Wohnzimmer progress

Ventilation concept

Aim:

comfortable warmth and air freshness
energy efficient
recover waste heat using a heat recovery unit
control humidity, CO2 and temperature levels using software
filter incoming air (spring pollen kills me)

And most importantly:

never ever smell a cat toilet again.

I started reading this excellent ventilation in Germany primer (it’s in German but you can use this Google Translate link to Englishify things).

So tomorrow morning I’m meeting with the folks from EST Berlin to discuss airflow and heating. Before then I made this quick diagram to prepare me for how it could work.

F17 Ventilation Concept v0.1 – using negative pressure to pull in fresh air (comments welcomed in the doc)

Ventilation Notes

Ideally the ventilation includes heat recovery (and a filter to protect against spring pollen)

Three variations on the main room and kitchen position

This is a tough one. The room is 9m x7m and proving hard to lay out.

Variation 1: kitchen on the street side (adjacent bedroom1)

Benefits

I really like the idea of coming in and having the kitchen nearby the front door
Morning sunshine for breakfast will be nice
Means the main lounge seat can be tucked around the corner

Negatives

Will need a wastewater pump

Variation 2: Kitchen next to the terrace

Benefits:

Having the main cooking block under the sun roof (lichtband) is nice.

Drawbacks:

Will need a wastewater pump

Variation 3: Kitchen on the street side (far wall)

Benefits:

I like the area at the end of the main passage being open
Maintains a view to the sofa area of the main couch.

Drawbacks:

any?

Applying user stories to home planning

In the software world we write user stories that cover how a feature will be used. They are usually along the lines of

“As a <something>, I want <feature> so that <something can happen> “

Each story defines an element of functionality. For example, “user can login”.

So I was thinking about the equivalent of user stories for building. Some are obvious: “A an authorised person, unlock the front door”.

But there are others that are more interesting and which we end up doing everyday without knowing about: can put dirty laundry into the washing basket. In the F17 case this would mean, a context of taking a shower and changing, and needing to put some dirty laundry into the washing basket. That would mean walking around to the laundry room, opening the laundry basket and then walking back to the bathroom.

So I thought it would make sense to list out the things that I do regularly and look at how each of them could be optimised or whether a compromise is necessary. For example in our “place dirty laundry into the washing basket” story, we ended up optimising by putting a chute into the bathroom that takes the dirty laundry directly to the washing basket in the laundry room.

So here’s my list of stories from the silly to the “perhaps this could be optimised” tasks.

Arriving home:

Put down bags
Sit
Take off shoes
Unlock door
Pick up shoes
Put shoes away inside
Pick up bags
Go inside
Put bags down on counter top
Take off coat
Put house key away
Put coat away

…and then go and put away shopping (probably another user story).

Wow – that’s actually a whole bunch of tasks that I generally overlook but that could be somewhat optimised.

For example “sit” implies having a bench or stool outside or just inside the door. And then there’s the whole notion of unlocking doors and searching for keys.

If I look through this there’s a lot of stopping and starting – sit, stand up, go inside, go outside again, put down bags to be able to unlock, pick up bags again.

Our arrive home user story is actually a plethora of new tasks.

But before listing them I think that it might be worth thinking about other optimisations that would make this arriving home moment a little more pleasant. If the door could unlock and open automatically that would reduce our list to:

Arriving home:

Go inside
Put bags on counter
Sit
Take off and directly put away shoes
Put away coat

…finally fo and unpack shopping

The optimisations would be something like:

We don’t need to have a key to unlock the front door. Instead the presence of someone with access could be detected by their mobile phone being nearby and a PIR sensor.
The door can open and close a few moments later. Automatically
And dirt that is brought into the house is automatically cleaned up by the imagiSuck™ vacuum.
Finally we have a new event that could be fired off on the openhab software “arriving home” which would include turning on the lights (if it’s between sunset and sunrise) starting music streaming and playing into the main room.

Sensor states to monitor:

Someone near the outside of the apartment front door
PIR sensor
Bluetooth/wifi/NFC
Someone near the outside of the apartment front door with access
Someone buzzing the downstairs intercom
“Someone else already home”/presence (in which case, don’t start playing music – perhaps they want silence or are already listening to something)
Sunrise/sunset time on this day

Potential rules to program:

“Arriving home”
Person outside the front door has access?
Open the door
Unlock the door
Have the actuator swing the door open
Close the door again after n seconds and nobody outside.
“A guest arriving” – buzz them in downstairs and then automatically open the front door when they reach the top floor.
(and the really pedantic rule) Tell imagiSuck™ to vacuum the stretch between the front door and the kitchen. At the risk of being labeled a germaphobe I’ll hold off programming this rule and install a doormat outside :).

Bringing this back to user stories, there are other ones that I find myself doing reguary that I’d like to think through and walk though:

“Do the laundry”
“Clean”
Change the cat toilet
Chage the bed linen
Play music/podcast
Go to bed
Wake up
Leave the house
Leave the house for a longer time
Nap
Prepare food
Shower
Read in the lounge
Let a friend stay over
Receive a delivery
Secure my bike
Make coffee!

We could group a few of these into “starting the day” (in order):

Wake up
“Play music”
Shower
Coffee
Prepare Breakfast.

I like waking up naturally. Light usually does the trick of activating my brain and getting a few thoughts firing. I’m also aware that I spend a lot of time on my laptop in bed in the morning and this isn’t perhaps the most productive time (I’m looking at you Reddit and Hackernews). So I’m thinking that the lure of freshly made coffee in the kitchen might do the trick of at least getting me out of bed. After that I’m rolling.

