Hi all,
It's been a long time since I posted.
Since we moved in we have largely been trying to get our old house ready to sell and sold. Not sold yet, but the summer market here seems to be pretty healthy, so we are hopeful.
Anyway, when we moved in in January, it was really cold for here, in the teens for more than a week straight. Since we didn't have the solar hot water or the floor heat system hooked up yet, we just used the Ground Source as a forced air system to heat the house, which it was capable of handling with ease.
I spent a good amount of time programming the lighting control system, and even now I am still making tweaks, and need to do more programming on some rooms and outside lights. It is kind of tedious to do that, and best accomplished at night when you can see what you are doing with the lights. The lighting works exceptionally well, however, and even visitors catch onto it with very little or no instruction.
Nothing is realy complete yet, I've just been tremendously busy with work, and trying to catch up on everything else in life that was dropped for almost two years of construciton mania. But lately I have been getting more projects around here done...
We have the Solar hot water system up and running now, and it works great, making about 120 gallons of water per day heated to about 130F. That seems to be dropping our electric bills by about 30 dollars per month, which equates to about a 4 year payback.
As for the GSHP, it is great. Our electric bill in the month of April, paid in May, was only $110 dollars... That is for 5000 sq feet of house, heating, cooling, hot water, pumps, lights, septic, computers, tv, etc. We have only used about 5 gallon of propane since we moved in, for cooking, outdoor grilling, and running the direct vent fireplace a few times (which is awesome). Our high bill has been $220, which was January. I think some of that was construction and a lot of lights in that process. The house was also pretty cold soaked when we moved in, so it took some time to get things warmed up.
With summer now here, 102 degrees and humid yesterday, our A/C system runs more often, but usually only the back bedroom zone comes on, because that cool air returns down through the main hall and through the rest of the house. I've never seen it come on to stage 2, and usually runs about 5 minutes out of every 30 minutes or so. We have it set at 78 degrees now, and the humidity right now is sitting at 45%, about half of the equavalent dewpoint setting outside, so to say it is very comfortable. I made some adjustments to the way the "Intellizone" system functions, by making the bedrooms both priority zones, so the unit comes on immediately if those rooms call for temperature needs. The rest of the house is set to a low priority, but i've never seen any of those zones come on, and all zones right now are sitting at exactly 78 degrees.
As of last night, my ground source loop return temperatures were 85 degrees, higher than I would like, but this morning those temps were down to 80 degrees after very little use through the night. The desuperheater is adding about 3 degrees per cycle to the 50 gallon storage tank it feeds, and last night those temps were up to 110F without much hot water use throughout the day. If we all have showers in the moring, that tank will drop to about 75 degrees, and then heat back up through the day. The solar tank will easily get to 130 or 140, and the feed coming off the roof will get as high as 160 degrees, with the highest tank temp i've seen around 140. I had to install a differential controller to the solar/final storage tank to command the mix pump for that operation, but it was only $80 dollars for that and it works very well.
Tons of other stuff to talk about, but I know most of you logged on for pictures. We still have boxes everywhere, because we are trying not to put stuff away that would be better thrown away...otherwise it gets stored forever and you don't even need it.
I'll try to get some pictures on here when I can, but this venue is pretty public and now we have moved in we don't really want pictures of our interior out there for just anybody to look at.
I'll try to find a few that will work, though and post them back here soon... Also some summer electric bills too...
Thanks and till then...
