Letting Stafford Home Services choose the right furnace for you is not only easy, it’s green as well! –We’re talking environmentally conscious, 90-95% AFUE Bryant units that lower utility bills, and are so technologically advanced that they use computer generated algorithms to know how long to run and how much heat to produce. Many of us consider the environment when making renovation decisions, and choosing a furnace is no exception. According to bryant.com, one of the best ways to protect the environment is to purchase energy efficient products that require fewer energy resources to operate. Not only will you make a difference to the environment, you’ll also save on operating costs. Make sure your heating and cooling products have high energy efficiency ratings such as SEER and AFUE.

Another great way is by using Energy Star products.  Stafford Home Service use many Energy Star products in their work. “ENERGY STAR promotes energy efficiency among residential appliances, because household appliances have the potential to contribute a great deal to air pollution. ENERGY STAR promotes energy efficient furnaces, heat pumps and air conditioners, and thermostats, among other products.” (source: www.bryant.com)

The 80% rating that used to be a great is now a thing of the past. Now units can be rated 90-95%. AFUE means Annual Fuel Utilization Efficiency. Your furnace’s AFUE tells you how much energy is being converted to heat.  For example, AFUE of 90 means that 90% of the fuel is being used to warm your home, while the other 10% escapes as exhaust with the combustion gases.

We all want lower bills, right?  Having Stafford Home Service install a Bryant gas furnace in your home you could lower you utility bill by 50%?  By knowing when to turn on and how much heat to produce Bryant Brand furnaces can reduce the amount of heat and energy you use. Dan from Stafford Home Service will help chose the right model for you.

These Bryant brand furnaces are so advanced they use computer generated algorithms to know how long to run and how much heat to produce. Older model furnaces used to run for a set amount of time even if the house was warm enough. These energy efficient furnaces are also multi-stage and are able to tell how long they should run, in order to be most efficient.  Let’s say it’s a sunny day in December, your furnace might never reach its highest heat stage, it can tell that it only needs to stay in stage one, the lowest amount of heat. However, as the sun goes down it will also be able to tell if it is more efficient to jump to stage three, the highest amount heat, rather than going through all three stages.

Recessed lighting has a nice clean look and can be very effective at making small rooms feel bigger. Rather than installing chunky light fixtures, that take up room and clutter spaces, Stafford Home Service can install recessed lighting in your home for a simple, sleek look.

Recessed lighting can be installed in any room and is a great way to highlight works of art, mantels, photographs, or an interesting painted wall or Italian plaster feature.  Another useful way to use recessed lighting is for task lighting: Reading areas, desks, and various work spaces can all benefit from recessed lighting.  Imagine your desk free of hot, inconvenient lamps –with a flick of a switch your desk can be washed with focused light from recessed fixtures strategically placed for maximum effect.

There are four bulb options available for recessed lighting:

• Incandescent
• Halogen
• Low-emitting diode (LED)
• Compact fluorescent light (CFL).

Incandescent bulbs:
Incandescent lights are the standard lights with which we are all familiar. They have the least expensive up-front costs of the four options, are the least efficient, create more garbage and run very hot. They will also be phased out, according to federal law by 2012-2014 [http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:h.r.00006:].

Halogen bulbs:
Halogen lights are also incandescent, but they last longer and provide a greater quantity of light, per watt. They are a step up from standard incandescent but have all the same fundamental problems and will also be phased out along with standard incandescents.

LED bulbs:
If your looking for a Green lighting option, LED lights are the way to go.  According to energystar.gov, an ENERGY STAR qualified LED uses, at the bare minimum, 75% less energy than incandescent lighting and also reduces maintenance costs, by lasting 35 to 50 times longer (and more) than incandescent lighting and about 2 to 5 times longer than fluorescent lighting. LED bulbs also contain no mercury (which CFL’s do.) By using LED lighting you won’t have to replace bulbs more then once every several years (or more), which, in the long-term, is good for your pocketbook and the environment. (not to mention if you have limited mobility and have difficulty replacing bulbs)

Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs (CFL):
CFL bulbs are another green solution. An ENERGY STAR qualified compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL) will save about $30 over its lifetime and pay for itself in about 6 months. It uses 75 percent less energy and lasts about 10 times longer than an incandescent bulb.” (www.energystar.gov) Stafford home Services uses Energy Star qualified products. The toxic mercury contained in CFL’s is an issue, but is offset by the infrequency of replacement and proper waste disposal programs that are currently in effect across the US.

