Chapter 13 - Underfloor cooling 101

For the past two months since my last post, Steve has been trouble-shooting an important component of our home energy plan - underfloor cooling.  This was a component that hadn't been tested during our handoff which occurred during a cool month of the year.

Our plant room contained all the necessary components for the required warming of the brine from the geothermal pump:



But it was clear there was something wrong in terms of the relay between the pump and the heat exchanger responsible for warming the brine to the lowest temperature which would avert condensation under the floor.



Steve was able to provide some detailed data demonstrating the problem which was relayed back to redblue Energy (http://www.redblue-energy.com/home) who then communicated with our local electrician from MEC:






The system is managed using the Exigo platform (http://www.exigo.com/services/) from Regin (http://www.regincontrols.com/en-GB/home/) which is an international company specializing in indoor comfort solutions.




With a lot of communication and cooperation between Matt Radaker from MEC (http://mec-electrical.com/) and Stefan from redblue Energy in Muschenbach Germany via teleconference, the troublesome relay switches were identified and corrected and some valves were adjusted and now we have seamless switching from underfloor heating and cooling.  It's working!  And, we can monitor it remotely using an IP address on our home intranet.  For example, right now, the system looks like this:




Looking a little closer, this is the current status of our heat pump and heat circuit:

This may not reproduce well, but we also obtained the schematic of our entire home energy plan:



which I am including to demonstrate the incredible expertise of and support from redblue Energy. 

We are thrilled to have all of the energy systems in working order and have enjoyed our very comfortably cool and low humidity home through the end of summer.  The system won't be really challenged again until next summer.

We have had two major disappointments over the past two months.  The first is, that in spite of herculean efforts on the part of our financial manager at Morgan Stanley 


(http://www.morganstanley.com/), we were unable to secure any type of home equity loan on our home. We went through multiple failed attempts to get it appraised all of which were denied because there are no comparables.  We wanted a one-of-kind home and now we have one which precludes any type of appraisal which is mandatory for a loan. The other disappointment relates to a flat out rejection by Dwell magazine (http://www.dwell.com/magazine)


for my project submission.  One of the editors told me that this house is definitely not what they are looking for in their publication.  This is ironic because the magazine has literally been the mental inspiration of this project since its outset.  The Dwell website recently featured the Honda Smart Home US (http://www.hondasmarthome.com/tagged/heatingandcooling)


which has many features similar to ours and makes us envious about photovoltaic battery storage, which we may pursue at some point when we live in Bedford PA full time.

The Dwell editorial staff may not love our home, but we certainly do.