Colter's Shop of Klipsch

[greg928gts]

Probably will load the attic with 12" of blown-in cellulose.

Michael, is there any way I can convince you to double that amount? How about increase it 50%? I would recommend 5000 pounds of cellulose for your attic. It will really save a lot of energy and it will help keep the shop warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer. If there's any way you can swing it . . . .

Good progress on everything, keep up the good work!

I got your call the other day but I just couldn't answer, sorry. Are you all set or do you still have a question? I'm going to be on vacation from 12/1 - 12/14, so email me before then if you want.

Greg

I don't thing the trusses will hold that weight Greg. I don't see putting more in the shop than I have in the house, but 14-16" might be doable. 12" was just off-the cuff. The sidewalls will only have 4" fibreglass, that's it.

I'm not sure about the manifolds and valves. Some parts I could not get at Menards. Most of their manifolds are 1/2 outlets but 3/4 PEX inlets, not sweat fittings. That seems odd.

I think the trusses will hold it just fine. The house is old, the shop is new.

I would recommend a layer of foam insulation on the walls in addition to the fiberglass. You have more R-value under your slab than you do in your walls!

Insulation is a great investment. You never have to replace it or maintain it, and it pays you back year after year. One way or the other, you'll spend your money on insulation now, or electricity year after year.

Most of the manifolds we use are 1" copper with 1/2" branches that hook to the PEX tubing. But I suppose a 3/4" manifold with 1/2" branches would work fine too. Wherever you bought the PEX tubing should be able to get you set up with manifolds and a way to hook up the PEX.

It's surprising to me that you're having difficulty with the radiant floor. Around here everyone is selling the tubing and parts, and it seems every new home is getting radiant heat. Hmmph, I remember back in 1988, being laughed at for putting tubing in a slab. "That will never work". "You're going to heat the house with that"?

Greg

[colterphoto1]

I bought the $77 PEX crimping tool for the 1/2", I'm trying to avoid buying another tool to crimp a few 3/4" fittings. I'm looking for 1/2" PEX to 3/4" sweat Cu fittings in 3,4 or 6 gangers. I mean to create two manifolds, one for shop side, one for garage side. The garage side will have a single valve to turn down the heat sent run. The shop side will always be full bore.

I'm confused as to where the other valves go and what they do. I need a way to fill the system, to drain it, and to isolate the circulator (or could just drain the upper system in order to change the circulator). I could not find the flanges with integral valves, so just got regular flanges with 3/4" thread adapters. So what do the two ball valves do?

I also need to locate the vacuum break and the other part in the system (the bubble buster filter thingie).

Then to lay it all out prior to assembly.

Yeah, we're not up to speed on radiant heat here in midwest. It's actually quite a rariety. I have a lot of interest in my little shop floor.

[BLSamuel]

I don't thing the trusses will hold that weight Greg.

They should be able to... I dont' remember how to calculate it anymore but standard home construction should be able to support a semi on the roof or maybe 2nd floor? (Architecture school was > 20 years ago and being a non-engineering computer programmer / DBA / jack of a few trades, my math skills are rotting away.) The point is standard home construction is greatly overstructured. I wouldn't worry about 5000 extra lbs of insulation. Now if your roof leaked and you let it get wet ... then you could have a problem.

Reminds of the story of a well known university with a college of architecture I think where the engineers, or maybe architects pretending to be engineers forgot to calculate the dead weight of books in a library. Thankfully nobody was in the building after they first loaded in the books and a good many if not all ended up in the basement.... at least they told us that was a true story.

Hope you enjoyed Michael Kelsey... I need to get a life and get to Indy once in a while to hear some of the good musicians that perform in town.

[colterphoto1]

let's not guess at the load bearing capability of an engineered truss. They state clearly 'dead load bottom chord= 10 lbs/sq ft. I just have to figure out how much insulation that is. I'll not be exceeding that. Hey, Dad was a structural engineer, blame him.

5000 lbs insulation in 1500 ft2 building is 3.33 lbs/ft2. Looks doable. I need to stiffen one section of trussing so I can hang some lighting/ trusses for experimenting with hanging speaker cabinets. Going to ask the truss company if gusseting one truss with some OSB or other framing members will do the trick. I wish I'd had them put one really stiff truss in the middle of the building. If I had it to do over....

Michael Kelsey was in good form tonight. He had a drummer and bassist for some songs. They tore up Whole Lotta Love for about 15 minutes! I can't say the same for the mains woofer stage right. Had a buzz that made me a bit crazy. I stayed for a good part of the first set but had to get out of the smoke.

Roger picked me up and brought me home as I was a bit comatose from the pain meds. Good old Roger!

