Late wintery-Autumn in Jenny's Light House

Last night the minimum temperature dropped to a chilly -4.4 (with a nasty apparent min' temp of nearly -7!) and the mornings are certainly taking longer to warm up as we head into May. So how is Jenny's house (with no heating in the living areas or bedrooms) faring as winter approaches?

See our earlier journal post for some background on Jenny's house and its data loggers.

The floor plan of Jenny's home showing the location of the data loggers used to generate the graph below.

BOM data for the first week of May showing minimums and maximums on the left.

As wintery-Autumn arrived in Canberra Jenny's house remained cosy with the main living areas and bedrooms (shown in green, blue and orange on the graph below) fluctuating between 16 and 23 degrees. Encouragingly, the southern bathroom (shown in black) still hasn't dropped below 15 degrees.

The only heaters in Jenny's house are individual 600W ceiling-mounted, far-infrared panels in each of the bathrooms. Only the heater panel in the southern bathroom has been used so far.

There are a couple of interesting things to point out in this graph:

1. The infrared panel was turned on twice during May 2 in order to 'emergency dry' some clothing needed for a camping trip the following day (it worked well).

2. The infrared heater was accidentally left on for EIGHT hours on May 5 and got to a lovely temperature of 24 degrees! (Slap over the wrist for the oldest boy in the house.)

3. The infrared panel was switched on a couple of times on Saturday May 6 and once on Sunday May 7 as Jenny returned home to shower between swimming slots in the 24 hour MS MegaSwim (she deserved a warming treat).

4. Nobody was sleeping in the middle bedroom on the last 3 nights shown on the graph. Proof that one person can produce quite a bit of heat in a well-sealed and insulated room.

5. We had lots of different people moving in and out of the house throughout the day on May 6. It was also quite overcast. On this day the internal temps were notably lower in the unheated parts of the house. Despite this it was still very comfortable.