We finally got our heat pump installed after about 2 months of waiting. They seem to be in big demand at the moment and the installers had to order one from Japan and wait for it to arrive.
I decided to get a Fujitsu Nocria AWTZ14L because it was the most efficient heat pump I could find in its power output rating. It can move 6Kw of heat into the house and has a heating COP of 4.44. There are some more efficient heatpumps around - I was keen on a Panasonic CS-HE9GKE with a heat output of 3.6Kw and a COP of 5.22 but since it was potentially to be the primary source of heat for the whole house, I thought we might need something a bit bigger. The Panasonics big brother (CS-HE12GKE) could do 4.8kW at a COP of 4.6 and I was really keen on getting the most efficient one but our Fujitsu strikes the best balance of power and efficiency and has some cool extra features such as being able to press a button and it cleans the primary air filter itself (it slowly moves over brushes, out of and back into the housing). It took a lot of reading to decide on this model and I can now say that I am very happy with it.
It's just so effortless! No lugging around firewood, chopping kindling, catching spiders and slaters from the wood, worrying about the woodpile getting smaller or being wet or falling over onto someone. No more waiting for hours for the inefficient fireplace to exhale enough warm air so that the temperature slowly crept up (did I mention that our previous fireplace was cr@p?) No, I just push some buttons and, voila, the house is comfortable! The other day I had turned it off at night and it was a little cool in the morning (about 15 degreesC) so I turned on the high power option and in LESS than 10 minutes the room was toasty warm! I could actually watch the thermometer going up. Fan tastic! It can output up to 9.1kW in high power mode.
When I first turned it on it was so comfortable I just didn't turn it off again for a week! Currently I'm trying different things such as setting the "on" timer for 7am in the morning and leaving it off at night to save power. Since it heats up the room so quickly it's fine in the morning although when it runs through the night the warmth does travel up the hallway a bit and into our bedrooms. I now want a heat transfer system to circulate the warm air from the lounge into our bedrooms. I'm convinced that it can heat the whole house with such a setup. On cold winter days it may work throughout the night to do so but once the house is warm to start with it only needs to heat for the heat losses and I think that it will be able to handle that with no problems. Particularly once the underfloor insulation and ceiling insulation top up are put in.
One of the things I was concerned about was potential thermal layering of the air. So where there is hot air by the ceiling and cold air by the floor. One of the installers giving us a quote warned us about that and was keen to sell us a (much less efficient Daikin) floor console because as he said "hot air rises". Well I can lay that myth to rest. I have had no noticeable thermal layering at all and even whan I move my hand around trying to test the temperature at different heights, I can only feel a small temperature difference between high and low. So that's not a problem at all. There is a lot of misinformation and urban myths that these so called expert installers tell us.
I recommend this heat pump to anyone!
Benjamin
2009/11/09
Living in the new house
It's been a while without a post and the initial excitement has worn off but I'll update this from time to time. Currently I'm working, looking after my heavily pregnant wife and my three children and writing my PhD so I'm rather busy...
So we've been in the new house for a while now and we've come through winter allright although it did get very cold at times. When the house is around 10degC in the mornings it's pretty miserable getting up to that and having only oil column heaters is not great since it takes a long time to heat up. I've done a combination of leaving the heaters riunning low all night, running via a thermostat in the wee boys room an using a timer to turn the lounge heater on early in the mornings but even that only takes the chill off the air really. We have had a shocking (pun not intended!) power bill in the first 2 months so I was more frugal after that.
The new house is definitely easier to heat than our previous house and we do have some uneven loose fill rockwool insulation in the ceiling but I think the main reason is that it is simply smaller.
So progress so far is:
- the fireplace has been covered up and one exterior wall of our lounge has been insulated and gib board (= sheetrock) replaced. I was a bit gung ho about it and bought R2.6 fibreglass blanket insulation (polygold) to put in the walls. It was cheap and I could cut it to size and it was high R so I though it would be good. The 90mm thick R2.5 wall biscuits are about double the price. This is 110mm thick for a wall cavity of about 90mm so the gib board needed to be pushed in firmly to screw it in place and in hindsight I'd probably go for the thinner stuff next time. There IS a little bit of bulging going on in the gib board but I'm not too worried. I took the opportunity to also extend a power circuit to the end of the room with dual 4-way power sockets and also put in a proper aerial socket rather than the cord coming out of the wall... Previously the whole lounge had one double socket at one end of the room which just doesn't cut it nowadays.
