Lawn and Garden - your turn to help

My last post about the yard and garden was all confident but really we have a few (well, more than a few) issues left to resolve. I thought I'd list a few of them here and get some suggestions from you.

The first is a sinking walkway to our backyard. Most of these slate sheets have sunken below ground level since we moved in.

You can see from this angle that the grass and dirt has overtaken them. It's not really an inviting walk into our backyard:

We did actually clear this area out next to the side of the house a bit, and plant some snowdrops that our neighbor gave us, so there's that at least:

While walking through our neighborhood, I saw someone with this and WANT (it's not creepy to randomly photograph strangers' yards, right? I mean they're in the neighborhood so that makes it cool, right?). I guess this would be pretty hard to do, given that ours is on a hill and curved. We'd need a lot of pebbles, too.

 Any other ideas on how to improve our walkway?

Second, I'm so happy that we finally got the salvia to grow in our front garden. However, for two years in a row now, the first heavy rain after they come up makes them sink to the ground and stay there. They are in the back against the stoop (because they are tall enough in theory to poke out above the hosta and azalea), but you can't see them here:

You can see from these two photos taken from above that they have basically fallen down flat in a circle out from the center. These kind of plants don't seem like they would easily be staked, since they are in so many parts. Do I just need to embrace the fact that they are flat and move them to a more prominent place in front of the other plants?

Next on the list, our mint. It's got black dots and holes on it. A search for this problem reveals that it is either a fungus or blight that makes me think we have to cut it all back and hope for better next year. But none of the descriptions and pictures look quite like ours:

And finally for today, some aggressive weeds trying to take over our brick patio. The holes between the bricks are obviously no longer well filled with sand or cement or whatever was there to begin with, so there are weeds everywhere. We're not fond of using weed killer anyway but honestly in this case it hasn't even seemed to make a dent. Here it is just before I cleaned it up by hand:

 Here's proof that after a lot of manual labor, it actually looked nice:

 And here's the same spot (with no hammock base) just 3 weeks later again.

Any quick fixes? Roundup had very little impact when we used it last year, so we haven't wanted to buy another bottle.

A Tale of Two Seasons

I took so much time getting around to posting some photos of our garden that it turned from early-May to late-June. So why not take advantage and give some comparisons. I'm so happy that after all these years, our garden looks nice for more than just one month of the year.

In the spring, we have flowering spiraea vanhouttei, phlox, and Georgian blue:

 In the summer, nothing flowering plants from this view but a lot of interesting greenery:

On the lamppost, climbing clematis - and below, flowering verbena:

6 weeks later, the clematis made it all the way up the post (but, oddly, with a total of only 3 flowers all season) and we have yellow and white flowers as well as an Stargazer Oriental Lilly ready to start blooming (you'd think since I planted them, that I'd remember what those yellow and white flowers are, but I have no idea):

In this side, some spirea, a tiny phlox, and alliums in May:

Now, pink hydrangea:

Here's a sequence of 3 photos for this garden. First, newly planted roses bushes and the very start of some tiger lilies, in April:

Then, in May, lots of roses, as well as some red weigela:

Now in June, red tiger lilies (though the red leaves on the rose bushes are slightly concerning):

Our black-eyed Susans are about to wake up, having pretty much overtaken the garden under the picture window (helped by their equally hearty spring friends, the irises).

We've come a long way from when we first moved in and everything bloomed for a few weeks in April and then turned a boring green. We still have the azaleas, camellias, and cherry tree that look great for about 2 weeks only, but we've definitely added some diversity to make the rest of the growing season more interesting.

Ducting

One of the advantages of the Carrier Infinity system is that it can calculate duct static pressure. Briefly, this has to do with the pressure of the air as it blows through the ducts. Like blood pressure, lower is better. The newer AC systems expect a reading of around 0.5 inches per water column. Our ducts are delivering a reading of nearly 0.9.

Why should we try to fix this? Well, the air blower is going to be working harder than it should, which is wasting energy and shortening its life span. Our installer told us for under $1000 they could add more returns to increase the amount of air entering the system, which should reduce the pressure. They also wanted to add some supplies to each room of the upstairs to help equalize the temperature in the house.

Before we had any energy improvements done the house, the temperature difference between the top and main floors was around 8 degrees. Afterwards it dropped to about 5 degrees. So doubling the AC vent numbers on the top floor should help!

Closet without the shelves, before any vent work

Where a return is going

Before the new supply was added

Cutting a hole in the closet to run the new ducts, which will connect with the existing duct, outside the wall

New return hole

Supply hole in the baby room

The return in the linen closet is the biggest problem. The air is being pulled from the hallway between the walls into the ducting. Only a couple of inches to fit a lot of air. So the plan is the put some proper ducts in. But we'll be losing quite a bit of closet space. Which is probably why the previous install ran INSIDE the wall. They are also adding a return next to the Chinese painting in our room. .

