Thornleigh Passive House

 The International Energy Agency is not known as a hot bed of tree huggers. It has been one of the oft quoted sources of the Australian Liberal (they are conservative) Party's thoughts about energy policy... but they have dropped a new report outlining the viable pathway to net zero emissions by 2050 . It is a huge document with lots of stuff in it, and I am not an expert in these things... but I consider myself a reasonably sensible and intelligent person... and interested in the future of the human species. So in the context of this blog I wanted to highlight a few things it mentions in terms of our built environment. By 2030 - all new buildings need to be zero-carbon-ready . That is quite soon! I would be curious as to our current level, but it is almost certainly a very small proportion and not increasing fast enough to meet this target. By 2040 - 50% of existing buildings need to be retrofitted to zero-carbon-ready levels .  "Around 2.5% of existing residential build...

I went to the Australian Passive House Association sponsored open house at Asquith Passivehaus  on Friday and it was great fun to catch up with about a hundred people into passive houses.  At these gatherings if people discover that I live in a passive house then they always ask about the money and the stress associated with choosing to build a certified passive house. Stress associated with the decision to build a certified passive house: Deciding to build a house is a big decision. The choice to build a passive house was the least stressful or difficult choice we made when building our new home. It doesn't dictate a particular style for the house - it is about meeting an efficiency standard - which can stress out your architect and builder, but the the owner! Deciding to build a certified passive house made the process less stressful because of the added certainty of how our new house would perform was so much less... someone with far more knowledge than I possess...

Fall is here, and we are just about into the temperatures where the HRV's job is to keep things warm. In April we ran the split as a heater on 6 days on a 10:30am until 3pm schedule to take advantage of the solar production during that part of the day. This is mainly because I am experimenting. THe HRV is working well and doing a great job of keeping the house in the comfort zone. April is a "normal month" typically one adult is at work while the other is working from home, but we are increasingly spending days in the office. 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 0% 100% 0% outside 79% 21% 0% Methods: I have taken the 5 minutely data from the wirelessTag sensors and calculated the median temperature for each hour and determined the proportion of hours falling inside of the 20 - 25 °C target temperature (using the R functions 'aggr...