Oxley Woods Living

Life in an Oxley Woods eco house

 
 

Posts Tagged ‘eco home’

 

Positive movements?

September 21, 2009

Well there’s been a lot going on lately that I’ve not been blogging about, purely because a lot of it was timing based.

Unfortunately, it appears that the wishes of over half of the residents here at Oxley Woods may have fallen on deaf ears. Hopefully this will not prove to be the case, but time is running out. More on that perhaps another time, maybe with good news for everyone!

Anyway, aside from the doom and gloom, it does appear that last week and this, there is more activity on site in terms of joiners and other workmen flitting about. I have heard from a number of residents that they have been contacted by Wood Newton about issues that they had not had any news on for some time. This is good stuff.

Perhaps so many residents coming together to express their support for one another, and their frustration, in some cases dismay with the situation on this “landmark development” of eco houses, is paying off. It shouldn’t need this in my opinion. I think everyone expects problems to a degree, but it’s when there’s too many, or they just don’t get solved in good time, that’s when things start to get out of hand and become intolerable for some.

Anyway, hopefully the increased activity on site IS following through and resulting in more people getting their problems solved now. There’s some people out there in a terrible position and maybe that is about to improve! We live in hope.

As for us, after chasing Taylor Wimpey head office/customer service on Friday I had a copy of a letter sent over this morning which sounds very positive indeed for our personal situation. Again, we can only hope it bears fruit and things do improve. We’ve felt positive like this before and had our hopes dashed, this time it does seem different.

Hope so.

How finished are your windows?

July 24, 2009

Something we’ve just noticed, which is of little consequence given our current situation, but if you have bought an eco house on the Oxley Woods development, or are considering one, you may want to check your window frames.

Do yours look like our kitchen, unfinished with visible screws?

Kitchen window


Or perhaps like one of our bedrooms, filled but not finished?

First floor window


Or maybe like our lounge, finished, painted, and just about tidied up?

First floor front window


Hit and miss? Oh, I’d say so.

Wattson energy monitor

July 19, 2009

On Friday we bought ourselves a shiny new WATTSON home energy monitor from our local Maplin.

The device is one of many available that do pretty much the same job. Check your energy consumption via a clip placed on the live wire near your electricity metre, which is sent wirelessly to a display unit (portable and “wireless”, as long as the built in battery is charged up), so you can keep tabs on your energy consumption.

This particular unit costs close to £100, whether or not it will pay for itself in energy consumption reduction is yet to be seen, but it’s already making a bit of a difference, and proving some interesting, if not entirely insightful (at this stage) readings.

One of the first missions had to be childishly running around switching off every plug about the house to get the reading to zero. This proved harder than we imagined… It took some time to realise that we hadn’t switched off the smoke/fire alarm circuit, which was constantly demanding about 48 watts.

Anyway, nothing much to report on this at the moment, apart from I was surprised how little power (relatively) a tv, sky box and amp combination consume, how much the eco-hat appears to be eating up (around 80 or so Watts on “normal” (not boost) operation) and just how much our Kenwood Eco Kettle consumes, around 2,700 Watts. Although the kettle is rapid boil and has a handy measure on the side, so it’s never on for longer than required!

The nice thing about the Wattson is it gives you a constant readout in either numbers, colours, or both. This includes a not entirely useful readout of how much a years worth of your current power consumption would cost at the current rate.

The best part is when you plug it into your Mac or PC and start logging data, we’ve only got two days worth, but it’s interesting and at the moment quite fun (hope the novelty doesn’t wear off too fast) to see how demand for power changes throughout the day. You can also share this data on the DIY KYOTO website with other Wattson / Holmes users.

Anyway, the longer we have this up and running the more useful things it may give me to say about energy consumption and ideas for reducing it. So far, my best advice is avoid reboiling the kettle whenever possible!

Here’s the Holmes readout covering our initial “play time” and beyond:

Wattson and Holmes


If a picture paints a thousand words…

July 3, 2009

Then our new Flickr page is worth over a million and counting. Certainly saves having to come up with that amount of text!

If you fancy seeing holes drilled in walls, walls being peeled off inside and out, horrible looking water running all over panels and even the odd photo of just every day living when the builders aren’t around, then check out our new Flickr photo page, link in the main menu above, as well as just here: Oxley Woods Photos.


Getting wet in middle bedroom

OSB and studs revealed

Water messy test

Orange sky at Oxley Woods


As well as being an insight into what’s been going on in and around our Oxley Woods eco house over the course of the year and more we’ve been here (organised into monthly photo sets) this may be interesting to anyone looking at architecture, design and house building as I imagine there’s lots of stuff you won’t find in any brochure or official documents.

Things are looking brighter, hotter, dryer

June 30, 2009

It looks like we may actually be getting somewhere with regards to our year old problem of water ingress. More tests have been carried out this week and it actually feels like we’re getting somewhere. It’s been a slow, slow, painful process and horrible to live through, but it seems like we’re heading in the right direction.

It seems, after all this time, the problem lies within our windows and doors. If it’s a construction, design or materials problem we may never really understand in full, because we’ve no doubt been suffering more than most. What is certain it is the windows (and at least one door) for sure, and it would seem as a result of tests today, nowhere else.

Good news is, it looks like we’re on a way to a resolution, and then we’ll have our house put back together properly, and then perhaps the rest of our snags and problems will be resolved, and then perhaps we can just get on with living! Certainly hope so.

On another positive note it looks like our small lot of veggies are going from strength to strength. The potatoes has surprised me by doing really well (we planted them too late according “the rules”) and the tomatoes are looking pretty good, some of the corn is beginning to look really strong (some not so) and “my” blueberries are getting bigger and bigger.

Pretty good day really.