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diminishing returns on foundation insulation
Sunday, October 6 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Yesterday I'd left the excavation I'd started nearly complete and ready for horizontal styrofoam insulation, but a wall collapse had demoralized me enough to let the hole sit overnight, just to make sure that footing pier didn't decide to topple over due. Everything looked fine this morning, so I climbed down in that hole, feeling perfectly safe to be in it, especially with that temporary diagonal brace overhead keeping it from moving westward (towards me). I quickly cleaned out the bottom, making sure to expose all the edges of existing styrofoam so that the new styrofoam would be pressed against other styrofoam, and there would be a minimum of contact between non-styrofoam (in this case, sand) insulated by the styrofoam and non-styrofoam not insulated by the styrofoam. The trench I'd made was about 24 inches wide in the north-south dimension and about 53 inches long in the east-west dimension, filling a two-foot wide swath straddling the central east-west axis of the cabin and reaching from the east foundation wall to the central pier under the east decking. To get a suitable sheet of styrofoam into the hole while standing in it, I was forced to cut it roughly in half and then stand on one half while installing the other. Then I used bits of styrofoam scrap to fill in any voids between the sheets and any existing styrofoam edges I'd exposed. This sheet actually overlapped some of the styrofoam I'd installed last weekend, meaning that in a rectangular area near the center axis there was now a 30 by 12 inch wide rectangle having at least two inches of horizontal styrofoam.
As I had with the concrete pier of a pillar whose foundation I insulated last fall, I was able to dig horizontal tunnels on either side of the the central pier and install stryfoam scrap inside these to partially insulate the pier fitting on its north and south sides. The pier has a one foot cross-section, and I was able to insulate about six inches long and four inches wide on both sides.
Once I was done installing all that styrofoam, I no longer had to worry about collapses of the trench wall. Indeed, I could now use the void as a place to receive fill from further excavation. I proceed to dig horizontally southward about four more feet along the east foundation wall. As I did so, I moved much of the sand onto the styrofoam I'd just installed, saving myself considerable effort. But I couldn't go much further than I did, as the soil rapidly deepened from there to something between five and six feet deep, and to excavate a two-foot-wide trench at that depth would require a lot of work, a large place to put all the removed sand (not easy to find under a deck along a foundation wall), and any additional styrofoam wouldn't provide much additional benefit. So I installed the last of the eight foot by two foot sheet of styrofoam I'd been cutting up. And then I began filling the excavation in once more. At this point about fifteen feet of the north side of the east foundation wall had a horizontal sheet of styrofoam reaching out at footing depth about 30 inches (as the two feet I'd been adding was in addition to about six inches that I'd added when installing vertical sheets of styrofoam to the foundation walls themselves).
Meanwhile, despite worsening lameness in one of her front paws, Charlotte was eager for another walk. So I took both dogs for a walk down the old dock trail and then over to the vicinity of the outflow beaver dams via a shortcut, then to the dock, and then, after Neville and I sunned ourselves for awhile there, back to the cabin via the Mossy Rock Trail. I'd lost Charlotte while Neville and I were at the dock, and I lost Neville as well about two thirds of the way from the dock. He suddenly smelled the scent of something and hurried off the trail westward like a murderous hound dog. Ever since learning that Neville had freaked out Ibrahim and family in addition to all our other lakeside neighbors by killing a helpless fawn near the public dock, I've been paranoid about what the dogs have gotten themselves into whenever they decide to go on their own adventures. True, Ibrahim's A frame is 700 feet from our cabin, and there isn't much that interests our dogs there. But randomly, they might run through and then I'd have to hear about it because one of their many surveillance cameras caught a fleeting glimpse. So I hurried after Neville to see where he was going. Normally Neville is very slow and lags well behind me when I'm walking through the woods. But when he's motivated, he can run surprisingly quickly. He'd vanished somewhere on our driveway up where it forks to also provide our never-around neighbor Shane with his own driveway. So I walked out on our driveway to where I had a view down to Ibrahim's building site. I could see his kids running around and making enthusiastic kid noises and I could see Ibrahim grabbing things and taking them to an outdoor chop saw (he's always working on his house's interior), which I could then hear whining industriously. Since all that was going on normally, it seemed unlikely that Neville had run through their yard. But where was he? After awhile he came huffing and puffing from the direction of Woodworth Lake Road, but I couldn't tell where he'd been.
