So, we’ve been very slow to make a start on this, mostly because of the old saying that when you’re in interesting or busy times, you don’t have time to write about them, which is why I guess many blogs are entirely boring to read.
We’re hoping this wont be entirely boring, but no doubt it will be in part.
Anyway, to start of on a good note, we’ve been in our new eco home since the middle of July, and Yesterday (October 15th) it seems that finally, after a couple of visits, we have a working eco hat!
For those that don’t know, the “eco hat” on the houses at the George Wimpey Oxley Woods development are in effect a “chunk of roof” with the Nuaire Sunwarm system plumbed into them. Theses houses don’t have a traditional roof, in fact our house has a sort of “half gull wing” roof, clad in red rubber, so somewhere between Wood Newton, the house builder, George Wimpey, the bosses, Nuiare, and the architects, they dreamt up the “eco-hat”. The eco hat, described by one (latterly) apologetic delivery driver as red “skips on top of the houses” serve as a source of ventilation, cooling, and warming of air, and in our case, thanks to an optional upgrade, a water heater, using solar gain (passive solar energy).
Up until yesterday however, ours didn’t heat the water, which is annoying, as this is probably the most intensive, eco-friendly and money saving operation the eco hat is expected to perform, and it requires decent sunshine to do so. So to miss out on a summer’s operation wasn’t ideal.
As I write this, our new and upgraded control panel tells me that the temperature in the house is 23 degrees, outside it’s a decent 18 degrees Celsius, the temp inside the “collector” is at a toasty 46 degrees, and the water tank temperate is a decent 32 degrees. Considering that only a short while ago, the water temp was reading about 18 degrees, that’s not bad at all.
Prior to this upgrade, we only had a “hot/cold” controller, that gave the end user no information at all, so we relied on feeling the pipes to check temperature, and they never, ever felt anything other than ice cold, well they do now!
[...] As I write this the weather is wet, very windy, and certainly chilly outside. According to our eco-hat readout the external temperature is around 13 degrees Celsius, but inside the house it’s a rather [...]