Black Cat Theater (Now going BIG!) - Page 2

Having recently put up the drywall, I decided to read up on how to do the next parts - acoustical treatments, fabric panels, and what not. I wound up reading the excellent Bacon Race Theater thread only to realize that it was happening just a few miles away. Being thoroughly impressed with BIG's ability to knock that theater out so quickly, I decided to see if he could work his magic for me too. Turns out he lives just 20 minutes away and so was able to come over that very afternoon.

BIG's biggest concern was with the theater's cooling system. I had decided to go with the Dead Vent approach - that is, to actively exchange air with adjacent basement rooms. I like this approach since it addresses the concern for sound getting into the house's HVAC system while being cheaper than installing a dedicated mini-split system.

Taking up the challenge, I reconfirmed my calcs that the inline fan I got (Panasonic FV-30NLF1) is rated at 340 CFM, which will change the air in the room my size (2718 ft^3) about 7.5 times an hour, which exceeds the recommended minimum of 4-6 times per hour. This fan has 6" and I used 6" acoustical flexiduct...so theoretically, it seemed good.

However, preferring empirical data, I decided to do a load test by wiring 8 100-watt light bulbs to simulate the heat given off by eight people. [Note: a person at rest gives off 350 BTUs (ref), a 100w bulb gives off 341 BTUs (ref)], plus the PJ and have lighting set as it would be for a movie and measure the temperature over time.

First, some pics of the room in it's test configuration. Note that I used blue-tape and plastic to seal the room as best I could. I also put down a carpet remnant to help insulate any effect the concrete floor might have...



Note the two rows of 4x 100w bulbs roughly simulates seating positions. There is a digital thermometer on top of the lamp in between the rows - it's a little above head-height to provide a worst-case scenario. I also have a thermal leak detector, which gives instantaneous temperature for anything I point it at. You may not be able to see them, but the exhaust vent is above where the PJ might be located and the supply vent is in the ceiling behind the screen.

My first test was invalid as I discovered it was pulling air from my HDMI conduit, the electrical panel, the door, and three outlets. The HDMI conduit was likely the worst infiltrator, as it was directly under the return, hence less room-air was being exchanged. I sealed all these points, but there must still be some breaches as the supply still doesn't seem to be as strong as the exhaust (more on this later)

The following results are with 8x 100w + 6x 60w bulbs (the sconces) + the rope-light:

Minutes	Intake	Room	Exhaust
60	70.5	72	73.0
60	70.5	72	73.8
60	69.9	73	73.9
60	70.0	73	75.0

I thought this was OK, but not stellar. One thing I noticed was that within 30 seconds of my opening the door, the thermometer jumped from 73 to 75. My guess is that, with the door open, the fan was no longer pulling cool air across the thermometer. What this means is that having the theater's door closed was actually important to keeping the thermometer cool, but the room was even warmer.

Next I decided to try a slightly more accurate heat profile - as having 6x 60w bulbs on high is unrealistic. So I decided to dim the two sconces on the back wall (to simulate the PJ) and turn off the other four 60w bulbs. So, after turning off four 60w bulbs and dimming two 60w bulbs I got:

Minutes	Intake	Room	Exhaust
30	70.7	73	75.0
30	71.2	73	75.2
30	70.5	75	75.2
30	70.7	75	75.3

Disturbing, even with less load, the room actually got warmer! It's as if a thermal mass was giving off heat - a quick check showed that the concrete was a cool 68, the carpet over the concrete read 71, but the drywall was hot - 75+. Note: the thermometer in the room doesn't display fractions, so the room could've been 75.3 at the end there...

Next I decided to try a "4-person" test by turning off four of the 100w bulbs in the rear:

Minutes	Intake	Room	Exhaust
45	70.0	73	74.6
45	70.0	73	74.4
55	70.5	73	74.1
36	69.5	73	73.5

Definitely trending down - so it seems that 4 people should be OK indefinitely...

Next I turned off the last four 100w bulbs, but left the "PJ" bulbs, rope light and, of course, the fan on:

Minutes	Intake	Room	Exhaust
30	70.5	72	73.0

Interesting that the room didn't get even cooler - like 70.5. I noticed that the drywall itself was still warm...

