Oxley Woods Living

Life in an Oxley Woods eco house

 
 

Posts Tagged ‘passive solar’

 

Mixed start to the week

June 16, 2009

Bit of a hit and miss, good and bad start to the week for us and our Oxley Woods eco house.

On the good side we had the guys around Yesterday to fix the damaged ducting behind our medicine cabinet which has meant the extraction part of our eco hat has never been properly working since July last year. They re-routed the pipe and tied it back at the same time so it wouldn’t be damaged when replacing the cabinet. So glad to get that sorted.

We also had a Nuaire rep come around to re-commission the eco hat after the pipes/ducting had been connected properly. Unfortunately it wasn’t smelling so badly as usual (hardly at all) and he could not find anything (again) causing the whiff. So it looks like our eco hat is now “as good as it gets” in terms of water warming, ventilation and filtration. But it still smells.

On the downside this morning, following some rain yesterday afternoon and then again during the night, we have more signs of water ingress. We called in the site manager as soon as possible, and he had a look around. There is/was a small, additional water stain above our bedroom one at the rear of the house, and more disheartening it was also damp around our full length window on the exposed side elevation.

The site manager is finding it, in his own words “baffling” and is going to talk to John Green from Wood Newton. To be honest, as you might have gathered or expect at this stage, we don’t have much faith in any “final solution”.

Eco Hat madness?

October 29, 2008

It seems our Eco Hat has gone mad.  The day before Nuaire came to get the hot water element working, the fans all seemed to go up to full boost of their own accord.

They fitted a data logger at the time, which is just as well, because several times in the last week the same thing has happened, the only cure is to switch the whole system off and reboot it, which causes quite a dramatic spin up and down of the fans!

It’s annoying, as when they’re going fast, the vibration can be felt through the house, and the fan noise, although quite isolated to the “service area” (read bathroom) can be heard throughout the home, especially if they go insane during the evening.

Apparently we’re also missing some cladding inside the eco-hat, which was supposed to be put their by Wood Newton, to improve insulation and also stop moisture building up between the hat and the house.  No news on when that will be completed.

The problem was phoned in a few days ago, and so far, we’ve not had any indication as to when Nuiare will be back on site, I hope it’s sooner rather than later as the intermittent problem seems to be happening with increasing regularity.

On the plus side, the new digital readout from the eco hat is great, we knew this morning that it was zero degrees outside, but a bearable 15 inside, with no central heating being used whatsoever.

Eco hat water heating is go!

October 16, 2008

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!