Heat Control

The last few days here in Silicon Valley we have had temperatures in the upper 90'sF. Today, it cooled off substantially, but the heat gave me an opportunity to see how our newly re-insulated house performs in hot weather.

What I did was open all the windows up at night and let the house cool down. After the first night, the downstairs cooled down to around 70F, the upstairs to around 72F. After the second night, the downstairs cooled down to around 72F and the upstairs to around 74F. It seems that the thermal mass of the house didn't shed much heat during the night without some moving air (like with exhaust fans) to encourage it.

During the day, I closed all the windows with the exception of the skylight window. The house was not uncomfortable. The upstairs was at 82F the first day and 84F the second. I can say that this performance is much better than we would have seen without having done the reinsulation. The upstairs would have been into the upper 80's.

Today, I tried closing all the windows and  running the HRV all day, but it did not help much. The inside of the house was in the 80's, up to 81 upstairs, though the outside temperatures were way down, in the mid to lower 70's. I wonder if that had to do with the fact that the ducting for the HRV's runs through uninsulated attic, which could be expected to heat up substantially?

I hope to find out in the fall, when I am planning to install some wireless sensors to see. If it turns out to be so, I'll look into heavily insulating the HRV ducting.

Plastic Packaging

Well, it seems retailers are finally doing something about plastic packaging. If you recall from this post, my purchase of new LED and CFL lights for our new light fixtures caused a mound of plastic packaging to materialize on the Buddha room floor by the time I had finished installing them.

As it turns out, the increasing price of oil makes the plastic clamshells that are ubiquitous in retail more expensive. So retailers are working with manufacturers to reduce the clamshells and use more paper, which is cheaper, renewable, and recyclable. This article in the New York Times (possibly behind a paywall) has more.

And it is about time too. Some of these clamshells are so thick that you need a pliers to open them.