blog

Mid March Progress

Posted: 17-03-10

Windows in, filtration change, spouting, no shed.

After a long wait by ourselves and the builders, the windows have finally been assembled off site, and brought on-site and installed. The delay was with the sash-lift mechanisms, themselves delayed by the UK supplier.

They look fantastic, we are so pleased with them. We should be, we spent 2 weeks painting the buggers to make a cleaner division between the off-white colour of them and the darker grey weatherboards.

Most NZ houses have aluminium windows but metal is a poor choice of material to make windows from in energy efficient homes, even with double glazing installed because metal is a great conductor of heat. It will quickly cool in cold weather and let out your hard won heat. Ideally, you want to use a material or combination of materials that reduces or slows heat loss.

Many websites have data tables that compare the R-Values/U-Values of different types of joinery. The best combination seems to be UPVC with the thickest double-glazing or triple glazing you can fit. Even with the best glazing though, compared to an adjacent and well-insulated wall, such a window is still like a clear outlet to the outside world if you are a wisp of heat.

Wood comes a very close second in these tables, and here in New Zealand tends to be cheaper than UPVC which is still very new. Incidentally I actually recall getting the stuff installed in my bedroom back in Cambridge when I was 11 (I'm now 35 - the UK has had UPVC for some time..).

Due to its insulating qualities and the fact that it was the only joinery we could get double-hung sashes in for our budget, that's what we went for. The double-glazing is 4mm glass, 20mm Argon gas gap, 4mm glass.

Our home has been designed by us with energy efficiency and conservation in mind hence the above spec insulation, double glazing and central heating. Now, if you're reading this from say Europe or the US you might be thinking that this is all normal stuff, that every new home follows this pattern - right?.

But I really can't emphasis enough that New Zealand until really, very recently, say 2005 or 2006, just didn't want to know about this. I have banged on about this before, as has pretty much every other immigrant Brit, German or American. And now, given greater public awareness of climate-change, sustainability, energy (and money) efficiency, a critical mass of sorts seems to have been reached where this sort of thinking is now becoming mainstream. Mainstream to the extent you'll be deemed to be only slightly less off your rocker by your Kiwi builder than you were before, when you suggest to him that you want to exceed the minimum regs for insulating your ceiling and walls.

So it is with energy efficiency in mind that I did some calculations on the back of a beer mat about the power consumption of our UV water filter. The answers surprised me and had me scrabbling to find an alternative.

It turned out that the 135W UV bulb would be always on. All day, every day, that lamp would be on. I calculated that in a 28 day period the UV lamp alone would use more electricity than both Tasia and I use in our whole flat for the same period. And that's a poorly insulated, electrically heated flat, complete with electric cooker.

A plainly ridiculous system to have in a supposedly energy efficient home. It turns out the alternative I eventually found costs less to purchase and takes only a 9v battery to run. (It's a HydroCycle 4000 membrane filter, removes particles down to 0.2 microns - virus size) I'll let you know how we go with it.

We were asked to paint the barge-board about 3 weeks ago as the spouting (gutter) was to be installed the following week. So we dutifully went up there and spent a decent weekend painting the thing.

The spouting only arrived on-site last week and the clips that attach it to the barge-board have only been fitted this week, so I'm not sure why all the hurry really.

We ordered a shed on TradeMe 2 weeks ago and I heard nothing from the company. So I called them and upon my asking as to why no shed had yet materialised, they we unable to proffer an adequate response. It was promised it would be delivered tomorrow, which was yesterday, but today it wasn't there.

Bugger.