Travis Neighbor Ward

Equipping This Old House's "Timeless Home" with electricity, plumbing, and heating and cooling.

By Travis Neighbor Ward

The heat and humidity have reached their summer peak on this steamy day in Atlanta, and for what seems like the first time since the foundation walls were poured, This Old House's Timeless Home is quiet. Yet important work is still going on in the basement, where electrician David O'Brien crouches, silently feeding a 14-gauge plastic-insulated cable into the back of an outlet box. All around him, thin strands of white cable snake through the exposed studs and hang from the joists like overgrown vines. This box, the tenth one he's roughed in today, is now ready for the day when the walls and ceilings will be finished and the wires can be connected to switches, receptacles, and light fixtures. He has 27 more such boxes to complete on this floor alone, and enough work to keep him and his boss, William Just, busy for two solid weeks. "The real difficulty at this stage is locating everything where the architect wants it," he explains. "And now that the plumbing and ductwork are in place, the job is even harder."

While the rough-in stage -executed after the framing is done and before the drywall goes up-seems to be a relatively quiet period, this is when all the hidden components of a house's electrical, plumbing, and heating and cooling systems are installed. It's demanding work, requiring specialized contractors who know the code and safety requirements, who know how to maximize a system's performance, who don't put obstacles in the way of the installers, and who, despite the highly repetitive nature of each task, do every step right every time. (Anything that goes wrong after this point is difficult and costly to fix.) But for anyone who values living in a home with safe electrical power, clean flowing water, and a comfortable indoor environment, this is vital work.

At the Timeless Home, a joint project between This Old House magazine and the Masco Corporation (a supplier of building materials), planning for the rough-in phase started long before the foundation was poured. Plumbing contractor Michael Millwood and lead plumber Joe Addison visited the site and surveyed the architectural drawings to determine how best to meet the demand for water in the house's five full baths, two half baths and two kitchens. For example, the shower in the master bath-with its main showerhead and six body sprays, three aimed at the lower back and three at shoulder height-would use about 12 gallons of water per minute. Concerned that simultaneous demand from faucets and showerheads might turn forceful streams into ineffective dribbles, Millwood and Addison calculated that the tube connecting the house to the city's main water supply needed to be 1 inch in diameter (rather than 3/​4 inch), enough to accommodate a higher-than-average flow. "It's amazing how much more water you get when you up the water-main size just a quarter inch," Addison says. "But no matter what size pipe we put in, there might still be some pressure lost if all the showers in the house are on simultaneously." The plumbing crew laid the 1-inch water line-a single piece of flexible polyethylene pipe-in a 100-foot-long, 1 1/​2-foot-deep trench that stretched from the street to the foundation wall next to the front door. A 1 1/​2-inch PVC sleeve embedded in the concrete served as the pipe's access to the inside of the house.

All that water flowing in has to go back out, so the crew dug another trench for a 4-inch PVC drain that extended from the sewer pipe in the street to a point beneath the basement slab. Before the foundation contractors started their pour, they buried a 6-inch PVC sleeve beneath the footing for the drainpipe to be fed into. Fortunately, the basement's 8foot elevation above the street made possible a gravity-fed drain, rather than one that relied on pumps. "This is one time when being up on this hill paid off," says builder Jason Yowell.

Four months later, after the house had been framed, Addison was back on-site to install its network of copper supply lines and PVC drains. Starting at the main supply line, he attached a pressure-reducing valve to bring the city's 110-psi (pounds per square inch) water pressure down to a moderate 65 psi for household use. Next, he soldered two copper tee fittings onto its end, dividing the incoming water into three branches-one for cold water, the remaining two to feed each of the 50gallon gas-fired water heaters. One heater will supply the basement kitchen, the master bathroom, and two of the bathrooms on the second floor; the other will serve the full and half baths in the basement, the kitchen and the half bath on the first floor, and the third full bath on the second floor. In the basement, Addison threaded the hot and cold copper supply lines through the framing, a tedious process that required him to drill a series of horizontal holes through the 2x10 joists under the first floor. The parallel hot and cold lines for the first and second floors ascended into the stud bays in the master bath, the kitchen, and the half bath next to the entryway. For the interior drains, Addison used 3-inch PVC.

The fact that most of the first- and second-floor fixtures lie close to the same vertical plane simplified this work; the individual drains all branched off one line, or "drop," at strategically placed Y fittings. But because the kitchen is too far away from these plumbed rooms, it has its own 3-inch drop, which joins the other one at the 4-inch main drain leading to the street.

There's no mystery about what constitutes a quality plumbing job, or how to achieve it. As long as soldered joints don't leak, drains don't clog, and showerheads spray hot water with satisfying force, we're happy. Our needs are just as clear-cut when it comes to forced-air heating and cooling: We like even temperatures, moderate humidity, and no drafts. But achieving this balanced state isn't so easy. The always changing outdoor temperatures and humidity levels-not to mention the sun shining through the windows and beating down on the roof-all conspire to keep indoor air in a constant state of flux. That's why contractors who work with heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems turn to computer software to help master the complexities of maintaining indoor environments.

