Let there be light …
Today marks a MAJOR milestone in the new house my parents have been building and which my Dad and I have been doing all the electrical work on
Today the house was inspected, passed and finally connected to the grid by the States Electrical Inspector … YAY !!
This follows a year of work involving planning, wiring, drilling .. you name it. A year in which we’ve layed over 4 miles of cable including : Cat V: video surveillance cable; satelite cable; and of course miles of multi-core cabling.
There were only a few glitches but the place is now lit up like a Christmas tree, the PV’s are connected and the ground source heat pump is humming away and has heated up a tank full of water to 53C in only a few hours !!! … that’s water heated only from the underground pipes and passed through the heat exchanger … WOWSERS ! [check out the what & how here and below]
The result is a state of the art , super-green , techno-stupendous house. My Dad has incorporated every innovation possible. It’s a Geek’s dream-house …
- A Ground source heat pumpGround source heat pumps use solar energy naturally stored in soil, bedrock and groundwater as a heat source. They do require electricity to operate, but efficiently produce up to five times as much heat energy for every unit of electricity they use. [check out this article I wrote on them here]
- Solar Panels (Photo Voltaic cells) capable of generating 3KW of energy [check out my article here ]
- Heat Recovery Ventilation System – a system whereby hot air can be redistributed from one room to another.
- LED lighting eveywhere … 5W LED lights generating the equivalent of 50W light from traditional bulbs
- Underfloor heating driven by the ground source heat pump.
- Underground storage tanks that collect rain water off of the roof for use in flushing the toilets and watering the garden.
Everything is run from a central control room … VERY Star Trek! 😀
The control room systems have blue tooth connectivity … so maybe I can write some code to …
If you want to bore yourself with hundreds of photos of the whole project check out this gallery…
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