to about 50 degrees C.  The black roundish thing on the left is the pump and the tank is just a pressure tank.  We chose electric because it does not produce carbon dioxide.  Resistance heating is a fairly costly way to go, a heat pump can by up to 3 time more efficient.  The cost was comparatively low at $1400.  Once Jane and I sell the condo we think we will buy some solar photo voltaic panels to lower the heating costs.

Our regular looking hot water tank is just that. It is 60 gallons. and in an experiment at Christmas we found we could run 3 showers simultaneously  without running out or cold spots.

The heater was installed on the Friday before we moved in and the team got it working at about 6:00 PM.  Our heat is very nice.  Even everywhere.  Heat up time is 2 to 4 hours.  We have our bedroom set a little cool for sleeping but when you get up in the morning the bathroom is nice a warm with a nice warm floor.