While LED or CFL recessed lighting fixtures are far more efficient than a standard incandescent fixture, they are a significantly higher up-front investment.  Keep in mind, If every American home replaced just one light with an ENERGY STAR light, we would save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes for a year, about $700 million in annual energy costs, and prevent 9 billion pounds of greenhouse gas emissions per year, equivalent to the emissions of about 800,000 cars.  (www.energystar.gov).

In conclusion, recessed lighting is a great option for any room in any home. With options for every price range the possibilities are endless. For your next renovation project, let Stafford Home Service install Energy Star qualified products in your home.

Before I turned on the jack, my friend stood back. We thought all hell would break loose as the jack hammered the old floor into rubble. We thought the very foundation would shake and we would have trouble staying upright. Well, it turns out to be quite a bit mellower then that. It may have been the fact that the concrete floor was 4-5″ thick, it may have been that there was more Portland cement in the original mix then a sane man would specify. Whatever the reason, the floor barely budged. After a few hours of trial and error, I started to get the hang of it, with the last hour cruising by. Needless to say, it was not a walk in the park, but it was better then just using an 8LB hammer like the first time (I felt like I was going to die from strain.) After 6 hours we had a 12′ diameter hole. That was enough for one day.

The next day my girlfriend and I laid down some foam (for a little insulation) and 17 bags of sand mix cement. That’s over 1,200lbs of concrete. It took us 6.5 hours. And man is laying concrete hard (especially when you care about how flat it is. One thing I learned was that sand mix can be easily smoothed out when dry, so about 1.5 hours of back-breaking work perfecting the skimming was wasted time. Live and learn.

Three quick advantages with using dimmer switches:

• Reduced Energy Consumption, Dim your lights by quarter & save up to 20 percent Dim by half and save up to 40 percent.
• Increased Bulb Life, If you are dimming the light by just 10 percent it more than doubles the life of the bulb.
• Mood, A softer light is more comforting and sets a relaxing atmosphere.

We can install many different kinds of dimmer light switches. 3-way dimmable light switches are also available.

Call Stafford for more information on going green in your home.

Kris Thompson
Stafford Home Service
Office:   952.927.7194
Fax:      952.927.7192
Direct:   612.328.3989

1. If your home has a outdated circuit breaker panel or fuse box (usually located in your basement) –e.g. Federal Pacific circuit breaker panel.
   1. How does one identify an outdated panel? –Because there are so many brands/styles its probably best to contact us for a evaluation.
2. If your circuit breaker panel or fuse box does not have a main fused shut off switch.
3. If you are planning significant lifestyle changes in your home that will put added demand to your electrical system.
4. If you have a 60 amp service. Typically you can have only one 220 volt appliance on a 60 amp service. A demand load calculation should be used to determine this.
   1. How can someone easily identify their “amp service”? –Typically there is a listed label on the  panel
5. If your main fuses blow or main circuit breaker shuts off.
6. If you are planning on having your wires buried from your local power company you will need to change your meter socket and usually this is a good time to upgrade your circuit breaker panel or fuse box to a more modern and safer system.If you do not have adequate room for additional circuits, Such as adding air conditioning, electric water heaters, electric clothes dryers, electric heat, hot tubs, ect.

Kris Thompson
Stafford Home Service
Office:   952.927.7194
Fax:      952.927.7192
Direct:   612.328.3989

How to control all of this you ask? Well, my dear, with my iPhone of course! Yes, I said my iPhone. Or maybe a iPod touch if I want to let visitors have fun too. The Buletooth controllers on the PS3 and the Wii only five bout 30′ of distance so they will ne installing a Bluetooth repeater in the kitchen (the basement media room is abutted to the stair, so that is not an issue. The Wii controllers also use a control bar which emits light, so another remote bar will be installed in the 1st floor. Sick, isn’t it? One can walk from the basement to the 1st floor, Guitar Hero “guitar” in hand, jamming all the time. Now that’s class my friends. Or some kind of digital excess yet to be named.