Next I turned off everything and opened the door:

Minutes	Intake	Room	Exhaust
25	71.0	70	72.6

So the room finally let go the heat, though I think it was still storing some as I vaguely recall it was 68 when I very first started the tests...

The next morning I decided to try the 4-person test again. The room started at 66 degrees (our thermostats are set low at night)

Minutes	Intake	Room	Exhaust
30	70.5	72	72.5
60	70.1	72	71.8

So it got to 72 again pretty quickly. Combined with the above test, if I do nothing, it really does seem that 4-people could stay in this room indefinitely. But the room is for 8 people, this problem needs to be solved.

My hypothesis was that something is wrong with the supply line - that it might be constricted somewhere along its path. It just doesn't make sense to me that the air velocity isn't more like what I feel coming out of the exhaust. The air should take the path of least resistance and a 6" hole should be pretty attractive in an "sealed" room (within the limits of what I could achieve with painter's tape, plastic sheets, and towels). Yet the room fights hard to find other paths - for instance, I can feel some air turbulence near the door and pin-hole size air-streams from a couple outlets. It would be fascinating to have a air-pressure reader, as I imagine that it's more than normal. While air coming from the door or outlets would be cooler than the room's, I can't help but thinking it's not as good as if the supply didn't seem constricted.

I wanted to see if the supply was constricted, but I couldn't get my fishing tape very far without it kinking up inside the duct, from either side of the duct. To protect the duct, I had attached a bulbulous test tube thingy from a kid's toy to the fishing tape. I think it's because my fishing tape is the nylon-type - a metal one would likely get further, though I question if it would make it around some of the crazy bends the duct takes.

BIG suggested checking for a constriction by pulling a balloon with a string, which could be fished through by attaching it to a plastic grocery bag and sucking it through with a leaf-blower. The leaf-blower pulled the grocery bag through in a blink (wow!). Then I pulled a 5" balloon through without much trouble. I pulled it both directions several times. 5" was a good fit for the 6" duct - the balloon was snug. I'm satisfied that there isn't a serious constriction of any sort in the duct line.

My next thought was that maybe the duct line had too much static pressure in it, with all the twists and turns it takes. I decided to test this by simply pushing the supply line out of the way - that is, to let the supply air come directly from the joist bays above the ceiling. I could do this because the DD+GG boxes I built around the duct boots weren't attached to the ceiling yet (though they make a fairly tight seal). Doing this, I definitely felt more air-velocity - it's really hard to say how much more - somewhere between 25% and 100% more. I know that's a broad range but, like I said, it's pretty hard to feel the difference (a flow-hood device could measure it, but they cost way too much (2-3 thousand $) and it didn't seem worth it to have an HVAC company come out with one (~$75).

I started another "8-person" test with the supply vent opened up (i.e. 8x 100w + 6x 60w + rope-light). The room started at 66 degrees:

Minutes	Intake	Room	Exhaust
90	68.5	70	71.7
180	69.0	72	71.6

These numbers are slightly better than the last time I ran the 8-person test, for which after 3-hours I had (69, 73, 73.9). But, more importantly, the room felt less stuffy when I walked into it and the walls weren't warm. So, the culprit appears to be that there is too much static pressure in the supply line.

I called a local HVAC company and got really lucky to speak with their lead tech for about 45 minutes. I explained my situation and he said that he's not surprised that the supply wasn't providing enough air. That there would be a lot of head in it with all its twists and turns. He said that I could feel pinhole air-streams coming though outlets indicated that. He said that solution was to put in inline fan into the supply line as well - actually, he was a bit surprised that there wasn't one already. He was like "of course we commonly do that". He also mentioned having a bigger supply line (6" --> 8"), but that would require me ripping open the theater's ceiling, and I'm skeptical if there would be enough space for an 8" duct, so putting an inline fan in the supply line seems to be in my future.

BTW, I should mention that this is a surprising discovery for me. Never in my reading up on how to do this did I read that the supply had to either be active or oversized. Anyone else have experience with this?

Wrapping this up, BIG's concern for the room's ability to cool itself was spot on. Fortunately, the splicing of an inline fan into the supply line can be done outside the theater room, where it connects to the adjacent basement room. This means that we can move forward with trimming out the theater room in parallel, the main reason I reached out to BIG is the first place...