- We have a heat pump!!! Yay! Will write a separate post on this.
- insulation has still not been done and the bloody government has pulled the plug on our insulation guys funding because the scheme was too successful and they moved to limit the number of houses insulated . Stupid and annoying for us. Currently there's only one installer who can do work for community services card holders like us so we'll have to re-apply to them and may well have to spend much more money because they are not as cheap... I'm pretty annoyed about it.
- the weather is getting better which is nice.
Cheers!
Benjamin
So we've been in the new house for a while now and we've come through winter allright although it did get very cold at times. When the house is around 10degC in the mornings it's pretty miserable getting up to that and having only oil column heaters is not great since it takes a long time to heat up. I've done a combination of leaving the heaters riunning low all night, running via a thermostat in the wee boys room an using a timer to turn the lounge heater on early in the mornings but even that only takes the chill off the air really. We have had a shocking (pun not intended!) power bill in the first 2 months so I was more frugal after that.
The new house is definitely easier to heat than our previous house and we do have some uneven loose fill rockwool insulation in the ceiling but I think the main reason is that it is simply smaller.
So progress so far is:
- the fireplace has been covered up and one exterior wall of our lounge has been insulated and gib board (= sheetrock) replaced. I was a bit gung ho about it and bought R2.6 fibreglass blanket insulation (polygold) to put in the walls. It was cheap and I could cut it to size and it was high R so I though it would be good. The 90mm thick R2.5 wall biscuits are about double the price. This is 110mm thick for a wall cavity of about 90mm so the gib board needed to be pushed in firmly to screw it in place and in hindsight I'd probably go for the thinner stuff next time. There IS a little bit of bulging going on in the gib board but I'm not too worried. I took the opportunity to also extend a power circuit to the end of the room with dual 4-way power sockets and also put in a proper aerial socket rather than the cord coming out of the wall... Previously the whole lounge had one double socket at one end of the room which just doesn't cut it nowadays.
- We have a heat pump!!! Yay! Will write a separate post on this.
- insulation has still not been done and the bloody government has pulled the plug on our insulation guys funding because the scheme was too successful and they moved to limit the number of houses insulated . Stupid and annoying for us. Currently there's only one installer who can do work for community services card holders like us so we'll have to re-apply to them and may well have to spend much more money because they are not as cheap... I'm pretty annoyed about it.
- the weather is getting better which is nice.
Cheers!
Benjamin
2009/06/01
New Government subsidies for insulation & heating.
The Government announced its budget last Thursday and one of the few funding increases (the National Government is not Keynesian) is a scheme that subsidises retrofitting of insulation and clean heating to older houses, most of which have little or no insulation. The details that are emerging are looking very good indeed (http://www.eeca.govt.nz/node/3107).
Anyone can get the basic subsidies of 33% of insulation and $500 for approved clean heating systems (heat pumps, pellet fires, high efficiency woodfires, high efficiency flued gas fires - 'clean' here refers to low or no local air pollution, not necessarily low CO2 emissions).
We have a 'Community Services Card' which is for low income earners based on how many children you have (I have 3 with another on the way) and your income levels (moderate). This makes us eligible for the higher level of subsidies which are 60% of insulation costs and $1200 for clean heating. The deatiled rules have not been announced yet and leaves questions like is the heating funding a straight dollar subsidy or a 'up-to' percentage funding (eg 33% up to $1200). What is known/most likely to continue is that the insulation & heating must be installed and provided by "Energywise Partners" so I can't save any money by installing it myself nor can I choose exactly what mixture of insulation I most prefer - I can only get what the Energywise partners, that are here locally, provide. I believe both ceiling and underfloor insulation must be done together. There will be some shopping around to find the most suitable company. I've already made contact with someone who sells fibreglass insulation for the cheapest price on Trademe at as low as $3 per R-value per square metre, so R2.2 fibreglass was $6.50 per m2. 2 layers of that would give R4.4 which is quite respectable at $13/m2 (not installed). That person from East Coast Suspended Ceilings (http://www.ceilings.co.nz/) is trying to become an Energywide Partner so that would be a good match for us I think.