One great advantage to this madness (or brilliance, depending on your Luddite or Jobs tendencies) is that fan noise is greatly reduced or eliminated. The PS3 is still screaming out billions of cycles and driving it’s fans like rented mules, but it is safely ensconced in a separate room, in a tidy rack. Ahhh, peace and quiet. Now, when I am watching a classic film, with plenty of moody silence, like The Third Man I won’t be distracted by the steady roar of the PS3′s insane fans.

Another advantage is the savings of not having to have duplicate hardware;  in space, cash, and energy (I guess that’s kind of a Geen Renovation thing as well. Nice!)

Stay tuned for updates and photos.

One thing he explained is how he was going to mount the basement ducts a couple inches lower then I had first assumed. He said these critical few inches would make the ducts that much more quiet, as they would better isolate the vibrations of ducts and movement of floor. Brilliant! He was also very concerned with the placement of vents for cosmetic and functional reasons. He explained many situations where ducts would be a problem. If it were up to me I would have ended up choosing locations that would have essentially heated the outside and the furniture. Nothing like a great HVAC contractor to save the day!

Next was the Stafford Electric team. Kris came in on Thursday and walked through the entire space with me and Jason from Stinson Builders. Even though we had blueprints (do they still call them that?) and had previously discussed many of the options, Kris insisted on walking through every detail again and making sure we were all on the same page and that we were moving forward in the best possible way. As we walked through, Kris proposed new options that were better then the old, like recessed lighting in the basement guest bedroom and workout/craft area. Jason and Kris pointed out that those spaces would benefit by having finished ceilings. I am so happy that I began this process with Stinson Builders; Jason’s subcontractors are friendly, committed to the job and my satisfaction, and unbelievably helpful.

One exciting idea Kris cooked up, for the rest of the basement was to put in conduit and cage lights, in between the floor rafters Something like this (but cheaper, more industrial, and steel instead of brass):

This is perfect for the industrial look I am going for. I had the ceiling spray painted with BIN paint which has shellac in it (the only thing sure to lock out the lingering dog and cigarette smoke odors.) which I tinted a light blue-grey. I think it’s going to look great. Thanks Kris!

As we walked around the space I got a glimpse at the complexity of a good electrician‘s job. The melding of practicality, ease of use, efficiency, code compliancy, cosmetics and the like creates for a difficult terrain. Make sure you have a great firm like Stafford Home Services’ electric department to navigate the landscape or you may find yourself pulling things out later (at much higher expense), and being disappointed with the results.

One simple, electrical Green Renovation solution that Stafford is installing is dimmer switches at all locations. (there are even 3-way, adjustable light switches!) Did you know light dimmer switches were Green? Well they are. Kris and Dan told me about a Green Home workshop they attended that trained electricians and home services on going Green. Evidently the human eye only needs about 80% of a room’s full lighting. They were shown a demo and said they could not tell the difference, once their eyes adjusted. I assume that’s a 20% savings in lighting bills! Nice!

As we walked through the space, Kris stopped one of his electricians and had him move a flush, floor-mounted electrical outlet. It was just a rotation of a outlet that already had been installed. The electrician did not look happy but Kris insisted. I went back later and saw why: to rotate the box, there had to be new framing to support each unit. To think, here they are making more work for themselves, work that I would not have thought of until another contractor was done and gone, and they doing it just to make sure the aesthetics are just right. That’s the kind of electrician I want!

All said and done, this has been a good week. Stay tuned next week for updates on the Green electrical and Green HVAC installations.

-M

I’m very glad I have such a good team to work with and to help me work through these crippling decisions. Phillip Broussard, the St Paul based architect from Architron, is (and I’ve said this before, so forgive me) a saint. He has such an amazing way pf presenting options and discussing them, from so many angles. Things like, how sight-lines will be effected, traffic patterns, efficiency and green (environmental) impacts, etc… There are so many factors to any decision, you will do well to find yourself a top-notch architect like Architron. Don’t take chances here, and don’t skimp!

Now I can’t just stop here because my builder, Jason Stinson, from Minneapolis’ Stinson Builders, Inc., has been a lifeline and a great construction consiglieri. He has such an easy way about him and has been a great resource on design and layout as well as environmental building and renovating on a budget. He always gives me a easy to understand and well-thought out perspective. I can’t say enough about his support and design and building talents.

Anyway, I guess the gist of this post is to make sure you have a great architect and builder (general contractor) for your renovation project, as you will use them, and never underestimate the difficulty in making renovation decisions.