Thornleigh Passivhaus

Might recognise some clips in this video about passive houses...

A new year... The hot weather is alternating with wet and cool weather making it easier to keep the house temeprature in range without using the A/C. 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 1% 90% 9% outside 43% 33% 24% 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 12 wirelessTag sensors spread across 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. Quantile temperatures (°C) for the month. Inside / Outside Min 5% 25% Median 75% 95% Max inside 20 21 22 23 24 25 27 outside...

The end of the calendar year! The revised scripts were helping with the turnaround time... now I just ahev to get the JSON interface to wirelesstags working. By way of a random COVID update... Holiday time, so everyone was home (and due to the latest outbreak we do mean home) for the last couple weeks of the year! The wet and cool weather hit us hitting our solar generation, but making it easier to keep the house temeprature in range without using the A/C. 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 1% 98% 2% outside 53% 34% 12% 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 12 wirelessTag sensors sp...

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 Passivhaus 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 absolu...

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 temperatu...

Always easier when the first day of the month is on a Sunday! On it with the report this month. The revised scripts are helping with the turnaround time too. By way of a random COVID update... One adult is working from home 5 days a week and the other is at home about half the week, but the kids are in school. 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 1% 96% 2% outside 73% 17% 10% 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 12 wirelessTag sensors spread across 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 ...

Ooops... with all the various things going on I forgot to do the September summary. Slight change to the methodology this month (rather than calculating the hourly median for each sensor then taking the median of those I am directly calculating the median hourly temperature from all of the relevant sensors)... 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 7% 91% 2% outside 80% 15% 5% 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 12 wirelessTag sensors spread across every room of the house. Outside is the data from the wirelessTag sensors outside near the cubby house and HRV intake. The water wall, cleres...