February 2012
2 posts
Anonymous asked: I have got one of those "draughty, freezing, solid brick walled Victorian houses" so am really interested. The BIG question - what did it cost to do the retrofit?
A year's data...da-dah!
Sorry for the long, long gap since my last post - we’ve been busy applying what we learnt on this project to many others around the UK.
We finally have a year’s worth of data, represented (rather boringly, sorry) in the graph below:
A bit of background about the electricity consumption number:
it includes all electricity used onsite - i.e. MVHR fans, air source heat pump for...
November 2011
1 post
International passivhaus open days
Last Friday and Saturday we opened up the house for International PassivHaus open days. (Seems funny writing that - who woulda thought that’s something we would be end up being involved in.) Anyway, we are proud members of the passivhaus community so it was a pleasure to share the love.
I would write all about our wonderful tours, but luckily one of our visitors has kindly saved me the...
July 2011
1 post
June 2011
2 posts
Some data
So, we’re starting to get some data from the house. Admittedly, we don’t have the most advanced monitoring systems - i.e. me with a pencil (apart from the MVHR temperature data, which is quite snazzy, of which more to follow in another post) - but think we’re capturing the key data.
The electricity and gas readings are shown from 23 January 2011 - by which time the MVHR, solar...
April 2011
1 post
March 2011
3 posts
February 2011
4 posts
August 2010
4 posts
Painful paint
This week we dipped into the world of “eco-paints” in an attempt to find the best solution for our house. It is not an easy process. There are lots of brands making lots of claims that fall under the broad category of “eco-friendly”, but without doing a Phd on the subject, it is incredibly difficult to compare. Sorry that this post is so long, but hopefully it will be interesting/helpful.
The main...
July 2010
6 posts
June 2010
2 posts
The Home Straight!
To those people who have been reading this blog, apologies for the long delay since our last post. The reason is that the build (and a few other things) have quite simply overwhelmed us.
You’ll be pleased to hear that everything is back on track and we can bring you all up to date with the huge number of things that have changed, progress that has been made and obstacles that have been...
May 2010
1 post
April 2010
1 post
March 2010
5 posts
Ecobuild - well worth a visit
Taking place less than a mile away from our project site is this year’s Ecobuild exhibition - http://www.ecobuild.co.uk/. We took a break from our busy schedule of knocking walls down yesterday to have a look at the latest in green construction technologies.
It’s lucky that it goes on for 3 days - you’d need that long to visit only half of the stands and seminars at the...
February 2010
6 posts
Interesting article about the PassivHaus standard →
January 2010
8 posts
And we're off!
After what seems like an age of planning, modelling and jumping through bureaucratic hoops, the works have finally started. The scaffolding is going up at a crazy speed - if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed that 20 stone men could clamber up the side of a building like hyperactive monkeys. Once the scaffolding has been erected, the first step is to build the...
Welcome to the greentomato ecohome!
Welcome to our new blog - the greentomato ecohome!
Over the next 6 (probably more…) months, we will write and post photos and videos about our conversion of a Victorian terraced house in West London into a seriously low energy home.
We’re hoping to do such a good job that the house will qualify as a “passivhaus”, which means that it uses less than 15kWh of energy to heat...