Green comfort

We decided a while ago that a spa was not only a cool thing to have but would help with some health maintenance issues. Fortunately a spell of intense work provided the funds for it and after some back-verandah-meets-chainsaw action, we have a spa sunk into the back deck. How decadent. Now for the green accounting side of it:

• New timber for deck mods - locally treated waxwood from plantation timber.
• Spa itself - australian manufactured with exception of pump and electronics
• Support pedestal - spare bricks and a paver lying around the house plus 1 bag of mortar
• Water - 1500L from our rainwater tank
• Heating - Currently electric system using 100% Greenpower from JackGreen.

The first heat-up took a whopping 77kWhrs of electricity, which is more than a week's worth of our normal power consumption, or in other terms, enough to run the fridge for 2-1/2 months. Holding it at 34degC overnight took 13kWhr and for the daytime 6kWhr (outside temp a rainy 8~16 degC).

As the fibreglass body only has a ~3mm coating of expanded foam coating as insulation, I stapled some sheets of plastic to the underside of the edge supporting timbers and pulled them all together. While I was doing this it was noticeable how warm the air was under the enclosed but not sealed deck. After the plastic was installed it was noticeable the temperature difference inside and outside the plastic, so it appears to be working. I also took the time to seal the corners where the curved spa sits in the square framed deck, as it was possible to feel the hot air rising from these small gaps. In time I'll put some thermometers around to measure exactly what's going on and how much effect it's having.

Ultimately I hope to majorly reduce the power consumption by connecting to a solar tube water heater which I picked up at 50% off while buying some tanks. This will get plumbed in as a recirculating closed loop system to provide heat to the spa, via a heat exchanger (as soon as I find or make one!)

So who says going green rules out some of the nicer things in life?

Oh, and I may tap some of the water off to spoil the dogs with hydronic floor heating for winter...

We have floor!

In the latest instalment of the adventure of the spare room, it now has a floor again! Thanks to the efforts of the Cunning Plans Dept, we not only have floor, but it didn't end up costing anywhere near as much as we originally thought it would, coming in at around $850. Bless the engineering profession and large projects that just happen to have some excess building materials lying around.

On to the pictures. After the floor was gutted, the next stage was putting in some drainage trenches and ag pipe:

Most of this work was done while it was bucketing rain outside. As it also connects to the rest of the underhouse space, we let our two crazy labradors in to get out of the rain and be part of the action. I think Hudson possibly consumed a kilo or so of clay that had been excavated. Not the brightest puppy.

After the drainage was done, new beams needed to go in as well as the Bondec, which will provide some waterproofing. Supervisors Hudson and Gracie also pictured:

On top of the Bondec went the reinforcing for the concrete and the hose that will become the underfloor heating:

And today the concrete arrive and the CPD and a mate spent a good couple of hours spreading concrete around the room and shovelling the excess back out the window. The end result is floor!

So now we wait for it to dry and then have then fun job of washing the walls and generally cleaning the room up.

All this is of course in aid of reducing the mould in the house so that it doesn't continue to slowly poison me. Let's see the mould try and make it up through Bondec and concrete!

Bye bye floor

Well the Cunning Plans Department (CPD) has sprung into action on the mould remediation mission and the spare room has been gutted. Built in wardrobe, floor boards, joists, the lot. To save dragging mould ridden timber through the house, it went out the window.


Several of the floor boards were so bad that they just fell apart when being ripped up. At the end, we now have a door to a hole in the ground.

As you can see, there wasn't a lot of space between the floor and the ground and the house foundations prevented any decent air flow. The CPD has also taken the opportunity to knock a few bricks out (into the rest of the under house space, not outside) to get some more airflow.

The current plan for the floor is concrete, with some kind of layer that inhibits moisture. The CPD has been asking around his connections to see if he can source some cheap. We're currently looking at around $2-3K to do the floor, then we have to decide what to put on the concrete. Probably carpet since it is only a spare room.

The mouldy floor boards have gone to the tip, along with the carpet and some of the other items in the room that had too much mould to save. The joists are piled in the backyard to dry out.

Unfortunately, moving everything out of the room has stirred up a lot of mould in the air. It got to the point last week where I thought I was coming down with the 'flu. I'd feel lousy in the morning, but once I got to work I'd feel fine. Then within an hour of coming home I'd start feeling 'fluey again. However it should get better as we clean things up.

And of course all the other items from that room are now crammed into other rooms and under the the stairs. This has provided a good opportunity to do some culling of stuff. So far I've dropped off two boot loads of stuff to the Salvos. Mostly bed linen (after it had a good wash to get rid of the musty smell), books and a few small furniture items.

I also unearthed two crates containing my old goth clothes and paraphernalia (candle holders, incense burners etc..). The clothes have been washed and the other stuff I'm cleaning up and it will go on ebay in the near future. It will probably make some young emo very happy.

Well that explains a few things...

I'm allergic to mould. I'm not sure exactly which moulds are the worst, but my specialist recommends avoiding as many as possible. I've been on immunotherapy for moulds (along with cats and dogs) for around 4-5 years now. There was a big improvement in the first 3 years and then the symptoms started to come back.


One of the theories is that there may be a correlation between the increase in symptoms and when we moved into our current house. It is set into a hill and gets a bit damp downstairs. We've had forced ventilation installed under the house and G has been doing other bits and pieces to try and get some better drainage happening. The other day he went under the house and noticed that the corner that our spare room sits over is a bit of a "deadzone" in terms of airflow and that the underside of the floor boards was looking mouldy. That room always smells musty and we don't use it much, so it was a good candidate for phase one of ripping up the carpet and checking the state of the floorboards.


So today, with the help of a non-allergic friend, the spare room was emptied. When the filing cabinet was moved, here is what was underneath:

Well that explains why I always felt crap after being in that room for longer than 5 minutes and why the files always smelled like mould. Within about 15 seconds of me coming into the room to see the mould patch, my sinuses exploded and I had to flush them with saline solution, take an antihistamine and stay upstairs for a while.

Other patches were found under other bits of furniture. The carpet was quite damp. G cut the mouldy patch out of the carpet and the underfelt was also manky. So that went and the floor boards underneath were soft.

All the carpet in the room has now been ripped up and the floorboards washed with a bleach solution. The floorboards will probably have to come up as well. This picture shows the spidery black tendrils of the mould spreading across the floorboards:

This isn't boding well for the rest of the downstairs floor, but it does mean that we can do some mould proofing when putting in new floor. Looks like we're in for a bit of work on the house. If it was a better market it would be tempting to just sell the house and buy one that doesn't have a mould problem. Depending on how we go with abating the mould and whether that makes a difference with the allergies, we may still have to look at moving.