Thornleigh Passive House

I get a reasonable number of questions about air tightness which is one of the key passive house principles. Australia has no air tightness requirements...  despite some solid suggestions  and some solid International examples . The UK requires new houses to have < 10 ACH50. The USA Department of Energy has a Zero Energy Ready Home national program certification that outlines required ACH50 values ranging from 1.5 to 3 depending on climate zone. Certified Passive Houses are required to have < 0.6 ACH50. Air tightness is measured using a blower door test. Using a calibrated fan and pressure gauges they increase and decrease the pressure in the house relative to outside measuring how much air has to be pumped in or out to maintain the desired pressure at a range of pressures. From these measurements they determine how much air leaks in when the house is 50Pa lower than outside and how much air leaks out when the house is 50Pa higher than outside. To account for the fact t...

Winter is here and we are definielty into the heating season now. In June the split system ran as a heater for most of the month from ~9:45am until 3:30pm, scheduled to take advantage of the solar production during that part of the day. The HRV is working well and doing a great job of keeping the house in the comfort zone, although the gound floor is consistently a few degrees cooler than the top floor. June started as "normal month" typically one adult is at work while the other is working from home, but we ended up all at home in our second significant COVID lockdown. 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 19% 81% 0% outside 100% 0% 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 tem...