HVAC subcontractor Ron Jones generally uses one such program to calculate the heat loss and gain for the more boxy houses he normally works on. "I enter the size of the house in square feet, the R-value of the insulation, the total window area, and the direction the house faces, and the program tells me how big a furnace and compressor can handle the heating and cooling load," he says. But he knew that no matter what the program told him, one furnace would not be able to comfortably heat and cool the separated wings and high-ceilinged living and dining rooms of the Timeless Home. He also knew that trying to run a single rigid-duct system through the attic-less upstairs would be an installation nightmare. So, using guidance provided by the program but relying on his 21 years of experience in this trade, Jones decided to divide the house into three zones, each with its own forced-air heating and cooling systems (see illustration on page 98). This 3-system setup will consume more electricity than a single furnace, he admits, but he's certain it will keep the house more comfortable all year round. An 80,000-Btu gas furnace and a 3-ton (36,000-Btu) air-conditioning compressor service one zone covering half of the basement and the half of the first floor above it; an identical furnace and a 2 1/​2-ton (30,000-Btu) compressor take care of the other half of these two floors. The third system-a 15-kilowatt electric heat pump to go with another 2 1/​1-ton (30,000-Btu) compressor-heats and cools the second floor. Both furnaces are located in the basement. The heat pump sits on the second floor behind a knee wall. All three compressors sit outside the garage. The cooling capacity of these compressors was calculated to take into account the high levels of humidity during Atlanta summers: "You want them to be able to circulate enough air through the interior coils in the air handler in order to wring the moisture out of the air, rather than cool the air quickly and then shut down," says Jones. Both the heat pump and the air-conditioning units have a seasonal energy efficiency rating (SEER) of 12 (20 percent more efficient than the 10 SEER required by federal law), and the two furnaces have an annual fuel utilization efficiency (AFUE) rating of 90 percent (10 percent higher than the national standard). "It's the highest rating you can get," says Jones. All three systems have a digital thermostat, a 17-gallon-capacity humidifier (for the dry winter months), and a high-efficiency media filter that can remove 95 percent of the pollen, mold, spores, and dust over 1 micron flowing through the return ducts.

Positioning all the ductwork that conveys air to and from the units in the basement was a straightforward task. Jones screwed together sections of round, galvanized "hard pipe," some up to 14 inches in diameter, fitted them between studs and joists with metal-strap webbing, sealed all the joints with mastic, and wrapped everything in R-5.6 fiberglass insulation. Work on the second floor proved more challenging. With no attic available, Jones's crew installed the heat pump and threaded flexible 8- to 14-inch-diameter wire-reinforced flexible plastic ductwork in the eaves and between the rafters. Jones even had the framers create window seats in the master bedroom to give him a place to run his ducts.

All the ductwork leads to supply vents as large as 12 by 12 inches (as many as three per room) and 14-by-6-inch returns (generally one per room), which are vents that remove the stale air to help circulate the good air. For optimum performance, Jones located them as close as possible to outside walls, and made sure the ducts leading to them were as straight as possible. In the master bedroom, for instance, he positioned one return and two supply vents in the floor; that way the ductwork only had to make one 90-degree turn as it came up from the basement. "The fewer the turns, the less you're restricting the air flow," Jones says. He did not, however, place any returns in the bathrooms or kitchen. "You don't want to send smells throughout the house," he explains.

Once the HVAC and plumbing systems had been installed, electricians William Just and David O'Brien could start their rough-in work for all the switches, outlets, ceiling fans and lights, and appliances.

First, to make sure the house had enough power to run the heating and cooling systems, the appliances, and the large number of light fixtures that the architect, Jeremiah Eck, had drawn into the plan, they connected two main cables from the utility lines on the street to two 200-amp, 40-circuit panels in the basement. Getting each 1 1/​2-inch-diameter cable to the basement from the electric meter on the side of the garage took some doing. The men had to lead them up to the second floor above the garage, through holes in the I-joists over to the mudroom, then down again into the basement. "Those cables don't bend easily and there were lots of beams to go around," Just says. By comparison, threading the 6,500 feet of 14-gauge plastic-insulated wiring through the house was a walk in the park. The crew mapped out the wire routes for the fixtures and marked out the locations for outlets and switches on the studs, making sure they were 6 feet from every door, 12 feet apart throughout any given room. The code even dictates where they had to drill holes through studs. "You need at least 1 1/​4 inches of clearance from the outside of the stud so the drywall installers don't drive a nail or screw into the wires," Just says.

In this house, each outlet is connected to at least one wall switch, requiring just to use 4-wire cable instead of the usual 3-wire variety. "I wire all outlets like this and tie off the wires on the ones that won't be switched," says just. "That gives homeowners the option to make the other outlets switched as well if the furniture moves." And then, after a pause, he adds, " It's much better to do it that way now than try to change it later."

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