Thornleigh Passive House

I should preface this post by saying that I am not the kind of person who likes to wear a jumper in the house during the middle of summer or shorts inside the house during the middle of winter. I get that the Passive House standard is all about specific temperature (20 - 25 °C) and specific humidity levels (not measured as relative humidity), but to me 18 °C feels great when you walk in from 8 °C and 27 °C is blessedly cool when it is 40 °C outside. By which I mean to say that as a biologist I undertand that the we experience things relative to our frame of reference, but I also like data. So over the past 12 months we have had a few bits and pieces on loan from Zehnder and FanTech to see if ERV or HRV are better in the Sydney climate. I've learned alot in the process... and as I understand it none of this is commercial in confidence - quite to the contrary they are pleased for people to know about how their products work in Sydney. Spoiler: It works really well and I would abs

The end of the calendar year is creeping up fast. The revised scripts are helping with the turnaround time. By way of a random COVID update... On average one adult is working from home five days a week and the other is at work, but the kids are in school. We set records for overnight temperatures on the last weekend of the month with our outdoor overnight temperature staying above 27 °C and the daily high on either side hitting 40 °C. While we normally turn off the A/C at 6pm every night (scheduled to align loosely with the end of solar generation) we left the A/C on overnight. Across the two days we ended up using ~ 1kW/day more than we generated do to higher A/C usage than normal, but the house temperature stayed a comparatively comfortable ~ 26 °C even when the outside temperatures were clearing 40 °C with no chance for openning the windows for nighttime ventilation to cool the house. Percentage of hours in below, within, above the 20 - 25 °C target temperature range for th