Springtime...

Well this has been the fortnight the house woke up from hibernation and it wasn't a gradual sleepy start either but a very definite throwing off the covers and flinging back the curtains approach to spring.

Two weeks ago, in my previous post, I was writing about how cool (in the temperature sense) the house was and how we were waiting for it to come up to temperature; then the weather changed. For all but one of the last fourteen days the solar panels have been generating more power than we've used and the average temperature inside the house has gone from 18 to 22-24 degrees (for the less scientific amongst you that's the difference between wearing a fleece in the evenings and grumbling to wearing a T-shirt).

The chart here is our record of how much energy we've been using each week (the brown bars) and how much energy the PV has been generating (green).

You can easily spot the time round the winter solstice because the PV produced the least energy then. The combination of short days and the sun being at its lowest height in the sky meant that the panels didn't receive enough direct sunlight to work much. You can also see the icy weather in early December and the cold and snow in February because the energy consumption goes up as we run the heating more. The fluctuations in the brown consumption bars are caused by the amount of sunshine and illustrate clearly what I've said before about the sunshine warming the rooms and reducing our need for backup heating. Then, of course, there is the green trendline that shows how as the days get longer and sunnier our energy production increases. 

The sunshine has also made a difference to how we've been working with the house. As the days got warmer at the beginning of the month we were opening the porch door and blinds to let the sunlight into the house. In the past week, when the external temperatures here were around 20 degrees, we started closing or tilting the blinds to reflect the light away from the rooms as it was getting too hot inside. We're also now opening some of the roof windows at night to cool the top floor as 24 degrees is too warm to get to sleep. If we didn't have blinds on the south-facing windows the house would be getting too hot already and as it's working rather like a greenhouse we're improving our environment even further by getting more houseplants.

We still don't know what will happen to the consumption-production balance on grey days as the days get longer but, so far, the data from the eco frontier suggests that solar energy is beginning to look like a no-brainer even here in the grey West Midlands. This begs the question of  why the UK government isn't doing more to encourage its adoption, though after the recent newspaper reports one wonders if perhaps the solar industry simply lacks the lobbying power of its energy competitors; a depressing thought.

The Passivhaus: a few reflections on reality

I started tweeting this week, albeit very cautiously; it's been quite odd to see who twitter recommends me following but maybe Ed Sheeran and Mrs Beckham are genuinely committed environmentalists with a lot to say on the subject, who knows? Anyway, I digress, we are periodically getting requests to see the house and it occurred to me that people might want to know more about it so I've set it up to tweet (who's the master now eh, house??). 

We're also coming to the end of Climate Week, just in case you haven't been deluged with green publicity, and I've had a couple of local school Eco Committees visiting which has involved me polishing my spiel and, in the process, reflecting on how the house works.

I first read about the Passivhaus concept in 2008 in the Guardian newspaper (where else?) but there's a world of difference between reading about innovative house design and living the reality of it. 

The first thing people say when they walk into the house (apart from the social niceties, of course, all our guests are well-schooled in etiquette) is "are you really enjoying the warmth?" and they are quite taken aback when we reply "not yet, we're not". On sunny days the house is very warm because the sun streams through the massive, triple-glazed, south-facing windows but, as I've said before, on grey days we're only as warm as the base temperature of the house and I was mildly entertained to note that when the last group of architectural visitors came round they put fleeces on after a while. The house is fantastically well insulated and we know from thermal imaging cameras and general observations in frosty weather that heat doesn't escape but we were warned by the builders and architect that we would need to put a lot of heat into the concrete structure in the first year and so we are. Overall the house is usually managing to maintain its temperature for several days before we need to boost the heating but if you want to sit comfortably in rooms on the ground floor you need to plug in an additional heater. Some of the architects who visit say we should have underfloor heating, or stoves on the ground floor to warm that floor up, or a timber structure not concrete and originally the glass porch was going to run the length of the south wall to add warmth. We should, perhaps, have the bedrooms on the ground floor and the living/working rooms on the top floor where it's warmer but that's not terribly practical so we're compromising by adding extra heat topically and hoping that the house temperature reaches an equilibrium soon.

What I've found interesting this week is that, for the first time, we've had several groups of visitors spaced out over a few days and that has actually impacted on the house's temperature. The Passivhaus design is intended to use not just the sunshine but the heat generated by lighting, white goods and people to heat the building but whilst I knew that in theory it was noticeable that all the visitors made the house warmer last week.  I find it a bit odd, if not sinister, that the house is taking people's heat energy and using it....isn't there something like that in Frank Herbert's Dune novels? Perhaps we ought to be regularly hosting large gatherings but having shared my space for a year with all the builders and subcontractors of Speller Metcalfe I feel I now need the occasional quiet day even if it does mean spending more on the electrics.

This house is very much an organic entity. Perhaps if you're an architect or builder or engineer you consider the form and workings of your house all the time but I've really only looked on ones we've lived in as four walls and a roof and not considered the building itself at all unless we've needed to do DIY on it. Now we're always taking the workings of the house into consideration and even though it's airtight and insulated we've also become acutely conscious of the external environment and whether or not the sun is shining or if it's raining because that has such an enormous effect on how the house functions. It's not so much a house, more like a quirky member of the family really but, although this has taken a bit of mental adjustment, at least we're not bored!

