Adventure Inn's New building!

 

Welcome to the Adventure Inn blog. It has taken awhile to get going…but we are here now. We have begun our big project and can’t wait to share with all of you the process of building a solar thermal, super insulated, energy efficient addition.  Our goal was to replace the 2 older buildings with a new building that will help us reduce our energy usage by 50%.

We received a CERTS grant last year to help with the costs of our design and we have hired one ov Minnesota’s foremost green architects. Rachel Wagner of  Wagner-Zaun Architects in Duluth. Both she and Doug Zaun had many challenges to fit a new building on our small lot. We have open skies to the south which made it a perfect fit for our solar thermal. We also wanted to incorporate more green space for our guests and also to help with water run off.

We began the tear down the end of October. We Free-cycled as much of the old office building before the tear down. It was amazing the number of Ely folk who showed up and found uses of parts of our building.

Tear down and preparation went fast and soon we were ready to pour concrete. Our footings and the bottom of our concrete slab were insulated with 6" of strofoam. The slad had wirsbo piping stapled to the insulation before the concrete slab was poured. The snow stayed away until the final pour. For once we were happy that the fall was warm and the snow came late. Our wirsbo piping will be connected to our solar thermal so in the colder months we should be able to heat the building using the hot water created by the sun.