The last time I wrote an entry here I was starting to insulate walls of my house. After doing one section of this (a four foot alcove) I was happy with the result and decided to carry on.
The first time I just used bubble wrap as the insulation behind 12mm plywood. Having seen some commercial insulation consisting of bubblewrap sandwiched between layers of foil, I thought I'd try my own (cheaper!) version of this. So I papered the wall with aluminium foil using gluestick adhesive, followed by three layers of bubble, and then added a final layer of foil before adding the wood.
This sounds a bit of a procedure, but it went very easily and the whole job was done in an evening and decorated over another two.
The result is a much warmer room. So I did the same in another bedroom, covering an eight foot section of wall with two full sheets of ply. Other than manouvering these through the house, the actual job gets easier each time and the rooms are so much warmer that I'm not likely to stop untill I've made every room that tiny bit smaller!
On the power front, things haven't been so good. Besides a small turbine I have two 80w panels and hoped that these would be sufficient for most of my lighting through winter. I had planned to have converted the house over to RE (lights) by now, but I'm now pleased that I hadn't. I've been unable to keep even the couple of rooms I had converted adequately lit.
It's been a disappointment, but a good learning exercise. I hadn't realised just how little sun I was going to have during the shorter days, and boy! weren't they short and dark? I did some measuring and worked out that one day I probably had less than 50 watt hours , nowhere near enough when some 1 watt lights were on 24 hours a day.
It didn't help that the turbine wasn't spinning from around mid december untill this last weekend, nothing wrong with it, just 4 weeks of windless days. (or not enough to get to cut-in). I ended up putting the batteries on charge from the mains just to keep them topped up.
So, I'm a bit stuck. Either I'm not making enough power or I'm not storing it well enough. The batteries are getting old now I know, and I lost one this winter. Not sure where to go next.