Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: ability to heat upstairs W/O installing heat upstairs

[Cher Stuewe Portnoff (cher710]

Do you have financing that would preclude this choice? Money people can be 
picky about this kind of unconventionality in construction.

I'm not living in cohousing (yet -- still looking), but my background is in 
alt energy and energy tech. Even in Ashland, you could have some chilly 
upper rooms at times. Then if you ended up with people using electric space 
heaters... well, no reason to state the obvious.

Lack of an upstairs heat source is likely to hurt resale value, if that's a 
consideration.

Cher
"Seeker"

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "alfred hardman" <hardman.alfred [at] yahoo.com>
To: <cohousing-L [at] cohousing.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2006 11:40 AM
Subject: [C-L]_ ability to heat upstairs W/O installing heat upstairs


> Hi all     I'm on the building committee of Fordyce Street Coho in Ashland 
> Oregon. We're in the last part of our design phase and we're hitting up 
> against some financial pressures. We need to cut some costs ( surprise ). 
> One of the things we're looking at is not installing heating on the second 
> floor of our homes. The catch is we're using in slab radiant heat on the 
> first floor. If we were using forced air heat we could expect the heat to 
> rise to the second floor, but with radiant the air temperature will be 
> much lower, and wouldn't be expected to rise as much. We live in a 
> moderate climate west of the Cascades where the average winter temperature 
> is 35 to 40 degrees. Our buildings will be well insulated. They are duplex 
> style, sharing a common wall between two buildings. Additionally we're 
> designing passive solar into the homes, which should provide 25% of the 
> needed heat load. So far we have been told that not installing heat 
> upstairs will not work, that it will work, and t
> hat at
> worst we would have to plug in electric heaters for supplemental heat for 
> the upstars rooms. We'll be asking local professionals about this, but we 
> all thought that some of you may have had some experience with this issue 
> . We'd appreciate any help. Thanks. Alfred.
>
> ---------------------------------
> Blab-away for as little as 1¢/min. Make  PC-to-Phone Calls using Yahoo! 
> Messenger with Voice.
> _________________________________________________________________
> Cohousing-L mailing list -- Unsubscribe, archives and other info at:
> http://www.cohousing.org/cohousing-L/