SteamyTea

Yes, a Pi Zero W I think I have an old proper board or 3, may give it a go on that. Thanks for your help, lets see what happens.

Welcome As it is gutted, now is the very best time to deal with the air leakage.

Welcome Some Scotch people will be along and start telling you all about the different rules about building they have devolved. One of our members was building up in Inverneshire, and recently abandoned his project.

I am not so sure. During a cold, grey winters day, or more so at night, there is no extra, direct energy received from the body from the sun. This tends not to be the case in the summer, even when a bit cloudy. But you may have noticed that even in the summer, you can feel quite chilled when the sun sets and darkness comes. I have spent the last 30 years going to see the sun set at Land's End, 15 minutes before sunset it can feel quite warm, come the moment, and most people are shivering.

I don't know if we have any Python/RPi experts here, but I am struggling to get an i2c infrared thermometer to work. The sensor is a cheap CJMCU one, which is an mlx90614, sometimes also known as a GY-906. I have installed all the relevant libraries i.e. adafruite_mlx90614, smbus2, etc, but may have missed something key. I can get it connected and showing up with i2cdetect -y 1 as 5b and plays nicely with my RTC (which may or may not be UU) When I run the below test python programme it returns [0, 91], which I have no idea what it means but seems to show it is connected and can be locked out import busio from board import * i2c = busio.I2C(SCL, SDA) i2c.try_lock() print(i2c.scan()) i2c.unlock() i2c.deinit() When I come to run the proper Python programme I get this message. from smbus2 import SMBus from adafruite_mlx90614 import MLX90614 bus = SMBus(1) sensor = MLX90614(bus, address=0x5b) print (sensor.get_amb_temp()) print (sensor.get_obj_temp()) bus.close() I then played about and wrote this, but get this message from smbus2 import SMBus, i2c_msg from adafruit_mlx90614 import MLX90614 with SMBus(1) as bus: with MLX90614 as sensor: bus = SMBus() sensor1 = sensor(bus, address=0x5b) print(sensor1.get_ambient()) A bit more playing and I get this message. from smbus2 import SMBus from adafruit_mlx90614 import MLX90614 TemperatureModule._sensor = MLX90614(1, 0x5B) while not i2c.try_lock(): temperature = TemperatureModule._sensor.get_object_1() temperature1 = TemperatureModule._sensor.get_ambient() And after staying up to gone 9PM last night, and a few hours this morning, I am completely at a loss. I have spent literally hours searching this and there seems to be very little information PyPi does suggest a command is tried first, but it made not difference. Can anyone help? (when I say help, I mean actually write it for me)

I have often said that for every law that says we must do some, we have another law that makes it illegal.

Called a buffer tank isn't it?

Apart from the size, what makes it different from this

Welcome As above, get it re air tested and see how accurate the initial number really is. You can make your own 'fan that fits in a window/door' cheap enough to trace leaks. If you can borrow a thermal imaging camera, do so. Then overheat the house and get outside on a cold night and take lots of images. That will show heat loss paths. You can take lots of the inside as well as I suspect many will correlate. Only problem with lots of IR picture is remembering the order and place they where taken. Shame it only has PIV and MVHR, just pushing warm air out the building. Get some energy monitoring going, hourly data is so useful.

Um 'Dr' Robert Murray-Smith I cannot make my mind up about this guy credentials, I do know he annoys me when I listen to him. Had a few companies https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/officers/tqByWP0StTHC1bmtG42toNPuhIc/appointments There are a lot of Dr Murry-Smith. Some images of them here. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Dr.+Murray-Smith+was+a+Research+Officer+for+Imperial+Chemical+Industries+Plc.&atb=v390-1&iax=images&ia=images If all these devices where so great, and have been around for a while, why cannot I buy a 50 year battery in Tesco?

I just use Alt+Tab to change open applications. But then I come from a time before Windows.

Round pegs.

Get the SAP up Not that it would make your builder better, or worse.

@TerryE was after someone to take over all the system admin. With your skills you could be more powerful than a mod, I see a new horizon.

