Another Month

14:45 Wednesday, 1 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 37.18°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 96% Wind: 8.77mph
Words: 657

I actually slept better at my sister's house than I do here at home. I was cold, but I didn't wake up in the middle of the night and then fail to fall back to sleep. Don't know what's up with that, but there it is.

Anyway, we had a tornado warning yesterday evening. There's no place that's "safe" in this house. Maybe the mechanical room, since there are no windows in there, but that's it. Tried a few apps to see if any were able to report radar indications of tornado formation, but I found nothing that was useful.

When the squall line passed us, we did get some hail, maybe quarter-sized. It only lasted for several seconds, but you could hear it banging off the roof. I worried about the Maverick, I'd read about the aluminum hood being easily dented by hail, but apparently it wasn't enough to do so this time.

We watched Children of Men last night. I think it's only the second time I've watched it. I probably bought it shortly after it came out in 2006. It's remarkable that it's already 20 years old. The themes are very resonant with the present. There was a "flu pandemic" in 2009 in the film, and then a sudden drop in fertility, to the point where the last child to be born was in 2009 (the movie takes place in 2027). Immigration and hostility to immigrants is a central theme of the movie. It's a good movie, but it won't make you feel good. Kind of like Soylent Green.

As a palate cleanser, we watched The In-Laws, which was just about perfect in that role.

I've been trying to educate myself on heating and cooling ICF homes. Our builder is big on radiant floor heating. I'm big on not having two separate systems for heating and cooling. I've learned that you can use radiant floor heating systems as cooling systems. It simply turns the source into a sink, and it lowers the mean radiant temperature of the room, such that our bodies are able to radiate heat efficiently and we "feel" comfortable.

The tricky element with using cool surfaces is condensation. With an ICF home, you have to install a large dehumidifier in the home to manage the water vapor being emitted by the concrete as it cures over a number of years. So you're already building in a robust capacity to manage humidity levels within the home, so why not leverage that to use radiant floor cooling. I don't want to pay for two systems, one to heat the house and the other to cool it.

The other big advantage of an ICF house in this regard is that the thermal mass is enormous compared to conventional construction, so you don't experience large temperature swings requiring rapid response heating or cooling. In our home in Florida, you could feel heat radiating from the walls at night after the sun went down. The stucco was a fairly significant thermal mass, which was bridged into the interior through the studs and drywall, so even after the sun had gone down and the temperature had dropped several degrees, the AC kept cycling on and off all night, with the resulting noise and cold air blowing around.

I think the real challenge is going to get the sizing right, we don't want to buy more capacity than we can efficiently use. That's a little tricky around here because it doesn't seem as though many people are familiar with "hydronic" heating and cooling. Cornell University is next door, maybe I should poke around over there.

Anyway, our revised (downsized) "vision" for the house is with the designer. Hope to hear something back from her soon so we can start making calculations and ordering materials before Trump's war spikes all the costs.

Another thing about an ICF home is that I won't be worried about any tornadoes.

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