Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Well, our goose has been off the nest for over 24 hours now.  So far there are just the two goslings in evidence.  Either she had the world's smallest clutch of eggs, or something got the rest of her goslings.  Dang.

The next step on my office heating system is to build an insulated plenum with a filter holder.  This is where the warm air from the first floor will go first, basically into a big box with a filter in the middle, then after being filtered into an insulated 7" diameter duct.  I'm building this plenum against an insulated wall, and on top of an insulated floor, so that means I have four insulated walls to build to make a fully enclosed box.  I started with the two sides, which are now finished.  You can see it in various stages of construction in the photos below, which are in order left-to-right.

Having the right tools to do this with really makes this sort of thing easy to do.  The only addition I can think of that would have made it any easier would be a panel saw (for cutting 8' x 4' sheets of things like the OSB I used here).  Good panel saws are expensive, though, and my need (I think!) will be infrequent – so for now, at least, I'm sticking with a straightedge and a steady hand on the circular saw. 

I started by installing the two partially finished walls in the right place.  I left one side off so that I could nail the 1x3 frames into the existing wall and floor.  The nail gun with 2" nails worked very well for this!  Then I nailed the final sides on, and (last photo) stuffed them with blow-in insulation (which I just fluffed by hand and stuffed in).

That insulation was slightly mysterious.  The marketing folks have “green” in every possible place they could on the package, and even in green ink.  They really, really want you to know that it's recycled (up to 85%!), itch-free (not like that nasty fiberglass stuff!), and safe.  What they don't tell you is that it's full of dust that will make you sneeze non-stop, your eyes will tear up, and you'll need to blow your nose approximately 10 times per minute.  They also don't bother mentioning what the stuff actually is made of.  This leads me to believe that they're not very proud of the ingredients, whatever they might be.  That rules out my favorite possibility: dehydrated, shredded politicians.  If that's what it was made of, you can be sure they'd be bragging about that!