Thornleigh Passive House

The opening screen grab should look familiar to readers here... ABC 7.30 Passive homes helping to cut energy bills is 5 minutes of good public relations for passive houses in Australia. Thornleigh Passive House gets more visual presence in the story than the transcript would indicate, but my favourite bits from the transcript are: JASON OM: "This house in Sydney,... , is no ordinary home. It's called a passive house where energy efficiency is taken to extremes." OLIVER STEELE: "I think the Australian industry has a long way to go before passive house becomes the norm but hopefully projects like this one and the houses that are getting some attention will encourage people to start demanding this from the industry."

Our first quarterly water bill in the new house means water usage data! While water usage is not a "passive house" criterion, it is certainly related to the general principles of trying to live sustainably. From 14 October 2019 through 15 January 2020 we used 16,000L of water supplied from Sydney water (173L/day). While I don't have super precise numbers from the rainwater tank we probably used about the same about from the rainwater tank over the same period. Possibly the amount of rainwater used was a little bit more than that, but it could not have been much more. The reasoning behind estimating 16000 - 20000L from the rainwater tank... We had ~176mm of rain in mid-September which filled the tank (and then some), we had an additional ~22mm of rain the week before the water bill period started, so it would have been full at the start of the billing period (17500L capacity). On November 3rd we received 14mm of rain which would have topped it up a bit. In December w...

Data for the period during which we have occupied the house and had the sensors working (September 22 - December 31, 2019). Inside / Outside % < 20 °C % 20 - 25 °C % > 25 °C Inside 4 84 12 Outside 55 25 21 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 includes data from wirelessTag sensors spread across every room of the house as indicated below. Outside includes data from the wirelessTag sensors in the cubby house, outside, and HRV intake. Sensors from the water wall, clerestory, HRV-outlet and door data are not included in the summary. Temperatures from sensors deemed indicative of outside conditions... Outside sensor name Min 5% 25% Median 75% 95% Max CubbyHouse 5.9 11 16 19.4 24.3 33.3 44 HRV-Intake 9.6...

Another month in the house... Kind of. We were in residence 1 - 17 December while Andy Marlow (of Envirotecture fame) was in residence roughly from 20 - 31 December. So I only have first hand knowledge of the house for the first 17 days of the month. We have an interesting few days with no one in the house which I will examine separately. And I told Andy to enjoy living in the house and that he could do whatever air conditioning or anything else he wanted. Outdoor temperature ranged from 4 to 44 °C. Indoor temperature ranged from 17 to 31 °C. I used the A/C for a few hours to check the temperature sensor system I installed to check when the a/c was turned on, and based on the data it looks like Andy used the A/C for a few hours on a particularly hot day, but I have not checked the temperature logs in detail. Inside / Outside % < 20 °C % 20 - 25 °C % > 25 °C Inside 3.4 84.2 12.5 Outside 55.0 24.7 20.7 Methods: I have taken the 5 minutely data from the wireles...