335 Maplewood Ave Renovation: Lots of snow

A Brief History

The project entails repairing the building at 335 Maplewood Ave in a manner that meets both preservation and sustainability goals. The building is the new location for Petersen Engineering, a firm that has been located in Portsmouth since 1992, and specializes in sustainable building engineering. We intend for this project to showcase techniques & materials that promote both preservation and sustainability and intend to share all aspects of the project locally and regionally through open houses, presentations, industry tradeshows, case studies and publications. We foresee this project being a valuable educational tool to demonstrate that preservation goals need not be compromised by sustainability goals. We have teamed with Bruss Construction who we know from past collaborations has exceptional experience and expertise on projects with the dual goal of preservation and sustainability.

The project received approval by the Historic District Commission on January 6, 2010 with construction scheduled to begin early February 2010.

The projected peak heat loss reduction is 85%.

Friday, January 28, 2011

Lots of snow - no ice dams

James climbed up to shovel off the kitchen roof.

We shoveled off a little section of the insualted roof to inspect the ice damming situation.

It looks pretty good.

There is a little bit of ice on the edge but we suspect that that is from rain we had earlier in the week that might have taken a little bit of time to migrate down through the snow.

The underside of the drip edge is exposed to the elements and is conductive so when the rain water did trickle down - it must have froze the moment it hit the bottom of the roof where the flashing is. The strip of ice is about the depth of the drip edge. Just a thought...

I took the old temperature gun out on the roof and it is pretty cool to see the surface temperatures of the building assemblies from the outside and how they relate to the assembly R-value. It is pretty cool to see the temperatures corrilate with the thermal performance of the assemblies.