Whew - long post. Obviously I've skipped over everything I've done in the last couple years - including the rest of the basement, which is nearly done. The good news is that now, with BIG's involvement, this isn't going to take that much more time to wrap up, which has my wife smiling even more than me

Stay tuned!

To be honest, I hadn't really thought much about how the theater should look. But with drywall up, the time has come to think about colors, fabric, carpet, etc.

I was originally inspired by SandMan's and then more recently by the Bacon Race theater. So my first thought was to just mimic theirs. In fact, I joked to my wife that we should rename ours to the "Copy Cat Theater"

The only design element I'm locked into are the solid red Lazboy Matinee seats pictured on the first page of this thread. In fact, knowing that, I went ahead and purchased the 2nd row some time ago. While my wife isn't too fond about them being in our music room upstairs, I'm glad I got them because they've since been discontinued!

With the chairs in mind, I searched for pics of theaters with red chairs. This was much harder than I expected. I figured their would be many great references. As it turns out, most theaters have solid black chairs. I did find some with solid red chairs, but the really nice ones were over the top ornate with red carpet and red walls and gold trim - definitely not me.

Regarding my original inspirations, neither SandMan nor Damelon have solid-red chairs. One idea I had along the way was to flip all the red/black colors in Damelon's theater - still with black/red walls, but with a reddish carpet and, of course, red chairs. I felt that it could work, but decided to think about it more...

I went back to look at speakers. I'd originally thought to get the Klipsch THX Ultra2 system. A search got me to a brochure for these speakers and I caught myself thinking how handsome the model theater seemed when it hit me, the chairs were almost exactly like mine!

So, this is now my inspirational theater, at least color-wise. The walls and carpet are lighter than ideal, but the tone of this theater seems very compatible with the rest of the house. Most importantly, my wife likes it best of the hundred plus pictures I showed her, so that kind of settles it - it's a win-win (yeah!)

Last week I installed another 340 CFM inline fan on the supply line - so as to push the air into the room. Now there are matching fans in the supply and exhaust lines. We can actually feel a slight breeze in room - awesome!

The bad news is that I've done a number of cooling tests since and, while improved, it's still not great...

It seems that the furnace running is a significant contributor. That is, the room seems fine when the furnace is not running much, such as when it not freezing outside. When the furnace is running a lot, the adjacent room, where the supply comes from, warms up much faster.

I connected a temporary duct to the supply line, to force it to scoop air off the floor, which is about 4 degrees cooler than the ceiling. This helps, but not as much as I had expected - actually, I need to rerun this test starting with a cool room. Last time I ran it after the room had already "overheated" from my previous test, expecting it to be able to cool the room down, but it hadn't after almost 2 hours, enough time to change to room's air 14 times.

What has my attention right now is that I had noticed that the supply air blowing into the room was nearly 3 degrees warmer than the air it was scooping off the floor in the adjacent room. Could the air have become 3 degrees warmer while in transit? Maybe it's a false reading, maybe I wasn't reading the temperature of the air after all, but the supply's thermally-massive backer box. I had assumed that the wall of the backer box would become the temp of the air blowing past it, but maybe the radiant transmission of heat through it's connection to the theater's ceiling overpowered it...

That said, at this point, it is what it is *inside* the theater. Any future tweaks will happen outside the theater. This means that we can proceed with the build - yeah!

A couple weeks ago I posted that we had decided to use the theater displayed in the Klipsch THX Ultra2 brochure for inspiration - at least color-wise.

Here's what we came up with - what do you think?



Notes:

• the top-down picture depicts the room's current layout, since it is different than what was posted on the first page.
• the yellow triangles in rear represent corner base traps (OC 703)
• Rather than hide the front left/right speakers behind the screen, we plan to make art out of them (this also allows the screen to be 1' further back)
• The columns are lights - there will be a semi-transparent fabric to allow light to shine through them
• The carpet is the same as from our inspirational theater

Me too. I started off with Sandman (and later Bacon Race) as inspiration and had assumed to go Red/Black too, but then I realized that we have red chairs and didn't think they would look right, especially given their velvet-like texture. We then searched for pics of theaters with red chairs and, of all we found, only the Klipsch theater attracted us.



