Pleased to be able to report that Porters is still performing as we’d expect as far as the house, log burner and solar thermal goes. In contrast with last winter which was warm, and wet – and so grey with overcast skies – quite a lot of the recent weather has been clear and cold. Again we’ve had Jack Frost patterns on the outside of the triple glazing – which I still find amazing. The sun, though low in the sky and only really able to do anything useful between 10 am and 2 pm, nevertheless puts worthwhile heat into the thermal store and directly into the house through the big windows. The solar thermal panel collector temperature doesn’t get high enough to do much for hot water but if we haven’t used too much from when we last lit the log burner, we can go a day without lighting it at all because there’s enough from the sun in the thermal store to keep the house warm.
We’ve put in hand the process of having the house accredited as a Passivhaus, so that’s a story which I’ll report on as we go forward. So far we’ve had the air test repeated which has passed at 0.58ach. It was a bit better than this when the original test was done during the building of the house and we suspect that one or two things have dried out over the intervening 2 years+ and gaps opened up. Attention was needed where the SVP passes through the roof and also where the log burner’s flue passes through the roof as well.
As 2 years have passed it was time for the Paul MVHR to be serviced. The matrix simply gets washed with water – it didn’t seem to need it – and the fans are sealed for life. So there wasn’t much to be done. The filters get changed regularly anyway, the dirtiest being that in the pre-heater which is the first – and catches all the insects in the summer. The filter downstream from the pre-heater doesn’t really need changing very often as it doesn’t get dirty. And the filter preventing house dust getting into the system gets looked at every 90 days but again does not always need changing.
The saga of the faulty solar PV string mentioned in the previous post is still running and I’ll complete that – when it’s completed! Very soon now I do hope.