Nighty night,

M

[BLSamuel]

let's not guess at the load bearing capability of an engineered truss

very good idea (slap me silly) and even better idea to check with the truss manufacturer .... (not sure I have a clue anymore exactly what is meant by dead load bottom chord means anymore... but that may just be the dead load on the bottom chord itself in which case you'd be fine. .... as Fini pointed out, the power of the triangle... .structurally, the triangle is a beautiful thing and as Greg pointed out (and I'm sure Gregg would too), insulation is a wonderful thing. So is mass.

During my architectural school days, or maybe after I had changed directions, I did question some summer employers about all the equipment they were hanging from their roof trusses .... they were a bit defensive .. .blah blah blah .. I'm sure they thought of that .... blah blah .. but as one structures professor liked to say (think an Indiana basketball coach all worked up, veins bulging, sweat flying or maybe a fire and brimstone minister...) .... STRUCTURES FAIL! BUILDINGS FALL! AND PEOPLE DIE! Same professor had built a cool hydraulic powered crushing machine to demonstrate how some things failed. Structures fail and buildings unfortunately do fall occasonally but that's why we have structural engineers. Sometimes due to catastrophic events or sometimes due to simple mistakes or really stupid mistakes, like forgetting dead load of books in a library...

Well, blame the structural engineers, but blame them for keeping buildings from falling over... it's very good to be thinking about such things...

Oh yeah the smoke in clubs.... not sure I could take that anymore for a whole night... would likely give my wife an asthma attack. It's bad enough visiting St Ruth for a couple of days. It's weird, don't notice it so much here, but get home and open the bags, [+o(] one bad habit I'm happy I avoided. Leave the leather jackets at home, takes weeks to air out.

I'd think the gusseting could work - and the truss company should be able to tell you. Vertical strength is obtained by depth of the structural element - that's why there are I beams and those steel trusses that look so flimsy as the components are often kind of puny looking. The gussetting may provide more depth by connecting the pieces of the truss?...Maybe transferring the load accross more of the truss rather than the bottom chord? (I can't believe I still remember a bit of this stuff... but not enough to not check with someone who has a clue ... maybe 22 years in corporate purgatory hasn't totally destroyed my brain cells but in all fairness I like my job for the most part.... though sitting in front of CRTs swilling caffiene and diet sodas probably don't help either).

Sounds like your radiant heating is sort of a pionering thing in this area. Way cool.... now if you can just get the sun or wind to do most of the heating some day, or generate most of the electricity.... I've been thinking of putting some heating in the floor in our bathroom I'm rebuilding but was thinking electrical resistance cabling... but smaller tubing and a small water heater might be more cost effective, at least in the long run.

Grew up with hot water heat ... some of the most horrendous ugly huge radiators that were ever built. Well, ok, not as big as those really big older cast iron things but huge and obnoxious compared to the shorter baseboard type that were becoming popular back then. But a lot quieter than forced air and more even temperature - as long as we kept the coal furnace and wood burning furnace fired up. The old fashioned kind one had to shovel the coal in. I think my brother and his first wife finally put in a gas boiler in the 1980s. Mom and Grandma almost killed Dad and Grandpa I think someone said when they come home with these ugly radiators back in 1949 / 1950 .. .. "but we got a really good deal" but probably not as good a deal as the guy who finally got 'em out of his storeroom.

Off to dream land .. .I think I'm finally winding down.

[IndyKlipschFan]

Roger picked me up and brought me home as I was a bit comatose from the pain meds. Good old Roger!

That's what friends are for... He Rocked!!!

[gaspr]

OK, first off, I am not an engineer, so I may be way off base here... It seems very likely that the roof trusses will hold the weight quite easily. I would be more worried that the total weight of the ceiling drywall plus the weight of the insulation, is actually being held up by a couple of large handfulls of drywall screws!!!

I have seen drywall screws pull through damp drywall...make sure that you get some paint on that ceiling before the summer humidity gets to it...

[colterphoto1]

Good point. The sheets of 5/8" drywall are 104 lbs each for 12 foot sheet, that's 2.1 pounds per square foot, so I'm already at 5 pounds per square foot on trusses that will bear 10 lbs/ft2.

I use plenty of screws. The order of assembly is - hang rock, insulate, then apply joint compound (in case you cause any cracks walking around in attic, then paint by summer time. Being winter time, there's no point wasting time trying to mud the joints in the cold, they'd never set up properly until insulation is there to maintain some level of heat. Also need to apply a vapor barrier as the cellulose will not have an integral barrier. Vapor barrier goes to the 'living' side of the insulated wall cavity, so it must be against the drywall, under the insulation.

[JJkizak]

You can hoist both your cars up from those trusses and not worry. But I wouldn't do it. I only hoisted one vehicle, Corvette, 1969 427. And my trusses were constructed from 2.x 6's with a 24 ft span and placed 6 ft apart.

JJK

[greg928gts]

Good point. The sheets of 5/8" drywall are 104 lbs each for 12 foot sheet, that's 2.1 pounds per square foot, so I'm already at 5 pounds per square foot on trusses that will bear 10 lbs/ft2.

