Carriage House Basement
This used to be an unused room that collected boxes and dust. Now it is an exercise room.
If
there's one thing this house has lots of, it's storage space. This pantry was ripped up
when the utility trench was dug between the house and the carriage house.
A small room branching off from this pantry houses the nerve center of the house: the electronics room. This is where the house server is kept, along with the phone system, security system, power backups, etc. It also houses the automatic switch for the generator.
And people wonder why we have 400-amp service.
For some reason, all the guys ooh and ahh when they see the furnace room.
This is an Energy Kinetics 2000 furnace, and it provides the entire compound with heat and hot water. It's remarkably efficient, extremely quiet, and really cool to look at. One of its advanced features is that when the zones stop calling for heat, instead of letting the furnace cool off by losing its heat to the open air, the system uses that "free heat" to heat the hot water!
The actual furnace is the yellow casing. The black base below is just a stand to keep it off the floor!
One of the neat features of the furnace is that it can be converted to burn
just about anything, and it's very efficient. So if we wanted to run a natural
gas line to the house, we wouldn't need to replace the furnace!
Next Stop: The Landscaping