Results of the finished work:

New supply on the right

Much tighter closest. We lose a lot of shelving on the right

So, did we hit 0.50? Drum roll........

No we did not

Not even close. A bummer, really. From reading around the internet it seems that getting below 0.7 is just fine. So 0.73 is pretty close? Our AC guy says this is fine, but what would you expect him to say?  We are pretty disappointed but we have dropped way too much money on this project to do anything more now. It's not even clear what can be done - we are running out of space to install returns.

The system should be fine. I just need to stay on top of the filter cleanings to make sure the pressure doesn't build up too high. The doubling of the vents upstairs has also reduced the temperature difference between the top floor and main floor from around 5 degrees to 2-3 degrees. A noticeable difference.

AC Install

At 8:30 am three guys (from Company 2) showed up to install our new AC, the 2-stage 17 Seer 2-stage Carrier Infinity. A little before 6 pm the job was done. I'd estimate up to 20 man hours were used to get it installed. And there's still more to do! But that's for a later post.

Air handler ducts and parts

Mummified air handler

3 tons of cooling

The old one

The new one is a few inches taller and wider

The new air conditioner was dropped into place within an hour. After about another hour of hooking stuff up outside the guys disappeared into our crawl space for most of the day. During their lunch break I took a few pictures of our old air handler, which is located in the crawl space behind the headboard of our bed.

Old air handler

Ripping out the old air handler and some of the ducts

The AC guy wanted to keep the old copper pipes, which worried me that he was trying to cut some corners, but he said that since we had some fairly extensive insulation done in the attic, it would be disruptive to remove and install the new copper if the old ones were still intact. He promised they would pressure-test the old pipes and re-use them only if they were still OK. They were and were flushed out with some cleaning solution and nitrogen gas.

Cleaning out and checking the old copper refrigerant pipes

Old ducts

Testing testing

Air handler gone. The drip tray was removed later

Like an artist signing his canvas, the company owner signed the drip tray.

Our fancy, new AC thermostat is wi-fi enabled and can run lots of diagnostics to let us know how the system is functioning (it's also smaller, therefore we are stuck with some annoying screw holes to fill).

One problem? Being able to see how the system is functioning. It's an issue of too much knowledge. It turns out that new systems are designed to be run with less static pressure, so that the air comes out gradually and cools the house without the noisy gusts of cold air from the vent that were apparently the norm (and preference?) in the 90s. Our system was running at almost 1 inch static pressure and it should be running at 0.5. Which means our ducts aren't optimal for the new system. Which means a lot more work...The good news is that our AC company agrees this isn't optimal. Some complaints on the web are that a company will install a new AC unit, learn that it's running at 0.9 or higher, and just say "oh it's fine." Our company agrees we need to try to improve airflow, at least.

We can still run the AC as is it now, but it's not really working as it should. Back to the drawing board - duct work in progress. More to come.

REFRIGERATE!

OK, we have a temporary solution to our AC problem. D checked in with a bunch of neighbors and was able to find two people willing to loan us window units. They're loud and annoying - and don't cool things very well. But they came in handy earlier this week with temperatures above 90. Truly hating our Cape Cod house right now, with a top floor that heats up to attic temperatures.

The fancy one we ended up finding for the baby's room is much better than the standard window unit in our room. It cooled down the whole upstairs significantly:

Even though it seriously looks like it wants to take over the planet:

In the meantime, we've got our quotes for a new central AC unit. It is...well let's just say significantly more expensive than we though is putting it mildly. We have two different quotes and probably should get a third, but the two are priced very similarly, so we suspect this is just the price we have to live with. Both quotes have pros and cons. We thought it was interesting that in both cases, the AC people only suggested one option - the bottom option. We actually had to go back to ask how much it would cost to get a better model. I would have expected a few options included in the original proposal.

Here is, more or less, what we had to decide. (Blogger doesn't use tables, so this is a screenshot from Excel.)

A few things to note - Company 1 says the Lennox unit is 16 seer but the product info on the Lennox webpage says it is 14 Seer. We thought this might have something to do with a new air handler, listed at 2 Seer, adding to the efficiency. Company 2 has not finalized paperwork to take part in our utility company's rebate, so unfortunately we lose out on some rebates there, though Carrier has some rebates that Lennox doesn't (in the annoying form of a visa gift card). Also the actual total for the 3rd option will cost a bit more because we would pay extra to have a wi-fi enabled thermostat.

In the end, immediate availability is impacting our decision quite a bit and we're opting for the 3rd option (the 2-stage AC from Company 2). The first company hasn't even gotten back to us on our request for prices of a higher-end model. We've used the first company before and like them, but they just have too much business right now to try hard to "sell" this to us. And we want something sooner.

What would you have done? Would you have gotten more quotes? Will we regret this incredibly costly decision? It doesn't help that we're likely entering a heat wave early next week.