I’ve been experimenting with a Philips Hue system and having the brightness slowly ramp up over 30 minutes does a good job of wrapping up dreams and waking up. So to that end, perhaps the following sequence (assuming a variable of WakeUpTime)

WakeUpTime – 30 minutes: begin slowly turning up the room brightness (I’m not sure if there’s any benefit to coloured light so we’ll just work with the white LEDs on the DALI system)
WakeUpTime -26 minutes: start the coffee machine
WakeUpTime -29 minutes: open the blinds
WakeUpTime: fire the “Ok Google, Tell me about my day” event (latest news that I’m interested in)
Then I have to actually shift my lazy ass out of bed.
Pick up coffee, go and shower.

Rule runs until the “tell me about my day” is finished (this can be between 10 mins and 2 hours depending on how many news sources are configured.

Now we have a bit of a problem: If there is something interesting on the news (this started playing in the bedroom, the sound needs to “follow” me to the kitchen and then to the bathroom). I picked up an Apart Revamp1680 16 channel amplifier that could drive speakers throughout the apartment, but I’m not really sure how to do a “follow-me” function. My thinking has been to get 8 Chromecast Audios and have them assigned into different Chromecast groupings depending on the rule being run. So a WakeUpSimon rule would push audio to speaker grouping by the same name and include: Bedroom1, Passage, Kitchen and the main Bathroom. It’s a bit of a hack but would work. I’m curious if there is a better way?

Another task that could be rethought is laundry. Currently it’s something like:

Take dirty laundry from the spare room
Sort it into white and colours
Load the washing machine and start it
Horrible beeping sound when it’s finished
Take everything out, drag it out to the other room.
Hang shirts directly onto hangers
Hang hangers into wardrobe
Drape the bed linen over doors
Deal with higher humidity in the flat
Finally put everything away

Summary – it’s horrible.

So my thinking of how to optimise this is to have a dedicated laundry/utility room with the following features:

Two chutes from the bathroom that enable pre sorting into white and coloureds.
Ventilated with an airflow controller
Humidity sensor in the room
Humidity sensor in the apartment
Washing machine that doesn’t beep at the end of the cycle
A drying rack that lifts up to the ceiling for drying large sheets and duvet covers
An area that can take coat hangers

My thinking for washing is something like

Take clothes off before showering and post into the white or coloured chute
When one of the two baskets is full, load and run the washing machine

When unloading:

Load shirts directly into hangers and hang up directly
Bed linen is hung up on a large drying rack
Underwear and socks is hung up on the same rack
Rack is hoised up to the room

The drying rule could work as follows

Compare humidity inside and outside the room
If the humidity is higher in the room, open the airflow vent
When the humidity is within 1 percent of inside and outside, close the vent
Send a push notification that drying is done
Move shirts on hangers to the wardrobes in each room

I realise that this is all a little pedantic. My thinking is that before things get built, it’s a great opportunity to run through “apartment user stories”

Next up will be looking at how the following ‘”tasks” run:

“Clean”
Change the cat toilet – involving the CatGenie
Play music/podcast
Leave the house
Leave the house for a longer time
Nap
Prepare food
Shower
Read in the lounge
Let a friend stay over
Receive a delivery
Secure my bike

Fun fun!

Planning the Main Room

Yesterday’s meeting with Cornelia turned into a 4 hour session working on the main room, This one has proven tricky – it’s a large space but also comes with some limitations. The waste water outlet is on the terrace side which had meant that we were trying to locate the kitchen nearby.

It turns out that drainage slope (Abwasse Gefalle) is a function of the drainage pipe’s diameter. But either way you are looking at something between 1% and 2%. That means that across the main room we’re looking at needing to hide a pipe drop of about 10cm in the flooring. And navigate around the beams and underfloor heating. One way to avoid problems is using a pump.

However the real fun part yesterday was playing around with different approaches to the layout.

A quick reminder of how things look now.

Plumbing gradient gore

notice the waste water pipe.

The idea is that the wooden panels slide out to make the fireplace part of the room more cosy.

This is also my favourite layout at the moment.

New roof window position

Rene has been busy with the 3D printing again (thanks Rene!)

Now the “licht-band” is moved closer to the street and everything “fits” better.

Wondering if the lower beam is at the right height here?

Update

Today Cornelia and myself met the structural engineer (Statiker). The aim of today’s session was to look at some of his existing work, from before I bought the rooftop, and work out what would need to be changed. He is mostly concerned with working out how the roof will stay on and the building not fall down.

Key points:

We should avoid steel roof spans longer than 7m. While it’s possible to go much longer, a much larger I-Beam size is needed.
Steel bends or will dip down under the weight of a roof. For a 7m span, the steel will dip about 2cm.
The fresh water pipe comes up underneath the balcony and is routed through to the kitchen and bathroom. Cornelia had concerns about it freezing. The statiker mentioned that there is enough convection in the pipe so that warmer water from further down in the house would circulate and mean that the chances of freezing (after being insulated) are low.

The next step is that the structural engineer will redo the plan in January so that it can be submitted for building approval at the bauamt.

The existing plan looks like this

Each of the vertical lines is steel reinforcement

Meeting the structural engineer today

Somewhat undecided about this sloping passage

We’ve had many conversations about where to put the kitchen – unfortunately the waste water pipe is right where the kitchen island needs to be and running a longer pipe without a good gradient is difficult.

I lik the idea of somewhere to sit when coming home and taking off shoes. That said, there’s a large landing area at the top of the stairs that could also work so this might not need to be inside the apartment.