What a difference a year makes

I took this photo from the corner of the site almost a year ago today. We were five weeks into the build at that point and the tree surgeons had just taken down the massive cypress tree in the south west corner (you can see the remains in the foreground). At the time I was imagining what the site would eventually look like and here it is a year later:

Last week I took delivery of the trees for the site. I wanted to have as many native species as possible and I found an excellent nursery online at mailordertrees.co.uk. We used to drive past them when we lived in Cambridgeshire so I knew they produced good stuff and I was able to plant the trees within a couple of days of them being dug up at the other end.


Here's what they looked like when they arrived (note the sensitive way the courier treated the parcels, fortunately no trees were harmed during the taking of this picture). Unwrapping the boxes was a bit Laurel and Hardy as it was just me and a Stanley knife and the boxes were rather long and top-heavy but I got the hang of it. I had a lovely day planting them all in the sunshine to the accompaniment of the wonderful 6 Music on my headphones and apart from nearly falling in the pond with a tree whilst laughing at the antics of Radcliffe and Maconie things went remarkably well.

Spaced around the garden I now have two wild cherry trees, a Worcester Pearmain apple tree, a local damson (the Shropshire Prune, a name that never fails to make me smile), a crab apple, a mulberry, a hawthorn tree, a rowan tree and a hazel. Lots of folklore to play with there and they support plenty of insect species.

Out of sheer indulgence I also put in the beautiful White Stem Birch Tree (Betula 'Jacquemontii') next to the silver rehau inlet pipe. It's not much to speak of yet, as it's thinner than the cane it's tied to, but I thought it will complement the silver pipe nicely when its grows a bit.

So we are poised to enter the growing season now, all I need is the fencing to enclose the garden and the grass to get greener and it will start to feel more like home.

A First!

Someone told us a while back that they'd be interested to see how living in an eco house works in practice for a 'normal' family. By that I think they meant a family that is up for a bit of green pioneering but not wanting to go all tofu and unwashed about it. One of my children wryly remarked that they do find themselves wracked with Green Guilt rather than the Catholic [insert preferred religion] variety when it comes to discarding packaging or whatever and we did do the usual stuff like recycling everything possible, not having devices on standby etc etc before moving here. Having said that, though, we are not really dark green and, whilst I do try to buy the greenest versions I can afford, we do have things like DAB radios, laptops on constantly and the other features of 21st century living and this house is used for work for about 16 hours a day. It is therefore with great delight that I can tell you that today we actually generated more electricity than we used for the first time. Am I allowed a moment of green smugness? Nope, just relief because, deep down I genuinely doubted if the PV would be up to it.... mea culpa.

And for those of you interested in the architectural features here's a photo of the porch from inside the house. The external door may still be closing with string (the perils of having to get products from Germany) but I've started opening the internal door in this sunny weather. The porch gets pretty hot so I've been opening the door to disperse the warmth through the house and this has, of course, reduced the need to boost the heating.

I would think come the summer we will be having to think again about having plants in the porch but at the moment it's proving a very efficient way of getting seeds germinating and I have actually got cyclamen thriving for the first time in my horticultural life.

Isn't it lovely when things work?!

Good news

Three bits of good news from the eco frontier this week. Last weekend and one day this week we generated as much electricity as we used - hurray! I must admit to doubting if this would ever happen over the winter months when we've been cold and yet still the meter's been spinning round but it does begin to look like the technology works - phew!

 

Last February, right at the beginning of the build, this pond was one of the first things to go. I'm not sure how old it was but it had become an eyesore and its proximity to the street meant that it acted more like a wet rubbish bin than a wildlife habitat so I didn't make much effort to save it. The Code for Sustainable Homes states that: "House building need not reduce the ecological value of the site; it may enhance it in many cases. There will always be some temporary disturbance to the local ecology, but wildlife will return once construction is complete, providing an appropriate habitat is provided".

With that in mind the builders dug this hole in the back garden before they left and put in a butyl liner and I've gradually begun to create a new pond. This is what it's looking like at the moment and I've just planted it up with some plants from Wetlandplants.co.uk. I've gone for all native plants so I will post another picture later in the season when the pond is looking prettier. I've never created a wildlife pond from scratch before and hunted round for advice on how to edge it but opinion is divided on what and how. Eventually, working on the premise that a messy garden equals an eco-friendly garden I decided to edge it with plants and grass.

The large pebbles that create small beaches at the sides have come from the garden itself; when the trenches were dug last year we collected all the stones that came up with the sand so it's our little tribute to the power of glaciation. They should form sunbathing spots for visitors to/inhabitants of the pond. In the spirit of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle I've used a left-over paver to form a small bench and rested it on two logs from the leyland cypress that was cut down this time last year. Some of the rest of the tree can be seen in the wheelbarrow at the back of the pond, where it's waiting to form a log pile in a quiet corner of the garden, once the fence is installed.

