planting...

The garden between the driveway and the front fence in coming together with drip irrigation and some plants added.
  • Callistemon viminalis Captain Cook (x4) [ANPS]

  • Callistemon pearsonii (x4) [ANPS]

  • Hardenbergia violacea (x4) [ANPS]


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Five year retrospective

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Every so often I find myself chatting with someone about the performance of the house and I am caught out with not actually having looked at the numbers except on a month-by-month basis. So here is a bit of a look at 5 years of data. March 2020 - February 2025. Hard to believe that we have been living here for over 5 years, but we have been (actually longer than that, but the data are consistent back to mid-February 2020). For the record, I am using data spanning the 1st of March 2020 through 28th of February 2025. A few things of note. In winter months, we aim for a house temperature at or above 18 °C inline with the WHO recommendations and a general happiness with sleeping / waking up to a house that is ~ 18 °C. Using the hourly averages, the outside temperature ranged from 0.2 to 42.4 °C with a median temperature of 17.1 °C. The inside temperature ranged from 17.6 to 26.6 °C with a median temperature of 22.2 °C. Over the past 5 years, we have been in the passivhaus temperature t...
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Batteries

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We did it. It is not clear that the batteries will save us money, although with the way electrical prices are going, they might, and it isn't clear that they won't save us money either. At some point, we wanted to be part of the solution, so the likely breakeven-ish economics were good enough. Call it an investment in the future stability and sustainability of the Australian electricity grid. In terms of economics. Relative to my last statement on the topic, back in 2021 , four years is a long time. Batteries have gotten better, the cost of electricity is up (and demand pricing has arrived), solar feed-in tariffs are down, and NSW has a battery rebate at the moment. The cost of electricity has become increasingly complicated, making modeling costs/savings more tedious as the costs vary by time of day with times of day changing seasonally. Which also means there are more ways that electricity costs will likely change in the future. Minimally, with the battery system, we shou...
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Temperature (Out vs. Old vs. New)

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I have fielded more than a few questions about the temperature of our passive house versus the temperature of the house that we lived in prior (on the same lot).  So I've used the data I had on hand which is temperature (°C) recorded every 5 minutes over since October 2012. For the sake of consistency I am only using the NetAtmo sensors that I have had for that entire period. So I only have one outside sensor and one inside sensor located in the the respective living room. The outside sensor moved around a bit, but it should be good enough.  I've converted those measurements to hourly averages.  This ends up being ~ 66,955 hours to play with (52,232 hours from the original house, 14,723 hours from the passive house). I've left the rental house out of this comparison, but it was disturbing like the original house despite being ~ 20 years old. The key take-home messages: The passive house a much less variation in temperature than the original house (or outside).  ...
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