Thornleigh Passive House

You know it is bad when your architect says that the tables are not very good, but Andy was right - the graphs are way better than the tables. In looking at it I realised that I really needed to do it seasonanally (and monthly). This uses the same data as I have posted previously for sustainable house day... I am not sure why the plots look so bad here, but if you click on them the larger files look okay... (how about letting me use (svg?) Outside (green) and inside (blue) with 20 - 25 °C lines indicated. All of the x-axes (Temperature) span the same range, but the y-axis range (proportion of hours in 0.5 °C bins) varies.

... Currently a work in progress... Thermal Mass A material’s capacity to absorb, store and release heat. Thermal mass is typically used to moderate temperature extremes by releasing heat when the home is cool and absorbing heat when the home is warm. Specific heat capacity A material's capacity to store heat (measured per unit mass). Some materials are better at storing heat than others. Water can store 4× as much heat per kilogram as concrete. Density Mass per unit volume (mass / volume). Denser materials have more mass per volume so they can make up in density what they lack in specific heat capacity. Concrete has twice as much mass per m3 as water. Thermal conductivity The ease with which heat travels through a material. Ideally, thermal conductivity should be moderate so that the absorption and release of heat synchronises with the building's heating and cooling cycle. Both water and concrete are highly effective! In comparison, steel and water hold a similar a

 This is mainly a way for me to put some numbers down so that I have them on Sunday for the Sustainable House Day panel... Sustainable House Day 2020 entry . Original solar blog post  (2020.Feb.29). Power and heating blog post  (2020.Aug.25). Latest water usage blog post  (2020.Jul.15). Night time ventilation blog post (2019.Oct.25). Carbon dioxide and HRV blog post (2019.Oct.01). Electrical Usage (from the Enlighten website, 204 days) Category Total Daily Produced 2.7 MWh 13.2 kWh Consumed 2.8 MWh 13.7 kWh Export 1.4 MWh 7.4 kWh Import 1.5 MWh 6.9 kWh Net Import 97 khW 475 Wh Because of the way the property is wired these numbers only include the house usage, excluding the garage / rainwater tank pump (which are minor). Percentage of hours in below, within, above the 20 - 25 °C target temperature range since 2019.Sep.22. Inside / Outside % < 20 °C % 20 - 25 °C % > 25 °C Inside 7% 85% 7% Outside 70% 20% 10% M

 Our water wall got a photo in an article on passive houses in Issue 9.3 of Grand Designs Australia .

 We didn't win, but were "finalists" for the 2020  HIA Australian GreenSmart Custom Built award  and "highly commended finalists"for the 2020  HIA Australian GreenSmart Energy Efficiency award ! 

Another month of house data... The weather was down right cold although warming at the very end of the month. Two adults working from home except one who goes into the office for a couple of days. We have run the heater a fair bit to bring the house temperature up just a bit. We switched from the ERV to the HRV core during the month as our part of data collection on the two cores in the Sydney climate. Percentage of hours in below, within, above the 20 - 25 °C target temperature range for the month. Inside / Outside % < 20 °C % 20 - 25 °C % > 25 °C Inside 18% 82% 0% Outside 97% 2% 0% 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 12 wirelessTag sensors spread across every room of the house. Ou