I am estimating a cost of $3500 for a heatpump installed and about the same for insulation installed (maybe a bit more so let's say $4500). So that's $8000 at full price. If we get the maximum subsidy that would cost us $3500-$1200=$2300 for the heatpump and $4500*0.4=$1800 installed for a grand total of $4100. That fits within our approx $5000 budget and is about half price! We might be able to get another $500 on top of that through an asthma study being carried out that my wife will be a part of.
The only downside is that the subsidies will start from the first of July so we have at least another month to wait till we get warm efficiently.
I would like to thank the previous Labour Government for preparing this policy (I had some involvement in that as chair of the Labour Party Policy Committee that deals with Energy issues) and campaigning strongly on it, the Green party for pushing and supporting this policy in both the previous and the current government and the National Party for going through with it (I never thought they would).
Benjamin
Anyone can get the basic subsidies of 33% of insulation and $500 for approved clean heating systems (heat pumps, pellet fires, high efficiency woodfires, high efficiency flued gas fires - 'clean' here refers to low or no local air pollution, not necessarily low CO2 emissions).
We have a 'Community Services Card' which is for low income earners based on how many children you have (I have 3 with another on the way) and your income levels (moderate). This makes us eligible for the higher level of subsidies which are 60% of insulation costs and $1200 for clean heating. The deatiled rules have not been announced yet and leaves questions like is the heating funding a straight dollar subsidy or a 'up-to' percentage funding (eg 33% up to $1200). What is known/most likely to continue is that the insulation & heating must be installed and provided by "Energywise Partners" so I can't save any money by installing it myself nor can I choose exactly what mixture of insulation I most prefer - I can only get what the Energywise partners, that are here locally, provide. I believe both ceiling and underfloor insulation must be done together. There will be some shopping around to find the most suitable company. I've already made contact with someone who sells fibreglass insulation for the cheapest price on Trademe at as low as $3 per R-value per square metre, so R2.2 fibreglass was $6.50 per m2. 2 layers of that would give R4.4 which is quite respectable at $13/m2 (not installed). That person from East Coast Suspended Ceilings (http://www.ceilings.co.nz/) is trying to become an Energywide Partner so that would be a good match for us I think.
I am estimating a cost of $3500 for a heatpump installed and about the same for insulation installed (maybe a bit more so let's say $4500). So that's $8000 at full price. If we get the maximum subsidy that would cost us $3500-$1200=$2300 for the heatpump and $4500*0.4=$1800 installed for a grand total of $4100. That fits within our approx $5000 budget and is about half price! We might be able to get another $500 on top of that through an asthma study being carried out that my wife will be a part of.
The only downside is that the subsidies will start from the first of July so we have at least another month to wait till we get warm efficiently.
I would like to thank the previous Labour Government for preparing this policy (I had some involvement in that as chair of the Labour Party Policy Committee that deals with Energy issues) and campaigning strongly on it, the Green party for pushing and supporting this policy in both the previous and the current government and the National Party for going through with it (I never thought they would).
Benjamin
Misery
We came back to our old home to sleep last night and stupidly left all the heaters in the new house... and it's probably the coldest night of the year and nobody has been here to heat the place... So anyway, to get to the point, it's 6.8 degrees Celsius inside this morning. I put the thermometer outside and it reads 5.7 degrees so that says a lot about the thermal insulation of our house doesn't it? Without heating it manages to stay 1 degree above ambient!
Didn't want to get out of bed and I feel miserable sitting out here in the cold. My toes and nose are cold - perhaps a second pair of socks will help? On the plus side the fridge won't be using much electricity and I don't need one of those fancy models with chilled water taps because it's cold just coming out of our normal taps!
My wife is feeling a bit sick so I've just lit the fire (otherwise we'd have gone straight to the new place) but that's a bit of an exercise in futility because our older inbuilt fireplace is not efficient and it would take several hours to warm the place up. Oh well, you do what you can.
The poor chickens (we have 2) are feeling the cold too it seems and have stopped laying eggs in the last few days. I really feel sorry for them in their plywood chook house. A thermally efficient chicken coop might make its way onto my already overflowing to-do list. The 2 cats slept inside and one of them crept into our bed last night which only happens when she's really cold.
Winter is here!
