Our conservation efforts: a pretty graph.

[DamonHD]

Hi,

We've been making some headway in reducing heat (from natural gas mains supply) demand over the last couple of years, and today I drew it up as a (relatively) pretty graph c/o gnuplot:



The long and the short of it is, last year we cut gas demand by 30% even though it was the most severe UK winter in 30 years.  We'd done a bunch of things such as draught-proofing, replacing the internal door from our living room to the corridor, and replacing our front door with a double-glazed unit.

This year's main effort is the superinsulation of our living room as I've mentioned elsewhere:

http://www.earth.org.uk/superinsulating-our-living-room.html

but I remain very uncertain as to how much difference it will actually make.  Here's hoping.

Rgds

Damon

[Rover]

Impressive.. seems you require slightly more than a homeless individual sleeping over a sewer drain.... without the smelll

very cool!

[DamonHD]

We provide our own smell!  B^>

And we are perched on top of the intersection of a large number of local sewers: to the point that I've seriously considered doing a semi-secret 'water'-source heat-pump with collection coils buried close to the big pipes!  B^>

Rgds

Damon

[BrianSmith]

Are you sure its your insulation or is it .... g l o b a l  w a r m i n g   ..    

Seriously, it looks like you've dropped it over 30% or so.  That's pretty good.
 

[DamonHD]

That was 30% drop last year even though it was the harshest winter in the UK for ~30 years.

Changes in solar activity causing the UK to get airflow from Siberia rather than the Atlantic (again) overcame any global warming here, and given that the sun is still in much the same state I expect another pretty cold winter this year, thus our aerogel superinsulation project!

Rgds

Damon

[BrianSmith]

Where are you planning on putting the aerogel in your house?  Where did you get it?  A buddy at work sold me some 3 inch styrofoam cheap he was talking out of a hunting cabin that I am going to use to insulate my hot water storage tank, but aerogel would be much better....

If you decide to do some solar heating, I have a cheap differential temp controller with 4 temp sensors and logging capability for the diy'er that's <$50US. FYI

[DamonHD]

The work is more-or-less complete, see the link I posted earlier:

http://www.earth.org.uk/superinsulating-our-living-room.html

The idea is to concentrate insulation in the most-used room, to maximise the return.

The central-heating thermostat is in that room too.  (All radiators have thermostatic valves also.)

Rgds

Damon

[BrianSmith]

I didn't know they were putting aerogel behind wallboard/sheetrock.  That looks really good.  Enjoy the warmth and thanks for the link.

[GaryGary]

Hi,
That's quite a project -- congratulations!

You could correct the graphs for each year for the number of heating degree days for that year compared to the average number of heating degree days.
I use this site for degree days: http://www.degreedays.net/
Not sure if they do outside the US, but I'd guess there is someplace you could get HDD for your area.
One potential source is to ask your local propane or oil delivery company, as they use HDDs to estimate when peoples tanks need to be filled.

I've found that this really tends to smooth out the year to year comparisons.

Gary

[DamonHD]

Hi,

I do indeed have the HDD for each month (and indeed the guy running degreedays.net was kind enough to ship me 5 years' worth of data so I could compare to pre-conservation days).

The HDD number for us (taking a baseline of 12C that seems better to fit our cusp-of-conservation heating usage) has remained relatively constant (~1100) and is swamped by other factors.  Plus I'd also have to correct for our baseline (hot water) usage.  I do some of that in the text here: http://www.earth.org.uk/saving-electricity.html#meter

Rgds

Damon