I use plenty of screws. The order of assembly is - hang rock, insulate, then apply joint compound (in case you cause any cracks walking around in attic, then paint by summer time. Being winter time, there's no point wasting time trying to mud the joints in the cold, they'd never set up properly until insulation is there to maintain some level of heat. Also need to apply a vapor barrier as the cellulose will not have an integral barrier. Vapor barrier goes to the 'living' side of the insulated wall cavity, so it must be against the drywall, under the insulation.

I wish you had asked me about this. The proper procedure is to install the vapor barrier, install 1 x 3 strapping, then install the drywall.

Don't bother with a vapor barrier between the bottom chords of the trusses, just use a vapor barrier paint on the ceiling instead. If you even need a vapor barrier. I'd have to do some research to see what the recommendations are in your area.

That's a good point about the holding power of the drywall screws. I think I'd do a little more reasearch into that and if needed add a few more screws.

It should be easy to stiffen a single truss by adding sheathing from top to bottom on one or two sides. The truss company will be able to tell you how to do it.

Can you get adapters that sweat onto 1/2" copper that you can attach the PEX to? If so, I'll send you some copper manifolds. I probably have enough kicking around the barn to do your job.

Greg

[greg928gts]

I've actually been called crazy for the amounts of insulation I install in my homes. Back when fuel oil was 79 cents a gallon, the general thinking in our industry was that anything over R-38 in the attic was a waste of money. Funny how today most of those builders are either out of business or still using R-38 fiberglass with the price of fuel oil much higher. What is the recommendation by these geniuses going to be when fuel oil is at $5 per gallon?

Greg

[Joe Shmoe]

Don't forget to glue, before you screw [] The drywall adhesive will not only increase the holding strength, but also make the wall alot more solid. I am sure you knew, just wanted to add. my .02

[colterphoto1]

we run 4 screws per sheet width at each truss when attaching the drywall, I put one between every one of those in final 'screw-off'. That's one every 7 inches.

won't mess with vb in attic, you're right about the paint. Besides this is not a living/breathing building- it's a SHOP. No humans or plants inhabit the space enough for moisture to build up. There are no bathing or cooking activities taking place.

[colterphoto1]

" I wish you had asked me about this. The proper procedure is to install
the vapor barrier, install 1 x 3 strapping, then install the drywall."

In years of building both commercial and residential, I have never seen this procedure used in our area. You truly go to the nth degree.

[BLSamuel]

Good point. The sheets of 5/8" drywall are 104 lbs each for 12 foot sheet, that's 2.1 pounds per square foot, so I'm already at 5 pounds per square foot on trusses that will bear 10 lbs/ft2.

Now wasn't that the bottom chord of the trusses that are rated for 10 lbs / ft2? The complete truss I'm sure will bear much more. Very good to be thinking about it especially if you're wanting to hang lighting trusses and speakers - though 1 or 2 KP250 or even LaScala might not be too bad depending on how the load is distrbuted accross the bottom of the truss. (Not sure).

I'm sure the truss manufacturer will be happy to answer any questions and suggestions for any beefing up you may need to do for what you want to do. Of course that may have been easier without the drywall in place...

Awesome project man. I'd go with Greg's suggestion to put as much insulation in as you can.

[BLSamuel]

What is the recommendation by these geniuses going to be when fuel oil is at $5 per gallon?

R19 - they've invested in fuel oil, gas, and electric utilities.

[gaspr]

I wish you had asked me about this. The proper procedure is to install the vapor barrier, install 1 x 3 strapping, then install the drywall.

Ah...now I understand the purpose of the strapping and heavy duty poly on the ceiling...it keeps the load of the insulation from acting on the drywall.

[colterphoto1]

Here's Steve on his John Deere tractor moving some flume sand to the main driveway.

Sadly, I have worked here for nearly two months and there's hardly an image of me doing any work....

[IndyKlipschFan]

Sadly, I have worked here for nearly two months and there's hardly an image of me doing any work....

hahahahahahaha I had people think less of me cause I hired out some to do some of my work Michael.

So, yes your less of a real "he man" cause you didn't do all of it, and your lazy, and just rich having someone else do it..cause you can't.. blah blah blah...

Been there,.. Done that,,,,,

Just be happy with the process... You have done more than 90% do.

Hope u enjoyed Yes... I bet that would of been fun!

Michael Kelsey was awesome.... His next show in Indy@ Birdy's DEC 28th... BE THERE>...

[colterphoto1]

I was on the job site about every day, usually on one of the crews or another. The only phase I didin't have much to do with was the framing and concrete pouring. Excavation, fill, layout, windows and doors, electrical, siding, drywall are all my handiwork and I'm quite proud to have done a lot of the work myself thankyewverymuch.

M