Thornleigh Passive House

We had ~49 people come through the house for one of the International Passive House open days of 2019. As the event is not as widely publicised as Sustainable house day when we had more than 200 people through. The visitors who came through for this open house tended to already know a fair bit about passive houses (with many dragging along family members who they were working to convince of the merits of passive house living). Lots of the visitors were already planning or working on projects that were including passive house principles.

Link to a plot of the WirelessTag data from sensors relating the the performance of the HRV (heat recovery ventilation) system... note that between 1800 on November 1st and 0600 on November 2nd the sensors were being cross calibrated and were not where they are supposed to be.

Link to plots of the WirelessTag sensors data associated with the water wall versus adjacent ambient air temperature ... note that between 1800 on November 1st and 0600 on November 2nd the sensors were being cross calibrated and were not in the water tanks. The water tank sensors in situ:

I now have many temperature sensors around the house... and it is important that they are comparable. So here I outline the steps I have taken to ensure that the sensors yield comparable data. While I have attempted to cross calibrate my temperature readings I have not yet attempted to cross calibrate my humidity readings (which I really should do, and I will do when time allows). Calibration 1: On the 21st of September I put all the sensors I had on the kitchen bench and used the calibration options within the various software packages to adjust all the sensors to a single value which seemed to be the central tendency of all the sensors. Calibration 2: Last night I did the same thing, but with some new sensors and I did not bring in the sensors from outside. November 1 calibration Sensor Calibrated (°C) Raw reading (°C) δ °C Clerestory 23.60 24.09 -0.49 Mufraj (NE) 24.60 25.33 -0.73 Bedroom Southeast 24.60 24.87 -0.27 Bedroom Northwest 24.70 24.98 -0.28...

The sensors have now been set up for over a month (since the 22nd of September), so this "October temperature summary" includes all the data between September 23rd and October 31. This month we were still learning how to best manage the house, with some operator oversights that could have improved these numbers a bit (i.e., remembering to lower the blind, opening windows for night ventilation, and picking the best HRV settings). But I think the numbers still look good. At no point during the period covered by these data was any additional heating or air-condition used. Methods: I have taken the 5 minutely data from the wirelessTag sensors and calculated the median temperature of each sensor for each hour and determined the proportion of hours falling inside of the 20 - 25 °C target temperature (using the R functions 'aggregate' and 'hist'). Inside is the data from the wirelessTag sensors in the Kitchen, Mufraj, Master and centre bedrooms. Outside is the dat...