Also to the left of the pond is my version of a bug hotel. I was reading a gardening magazine this week where they had a very pretty hibernaculum for the price of a couple of trees and it struck me as a bit Marie Antoinette to spend a load of money on something that's supposed to be rustic. I created mine with a bee log I already had, an old basket, a log tunnel belonging to our late guinea pig and some hessian the builders left on site. I know you can create grandiose ones with pallets but I didn't really want something so dominant and if the local insects turn their probosces up at my efforts well, that's their loss.

And the third and final bit of good news? Despite the very best efforts of the local Columbae palumbae the grass seed I've put down is just beginning to germinate, if you zoom in on the top picture you can see a faint green tinge as proof. I can't say I'm going to miss the plain of stones and mud that I've got at the moment.

Going retro

I shouldn't like you to go thinking that all the technology here is glitch-free (!) so take a look at the flashy front door with its triple glazing and seals:

The inner and outer porch doors came with these round door knobs that were for pulling but not turning (why does this make me think of that Thatcher speech?!) but what we found was that if you didn't have your wits about you you bashed your hand on the metal door-frame which was extremely unpleasant.

The solution was to replace these knobs with a lever handle and yesterday someone came out to do that but, alas, somehow changing the handle stopped the key turning in the lock. After spending the night with an unlocked porch we have come up with a very eco solution and here it is ..................................

Until the door manufacturers (I kid you not) can come out later this week we have added this more rugged feature to our futuristic house.

You've got to be resourceful in this game.

Sun and air

Here's a very flash photo courtesy of the diocesan surveyor for you:

It was taken during the build when we had blue skies and sunshine and someone on site tall enough to open the roof windows (not me, they are so high up I get vertigo if I try).

Being a bit new to this malarkey, and a bit chary about massive energy bills, we've been monitoring our energy usage fairly closely since we moved in and we're beginning to get a bit of a feel for how our consumption is going.

Now if you are an expert in all things green this will be like grandmothers and eggs to you so just feel smug/exasperated at my idiocy and move on but, just in case you're not, here's what we've learned so far:

1. We have a generator meter that shows what we're generating
2. You don't need sunshine to generate electricity, just daylight because it's the sun's energy that makes the panels work
3. Having said that, around mid-winter when the sun is lowest in the sky our panels only generated electricity on days when the sun actually shone on them
4. Now the sun is higher in the sky, and the days are a bit longer, we can generate some energy even when the sun doesn't shine
5. And it doesn't shine very much in this bit of the West Midlands in winter so that's fortunate
6. I wish I'd been taught more physics but this site is useful for novices

By monitoring our energy usage and keeping a record of the external temperatures and amount of sunshine we've ended up discovering the obvious* about energy usage in the house. On sunny days the sun through the large south facing windows means that the rooms get warmer, we use less extra heating and we generate electricity so our overall consumption is lower. On grey days the opposite happens.

Normally there's a 1 degree difference in the temperature as you go up through the house so the ground floor is on 18, the middle 19 and the top 20 but the weather this house likes least is grey windy days as this reduces the temperature on the top floor of the house. I'm not sure if that's supposed to happen but, at the moment, it looks like it does.

The house has been designed to run at 20 degrees but as the thermostat is on the ground floor 20 degrees at the thermostat means 22 degrees on the top floor and we are finding that's far too hot for bedrooms. There was much discussion at the end of the build about the location of the thermostat as it's just by the front door and therefore subject to blasts of air from the porch when the door opens. It was suggested that it should be moved to the middle floor where temperatures are more constant and on reflection that should have happened but the discussion was just before we moved in so the thermostat hasn't moved. I'm not sure if the house will keep its temperature differentials once the fabric has warmed up and I'd be interested to know how (ie: in what direction) the house warms up so I will have to ask one of our expert visitors when they come.

As you see, the key thing about this house is that you need to work with it as it's very much an organic entity. This is not a normal way to have to consider your house is it? I refer you to the Ultrahouse in The Simpsons. Anyway, I'm finally understanding how the ventilation system works and if you look back to the previous post with the little Saturns sticking out of the walls you'll see how the warm air enters the rooms. What I forgot to write was that it exits the rooms under the doors where there is a 5mm gap** and this is balanced out by the angle and opening of the Saturn so the air doesn't enter or leave too quickly or hang around too long. Overall it takes just over two hours for the house to change its air so the air quality is excellent. The final thing to note is that if you want to keep a room warm then you keep the door closed because the northern corridor doesn't have any vents, which means that if your door has a bigger than 5mm gap (on account of being open) all the warm air rushes out into the chilly corridor rather than reaching you as you sit at your laptop....

... so I'll get up and sort that then!

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* It may be obvious, but it's a lot better than being surprised by the data

**As a tetchy aside I would like to point out that 5mm seems to also be the diameter of a vacuum cleaner cable so I spend a considerable amount of time extracting the latter from under doors when cleaning, but expect the house will train me eventually.