Day 23: A Name on the Door.

On Monday, 28th January (Day 19), a new team of workers began with the installation of the ventilation system, and with the further insulation of the roof. In modern houses built here in the North, air does not get exchanged by periodically opening all windows or some such. Also, the houses are built nearly completely air tight, and therefore ventilation must be enforced. This happens through a series of large pipes installed above the ceiling under the roof. Modern ventilation systems include heat exchangers, which use the outflowing warm air to pre-heat the fresh air from outside and thereby conserving energy.

During this past week (Days 19 to 23), also some electrical work has been done. Next to all outside doors there are lights installed now, which gives everything a finishing touch.

Upon closer inspection, we found that there's even a name on the door now: the door bell button is installed, but it does not do anything yet. However, we have now become one of the large amount of families in Finland, which all go by the same family name. I guess our future address will have to include a completely useless "c/o Friedland" – useless, because half the population is in care of Friedland.

The most impressive progress is the installation of all that hose pipe on the floor, which forms the floor heating. The photo above shows the distribution point from which hoses branch out into every room, and also the return flow is coming back together here. Controlling everything is a series of valves, one for each room, which are remote-controlled from thermostats in the rooms. The ball of electrical cabling is visible behind the folio, and so are red and blue valves for warm outflow and cooler return flow, respectively.

Here one can see one of the key features of floor heating: the hoses are closer together along the walls and windows, and further apart in the middle of the room. This makes sense, since the loss of heat is larger near walls and windows. The strange excluded area in the top-left is reserved for the fireplace.

The next step is to fill the entire floor area with very liquid concrete to make a smooth, even surface, which will eventually be covered by the flooring.

A lot has happened in the past week, but due to time constraints, blogging daily was not possible. Normal service will resume this week – we hope.