Uphill House has moved!

No, we didn’t physically move. Just changed site hosting.

Please visit us at uphillhouse.com. This will take you to uphillhouse.netplusdesign.com where we’ve consolidated our energy and temperature data with this blog.

Thanks!

Larry & Jill

Visualizing temperatures

It’s snowing and cold outside, so I thought I’d plot outdoor temperatures for the last 7 years.

Porch maintenance

We completed the porch about 7 years ago. The deck is Douglas Fir and we used Penofin Verde to seal it sometime around July 2011. It weathered nicely but was time for a little preventative maintenance. The sun and rain can do some damage.

The south and west sides get more sun and were starting to look thirsty and the end boards were starting to crack and shrink. The north side was starting to grow a greenish tint from lack of sun.

We did some light sanding with a 5″ hand sander to remove the dirt and gray weathered surface to reveal that beautiful red cedar color. Then we applied a new coat of the same Penefin stain.

7 years was a bit long. We’ll likely need to do this again in about 5 years. It is more work to maintain natural wood with natural stains, but the benefit is that the porch looks new again.

61,156 kilowatt hours

As of this morning, we’ve produced a whole lot of solar since mid 2011. Bliss.

38,323 hours of solar and usage data visualization

I’ve been trying some abstract visualizations that use data we have collected at the house. The image above was composed from 38,323 hours of solar generation and total usage data. It is a heat map in the sense that hours of higher generation or higher usage are brighter in color. The columns are days. Can you tell which columns are the weekends? Which areas correspond to day and night, summer and winter?

Sol LeWitt inspired doodles

After seeing the Sol LeWitt Retrospective at Mass MoCA last weekend, I felt the need to do some computational doodling today.

 

I produced all images using Processing.

Entry door lock sets replaced

Why am I writing about our entry door locks? We’ve had problems with our entry door locks every winter. They freeze up and it’s impossible to get the key in the key hole. Now they are so corroded inside that the lock mechanism barely works the rest of the year. They are less than 3 years old. I was surprised to see the amount of corrosion inside.

I’ve spoken to a few people about our frozen door locks in the winter. The issue seems to be that the house is so tight, that warm moist air inside the house only has one place to get out, through the key holes. One other consideration. Our ERV is set by default to produce a very small increase in internal air pressure. I believe their thought is that you want to be pushing clean air out the leaks, rather than pulling unconditioned air in. But I believe this may be one of the sources of our problem.

I’ve installed new door entry sets and will be setting the ERV to fully balanced to see if this solves our problem this winter.

I haven’t seen anyone else mention this problem, so I thought I would post here and see if anyone else with a passivhaus-level tight home has had this experience.  Please comment below if you have, and what you did to fix it.

Update January 2017

The original lock sets were manufactured by Schlage. The new one are from Kwikset. I like the style better and the push button lock better than the turn mechanism. They seem to be holding up well, but as I mention in the comment below, we now have an HRV which lowers the amount of moisture in the air in the winter. We also haven’t seen the same cold temperatures that we did in the first 3 years.

We’re now Uphillhouse.com

Less to type, more to love (no more ads).

Green Building Open House 2012 Reminder

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Just a reminder. The Green Building Open House Tour, sponsored by NESEA, and the National Solar Tour, sponsored by the American Solar Energy Society, is October 13 this year from 10 to 4.

Last year we opened our house while still under construction. This year we’re showcasing the finished house and data that we’ve been collecting along the way.

A listing of local New York houses in the greater Albany region are listed on Our Energy Independent Community site.

Put it in your calendar. Come see us and some of the best green houses in upstate New York.

Energy Star Certificate

Almost forgot, we got our official Energy Star Certificate in the mail a few days ago. It was included with a packet of information to explain the EnergyStar program to the homeowner. It also included a release form that if signed and returned would allow NYSERDA (the authority that administers the EnergyStar program in New York) to access our electricity usage directly from the utility for 2 years. Creepy.