we're moved in!

Yayyy...finally moved in and together as a family. And right before Christmas too. The place is a disaster because we moved in without the interior being finished. Cindy is busy now painting the closets so we can install some closet organizers and get stuff out of bags and off the floor. Everything works for the most part. We are still having some problems with the Rinnai hot water system. The vent/air intake pipe continues to freeze up at night and shuts down. It is a good thing that we are in a straw bale house. It is in the minus 20's lately and the house can go the entire day without the hot water heating the in-floor system and the house will only drop a few degrees without the wood stove going. With the wood stove, the house is just too hot. We bought a very small Vermont Castings stove and the salesman kept warning us that it would be too small for our 1300 square foot house...wrong! During the day though, the sun hits the black plastic vent pipe and melts the accumulated frost for the H2O heater...sometime during late afternoon I can turn the thermostat on and it will run long enough to heat the slab back up to room temp. I think the problem is that lately it has been unusually humid outside. It is minus 20 or worse and the humidity is still up around or over 80%! That is quite unusual for us...typically it is very dry during our winters.

It is good to know though that the Rinnai heater runs long enough to run a bath or use domestic hot water even when the vent is frosted. I haven't figured out a solution to the problem, but we'll investigate further once we get a little more settled. In the meantime it is completely livable.