Easy to get around that, just call everyone a manager and get them to waiver their employment right.

Got some men to the moon. Even comes with an ashtray, how (expletive deleted)ing brilliant is that.

Perfect excuse for @Pocster's shirkers thread

Lovely. That is about the right temperature for humans to do nothing by laze about. Happens to be the mean temperature in the parts of Kenya where humanins initially developed.

Generally true of all insulation. Water had a k-value of 0.6 W/m.K Air is 0.026 W/m.K. I think this is probably the easiest way to deal with it once the obvious external ones are dealt with. By limiting the amount of water that can condense, most of the problem goes away. Airtightness can also be worked on. If the internal air is dryer than the external air, vapour migration will take place, further reducing the problem. Basically what dehumidifiers do.

You can always tell when a sales person is lying, their lips move.

As that was the only significant mass, it was thermally isolated from the 'world'. Was the place stable in the non heating season? This assumes you did not cool the slab. Rather pointing to insulation keeps the temperature stable more than mass.

I am not sure it does (if you mean heavyweight housing in the tropics). The main driver of concrete housing in the developing countries was cheapness and speed of construction. All the places we lived in apart from 2 (Seria and Pin de Galle, both a few metres from the sea) had air conditioning and no insulation. Was a shock moving to The Netherlands where there was no insulation apart from rugs hanging on the walls, but lots of town gas to burn. Just having a quick look at the EPC register and the house we lived in when we got moved to the UK has an EPC of D, as did the one we moved to, and the one after that. My recent places seem to be Cs (have to look at the neighbours as the EPC was not invented when I last moved). So apart from two places, all our 'tropical' homes where of heavyweight construction.

I can't remember what the construction was. What were the wall, floor, roof build up. No need to have actual values, but was the insulation inboard or outboard of the main structure and what was that structure. It may also have been a combination of inboard and outboard insulation and low mass structure. Granite has a k-value of between 2.1 and 3.5 W/m.K Brick is ~300 W/m.K Polyurethane foam 0.03 W/m.K So polyurethane foam retards the thermal losses by a factor of between 70 and 117. Uninsulated stone will just draw all the energy you put into heating your inside air outside in now time. If 'thermal mass' was so brilliant, why do we need to insulate all our old housing stock? Most of them are brick and stone.

I have just bought an old banger of a car, trip up to my Mother's and it averaged (mean) 70 MPG (0DP). Now I am going to look at a blue sky by the sea.

Possibly. But energy storage has no time units connected to it, remember that 1 kWh is really 3.6 MJ. Thermal resistivity, which is insulation, does have time units. The absolute thermal resistivity has the units K/W, where K is temperature difference and W is watts, which is J/s. So just having energy stored in mass does not, in itself, have anything to do with the rate that energy is delivered (think of a car with a half full tank of fuel, but you don't know what the upcoming journey is going to be). So if you want thermal stability, you have to add insulation because that is what governs the rate that energy is delivered. It is independent of the amount of energy stored (at any give temperature). 12 hours would be useful if we lived an exact 12 hour lifestyle i.e. 12 hours daylight, 12 night time, known temperature regimes i.e. 22°C during daylight, 16°C night time, known other energy inputs i.e. heating, cooking, showering, number of people etc. The UK (and most Northern Hemisphere places) do not have any of the above, so using mass, especially the built in mass of a building, is not really going to help greatly with stability. As I mentioned early on in this thread, wine cellars built into caves are often quoted as 'proof' that much mass created stability. They are relatively stable compared to the ambient temperature, but at a lower mean temperature, or to put it another way, if you want to keep your house cold, fill it with rubble. Now here is an experiment that anyone can do, it is simple and only requires a bucket full of water and a thermometer. Fill bucket from the cold tap, place somewhere out of the way (just to save knocking it over). Write down the date and time, take a temperature reading of the air inside and outside the house, then take the water temperature. Do this as often as you like, but at least 3 times a day. Chart the temperatures. Draw your conclusions.