2021 September

Spring is underway, but so is lockdown version 2.0. The flowers are out, but we are not. In September the split system was off for most of the month and the HRV slid in and out of 'heating season' and neutral modes of operation more times that I could keep track of. The HRV is working well and doing a great job of keeping the house in the comfort zone. During September we were all at home in our second significant COVID lockdown (and going a bit crazy).

I continuing the graphic heavy format.

Temperature from inside and outside the house as the percentage of hours in 0.5 °C bins. I've scaled the temperature in hopes that they will be comparable across months.

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 'aggregate' and 'hist'). Inside includes data from the wirelessTag sensors spread across nearly every room of the house. Outside is the data from the wirelessTag sensors outside near the cubby house and HRV intake. The water wall and door data are not included.

Energy production and consumption: 1. total daily consumption daily energy production, 2. daily net energy production, and 3. energy independence (which is the percentage of our daily consumption that is met directly by our solar panels).

Methods: Data are taken from the Enphase Enlighten system. This reports solar generation and electricity consumption as well as import from and export to the grid in 15 minute intervals. The R function 'aggregate' is used to create daily values and the function 'boxplot' to create the plot. The plots show individual days as points, with the grey bar covering the middle 50% of the data, the horizontal black line is the middle of the data (median), and the whiskers extend to the farthest points from the median that are not more than 1.5 times the interquartile range.

Popular posts from this blog

Temperature (Out vs. Old vs. New)

Image
I have fielded more than a few questions about the temperature of our passive house versus the temperature of the house that we lived in prior (on the same lot).  So I've used the data I had on hand which is temperature (°C) recorded every 5 minutes over since October 2012. For the sake of consistency I am only using the NetAtmo sensors that I have had for that entire period. So I only have one outside sensor and one inside sensor located in the the respective living room. The outside sensor moved around a bit, but it should be good enough.  I've converted those measurements to hourly averages.  This ends up being ~ 66,955 hours to play with (52,232 hours from the original house, 14,723 hours from the passive house). I've left the rental house out of this comparison, but it was disturbing like the original house despite being ~ 20 years old. The key take-home messages: The passive house a much less variation in temperature than the original house (or outside).  In the summe
Read more

international passive house open day...

We had ~49 people come through the house for one of the International Passive House open days of 2019. As the event is not as widely publicised as Sustainable house day when we had more than 200 people through. The visitors who came through for this open house tended to already know a fair bit about passive houses (with many dragging along family members who they were working to convince of the merits of passive house living). Lots of the visitors were already planning or working on projects that were including passive house principles.
Read more

Water wall...

... 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
Read more