Didn't want to get out of bed and I feel miserable sitting out here in the cold. My toes and nose are cold - perhaps a second pair of socks will help? On the plus side the fridge won't be using much electricity and I don't need one of those fancy models with chilled water taps because it's cold just coming out of our normal taps!
My wife is feeling a bit sick so I've just lit the fire (otherwise we'd have gone straight to the new place) but that's a bit of an exercise in futility because our older inbuilt fireplace is not efficient and it would take several hours to warm the place up. Oh well, you do what you can.
The poor chickens (we have 2) are feeling the cold too it seems and have stopped laying eggs in the last few days. I really feel sorry for them in their plywood chook house. A thermally efficient chicken coop might make its way onto my already overflowing to-do list. The 2 cats slept inside and one of them crept into our bed last night which only happens when she's really cold.
Winter is here!
New house!
Well we have our new house now - woohoo! Got the keys on Friday.
We've started redecorating inside for a few days before we shift and fill the house with stuff that would otherwise then have to be moved out of the way. We've stripped the wallpaper from the living room, filled cracks with gib and sanded and 'sized' the walls in preparation for wallpaper today. It's quite a job...
Thermally it's the coldest weather so far this year, a cold front from Antarctica is sweeping the country with forecasts of snow in higher areas (like 2-300m altitude, not that high). We've bought a couple more cheap heaters to keep us warm for the next few weeks until we get a better heating system installed. It works an I'm not worried about the power bill right now, I have work to do!
Benjamin
We've started redecorating inside for a few days before we shift and fill the house with stuff that would otherwise then have to be moved out of the way. We've stripped the wallpaper from the living room, filled cracks with gib and sanded and 'sized' the walls in preparation for wallpaper today. It's quite a job...
Thermally it's the coldest weather so far this year, a cold front from Antarctica is sweeping the country with forecasts of snow in higher areas (like 2-300m altitude, not that high). We've bought a couple more cheap heaters to keep us warm for the next few weeks until we get a better heating system installed. It works an I'm not worried about the power bill right now, I have work to do!
Benjamin
2009/05/23
The three levels of insulation
As I see it there are three levels of insulation that are relevant here in New Zealand:
1. No or very little insulation. Perhaps a thin layer (less than 10cm) of Pink Batts fibreglass or some sort of blown-in insulation in the ceiling but most likely no underfloor or wall insulation, single pane windows, lots of air gaps in the wooden windows and doors and maybe in the floor as well. This is your typical older New Zealand house which most people are used to, live in and accept as normal. It requires a big source of heat to warm up and to keep warm and even then it will only heat perhaps half of the house. Usually a woodburner or gas heaters ore maybe electric resistance heaters. Once the heater is turned off or the fire goes out, the house gets cold again quickly, within a few hours.
2. Insulated. This would be a house built in the last few years or now. It has insulation in the walls, ceilings and underfloor. It may have single or double glazing. This still needs a large capacity heater but that heater is now capable of heating the whole house and it stays warm for a while after the heating has been turned off. This is probably what we will have once we've insulated our new house.
3. Passivhaus or superinsulated. This is what I aspire to! It's very simple in principle - more insulation, no air leaks, forced heat recovery ventilation. The insulation level is higher than the average new house (at around 20+cm thick for a Passivhaus) which makes it difficult to retrofit this level of insulation to an existing house. Windows are double or triple glazed and moderate in size. A heat recovery ventilation system uses an air-to-air heat exchanger to warm the cold incoming fresh air with the warm outgoing stale air. The payoff is that the house leaks much less heat than the average insulated house and thus only a small heat source is required to keep the whole house comfortable in any weather or climate. Often the people and appliances and sunshine in the house are enough to warm the house and little or no extra heating is required. No need to chop firewood or pay for a big heat pump, no big gas or electricity or firewood costs and no requirement for sunshine to heat the house.
If only every house was built like this!
1. No or very little insulation. Perhaps a thin layer (less than 10cm) of Pink Batts fibreglass or some sort of blown-in insulation in the ceiling but most likely no underfloor or wall insulation, single pane windows, lots of air gaps in the wooden windows and doors and maybe in the floor as well. This is your typical older New Zealand house which most people are used to, live in and accept as normal. It requires a big source of heat to warm up and to keep warm and even then it will only heat perhaps half of the house. Usually a woodburner or gas heaters ore maybe electric resistance heaters. Once the heater is turned off or the fire goes out, the house gets cold again quickly, within a few hours.