With all the dogs accounted for, I went back under the decks and continued returning the landscape to my vision of what it should be, with about five feet of clearance in the most valuable space (that is, beneath the porch, where conditions are dry) and less elsewhere.
But then the dogs saw or heard something and when darting off again to the west, and again I was worried they would end up at Ibrahim's place. This time they were gone for a fairly long time, and several strolls that I took through areas they might be in proved fruitless. When they eventually returned, it was somehow from the southeast, as if they'd gone around the planet.
Later this evening I went with just Charlotte down to the dock via the Mossy Rock Trail. There have been a couple bags of concrete mix down there that long ago turned into pillow-shaped rocks. Today I used one of those as the foundation for a northward extension of my in-lake "ice wall," the structure that ideally will keep the ice in the middle of the lake from exerting much force on the permanent part of the dock during the winter. That blob of concrete looked kind of ugly, though, so I immediately covered it with other rocks that I pulled up from the mucky lake bottom nearby. One particular large (and egg-shaped) boulder proved difficult toe extract, so I fetched a metal bar that I use as part of the dock winterizing hardware and used it as a crowbar. With a modest crowbar, the human ability to move rocks scales enormously.
I noticed, by the way, that whatever had been wrong with the cuticle of my right ring finger was now almost completely gone. I'd never managed to remove any foreign material or squeeze out any pus. It just healed somehow after a lot of stoned massaging Friday night.
This evening back at the cabin, I dedicated myself to tracking down another bug in my Local Remote system. Some timing issue was causing it to work fine with the faster internet speeds back in Hurley but to fail at the much slower cabin internet speeds (which are 1/50th to 1/25th as fast). Eventually I found the issue: some mangled SQL that ended with a hanging comma was failing to run. But even with that problem solved, something else was causing trouble, but by then the diphenhydramine I'd taken was kicking in and there was no way I was going to solve the problem with greater and greater levels of stupidity.
Some of the work required me to be down in the basement so I could keep changing the firmware of the actual remote controller itself (which sends signals to all device_features it serves as a proxy to control). I'd moved my radio out from under the porch into the basement so I could still hear the wild variety of pop music from the 50s to the 90s played on WFNY. At some point they played a song from 1965 called "England Swings" by country music legend Roger Miller. That song was buried deep down in my memory, as I'd probably last heard it as a child in the mid 1970s. The lyrics, which have occurred to me occasionally in the years since, always seemed absurd: "England swings like a pendulum do." Surely I'd misheard the lyrics and come up with that as a close approximation in the way that people (and pendula) do. But no, those are the actual words.
A view of the dock from the shore this evening, with the icewall exapansion visible on the left. That big round boulder is the one described above.
Click to enlarge.
Charlotte at the dock this evening.
Click to enlarge.
In this mark-up of the horizontal styrofoam map from last week, I show the styrofoam I installed yesterday (depicted in transparent layers) and how they lay atop each other and the existing foam. The greenish block is the first partial sheet installed and purplish block is the second sheet installed. Note the little green blocks on either side of the pier, the foam I managed to add by tunneling.
Click to enlarge.
A view under the decks along the east foundation wall this evening, looking from the north. This is after I buried all the styrofoam. The loose sand on the left is eventually all going to end up somewhere else. Note all the lighting, which is necessary even in the full light of day due to the gloominess down there.
Click to enlarge.
I even have a light I can turn on behind the steps up to the deck.
Click to enlarge.
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