Ventilation

Shawn is not around until 12, so the plan is to explain ventilation/ducting this morning and show a few new Franke hoods later. Hoods have become important especially with the BTU increases in cooktops. You do not want your house smelling like the last item you cooked.

Venting a hood is certainly preferable than a non vented application, because you now exhaust the heat to the exterior.

The best ways to vent to the outside are: vertical (or straight up) then horizontal or straight back. Venting becomes less effective when you bend it or you vent beyond 10-15 feet

Water, Water...Nowhere

I read USA Today. Cover story is about Georgia running out of water. Of course, New Mexico has almost run out of water as well. In the appliance industry there is a glaring statistic:


The average front loading machine is about 3.5 to 4.0 cubic feet and uses 10 to 15 gallons of wter per wash.

The average top loading machine is about 2.5 cubic foot and uses 42 gallons of water per wash. (I am rating the non Estar top loaders with the usable cubic footage without the agitator)


In other words, a front load machine can use 1/3 the water and can be 60% larger. There will be a day when we will be using our waste water to flush our toilets or water our lawns(as they do in Atlanta). Considering a front load machine seems easy. Even easier when you factor in the 50% reduction in electricity.

Next week we will be covering new appliance products and a few other topics. We also handle requests at the Yale Blog. Running into a building or renovation issue, then perhaps we can help.


Have a Nice Weekend....



Steve

Recessed Lighting Part 2

There are tons of options for recessed trims, which as we know from Wednesday is the decorative part of a housing. In theory, you can buy almost any style from crystal to gold.







I will discuss the 2 main trims. If you want further discussion on shower trims or any other specialty products, post a comment and we can cover it next week


80% of recessed applications will have this type of trim. Its a baffle trim, which eliminates glare. Buy it in white, so the trim will blend in with the ceiling








16% of you will want a directional trim to accent a wall. In the old days we sold eye ball trims, which extruded greatly from the ceiling and looked awful doing so. Try a REGRESSED(did I wake you?) eyeball like this one.

Kelvin Temperature

Tomorrow or later today, we will continue with recessed

But today I want you to look at 2 more pictures of the same setting. They are both shot during the day.











You probably like the shaded picture better. Sunlight(and fluorescent) washes out color. The color temperature is approximately 5000 degrees Kelvin. Shading it lowers the temperature to approximately 2700 degrees as we have a mix of halogen and incandescent in the picture.

Any Green lighting plan should absolutely take advantage of sunlight with skylights, etc, but not for more formal spaces or to highlighting objects of interest

What do you think?