After searching for carpets for a couple weeks, we found the carpet used in the Klipsch theater and ordered a sample. Then we ordered a bunch of GOM samples to try to find a good match to the carpet:


And picked these (note: the red is the color of our chairs, we're not planning to have any red GOM)


BTW: the color of the stained wood above is our target for the theater.

So, after selecting (and ordering! ) the GOM, we also second-guessed the carpet selection, thinking it might be too busy given the pattern of the GOM planned for below the chair rail. We thought about a solid-beige carpet - perhaps color-matched to the wall fabric above the chair rail, but the red in this carpet ties in our chairs perfectly (see the Klipsch theater brochure). We also looked at other yellow/red carpets, but they all seemed to be even more busy, with higher contrast patterns and what not. In the end, my wife said we shouldn't second-guess ourselves and that's we left it.


Well, we haven't bought the carpet yet and it's very $$$, so your input is more than welcomed right now. Hopefully the pics above and the Klipsch brochure will be enough to win you over, and we'll know that at least one other person likes it

We ordered the sample on the left for below the chair rail, and the sample in the middle for above the chair rail. These two samples with the carpet are shown in the room-renderings posted a couple days ago - still don't see/like it?

FWIW, we have a bathroom with a similar pattern below the chair rail and also on the ceiling, with a complimentary but different wallpaper above the chair rail, and all this on a marble floor! The end effect is stunning, it might the best looking room in the house.

Dave (dc_pilgrim),

When you wrote that you liked the carpet, did that include taking into account the fabric selections?

Thanks!

Yes, the patterns in the rendering are all scaled correctly. Even the yellow on the wall and the red on the chairs are the actually fabric textures - my OCD made me do it!

Thanks for the nod!

That would be greatly appreciated - thanks! Be sure to let her know that the gold in the black-and-gold pattern is the same colored thread as the gold in the fabric we selected for above the chair rail. It's very matchy-matchy

BTW, we're not yet completely committed to the GOM order. As it turns out, I'm suppose to authorize the shipping fees before they process the order. I'm holding out for a few more comments now!



Funny, we also had this discussion, as well as if we should use the black/gold fabric both above and below the chair rail (only on the front wall!). We even rendered models with these options (would you like to see some?). We reasoned ourselves out of it as follows:

• no one (except those on this forum ) will think anything unusual if the front looks the same as the walls. As soon as we do something different, it will be very noticeable and hence better be worth it
• having lived with our previous theater - a 10'-wide 16x9 screen 11' from the front row, against a bright-yellow with white-trim walls, I can personally assure you that your eyes just don't focus on what's outside the screen's 4" black velvet border
• having the front of the room blacked-out seems out of place with this design. Maybe it would work if we had a black/black GOM below the chair, but we really like the black/gold pattern we picked out. We think it ties in with the Asian-inspired motif given off by the shoji screen columns...

We also thought about letting the carpet on the stage be red, matching the chairs, but again couldn't break from doing anything different. Naturally, if the consensus on the forum says otherwise, we'd rethink that, but so far it seems all are somewhere between cautiously-ok and enthusiastically-approving...

Just to be sure - are one of the fabrics with the BLUE dots next to them the one that your wife picked out?




When you say "pattern GOM", do you mean the gold/gold or the black/gold fabric?

Assuming you mean the gold/gold fabric, under natural light, it's not obvious that it's the best match but, under incandescent light, it's by far the best match. Since the theater room has no windows, we're pretty confident about it.

Assuming you mean the black/gold fabric, all we can say is that we know the gold thread used in it is the same as the thread used in the gold/gold fabric and that the black is really black, but with all the gold speckles in it, it lightens up a little bit - not grey (since it's tinted towards the gold color), but at a distance, it's not exactly black anymore either. See for yourself, here are a couple shots of these fabrics at a distance:




That's a great suggestion. We had already darkened the stain significantly (using a nearby table, the one you see in all the pics), but never thought to go even darker. Searching my house for a darker stains, I found one that was just a tad darker and another I'd consider "espresso", which may be too dark - what do you think?