Archive of posts from November 2012

• Temperature and energy use observations

  Nov 20, 2012

  As I continue sifting through our performance data, I’ve been focusing lately on outdoor temperatures and their relationship with our heating and cooling energy use. These are a few of my observations.

  

  We have 9 months, 274 days, 6,576 hours of temperature data, from February 1 to October 31. Of those 6,576 hours, 4,635 outdoor temperature hours were below 68 degrees F.  Roughly 70% of the recorded time period has been below 68 degrees F.

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• Correlating HDD with heating energy use

  Nov 9, 2012

  

  I spent a few of the Sandy storm days indoors and decided to indulge my inner nerd. I’ve been tracking all our house performance data using monthly spreadsheets, which can make it difficult to filter data or look for trends across months. So I downloaded mySQL and imported all our energy and temperature data into the database. This is the first in a series of posts on what I find as I sift through the data.

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• October performance

  Nov 1, 2012

  

  October was overshadowed by the events of the last week. Despite the best efforts of Hurricane Sandy we are safe and dry at Up Hill House. We had plenty of strong wind gusts, but not nearly as bad as the costal regions. We were prepared for the worst. We stocked up on water and easy to prepare meals. We have a small propane burner that can be used to heat water or simple cooking. We packed the chest freezer with ice. We filled the bathtub for flushing and the cistern was full for the farm critters. Thankfully the power never went out.

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