2. Insulated. This would be a house built in the last few years or now. It has insulation in the walls, ceilings and underfloor. It may have single or double glazing. This still needs a large capacity heater but that heater is now capable of heating the whole house and it stays warm for a while after the heating has been turned off. This is probably what we will have once we've insulated our new house.
3. Passivhaus or superinsulated. This is what I aspire to! It's very simple in principle - more insulation, no air leaks, forced heat recovery ventilation. The insulation level is higher than the average new house (at around 20+cm thick for a Passivhaus) which makes it difficult to retrofit this level of insulation to an existing house. Windows are double or triple glazed and moderate in size. A heat recovery ventilation system uses an air-to-air heat exchanger to warm the cold incoming fresh air with the warm outgoing stale air. The payoff is that the house leaks much less heat than the average insulated house and thus only a small heat source is required to keep the whole house comfortable in any weather or climate. Often the people and appliances and sunshine in the house are enough to warm the house and little or no extra heating is required. No need to chop firewood or pay for a big heat pump, no big gas or electricity or firewood costs and no requirement for sunshine to heat the house.
If only every house was built like this!
Why why why?
We've just bought our first house and want it to be warm and energy efficient within a limited budget. I have lots of clever (or crazy) ideas that I might use on the house if my dear wife will let me and want to share my experiences.
We've just bought a fairly typical three bedroom 1960's weatherboard house in Palmerston North, New Zealand. As with almost all older houses here, this was not built with thermal comfort in mind. About half of the year over summer the temperature is comfortable here without needing heating or cooling to be comfortable and that kind of house is fine at those times but in winter it gets pretty cold. We don't get snow here but it's still pretty miserable to live in an uninsulated house when the temperature is 10 degrees C outside and 12 degrees inside... as it was this morning! I'm still shivering right now. We're still in the old house that we've rented for several years and it's just the same as the new house - a thin inadequate layer of insulation in the roof, none in the walls or under the floor, lots of gaps in the windows and doors for air to blow through, single pane glass windows, no consideration to passive solar heating (at least the living room in both houses faces north into the sun - I wouldn't have bought it otherwise). So any heat that is in the house escapes very quickly and currently we only have a rather useless wood fire and two oil column heaters that I've put in the kids rooms overnight. That's why the living room gets freezing cold overnight and frankly, we're sick of it. We get quite a few colds every year, my wife has asthma and just psychologically you get miserable in the cold.
Now that we own our own house we can renovate it achieve the levels of thermal comfort that we want. We'll retrofit insulation into the house as best we can and install efficient heating. Then there are my more unconventional ideas - hopefully I can put in some heat recovery ventilation as well and I have these crazy thoughts about a home automation system...
Hopefully it will be an interesting journey for us and be useful for you as well.
Benjamin
We've just bought a fairly typical three bedroom 1960's weatherboard house in Palmerston North, New Zealand. As with almost all older houses here, this was not built with thermal comfort in mind. About half of the year over summer the temperature is comfortable here without needing heating or cooling to be comfortable and that kind of house is fine at those times but in winter it gets pretty cold. We don't get snow here but it's still pretty miserable to live in an uninsulated house when the temperature is 10 degrees C outside and 12 degrees inside... as it was this morning! I'm still shivering right now. We're still in the old house that we've rented for several years and it's just the same as the new house - a thin inadequate layer of insulation in the roof, none in the walls or under the floor, lots of gaps in the windows and doors for air to blow through, single pane glass windows, no consideration to passive solar heating (at least the living room in both houses faces north into the sun - I wouldn't have bought it otherwise). So any heat that is in the house escapes very quickly and currently we only have a rather useless wood fire and two oil column heaters that I've put in the kids rooms overnight. That's why the living room gets freezing cold overnight and frankly, we're sick of it. We get quite a few colds every year, my wife has asthma and just psychologically you get miserable in the cold.
Now that we own our own house we can renovate it achieve the levels of thermal comfort that we want. We'll retrofit insulation into the house as best we can and install efficient heating. Then there are my more unconventional ideas - hopefully I can put in some heat recovery ventilation as well and I have these crazy thoughts about a home automation system...
Hopefully it will be an interesting journey for us and be useful for you as well.
Benjamin
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