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[Temp]

I'm in Cambridgeshire where the weather men said it was 38c yesterday. Bedroom was 29C at 10pm. Felt cooler outside so i opened window and put a big oscillating fan on the sill. At midnight it was down to 27C. Fan ran all night blowing air in. Woke up about 6:30 to thunder and rain and stat says its 28C!

 

We have mains pressure cold water at all taps. For last few days its been warm no matter how long you run it for.

Edited July 26, 2019 by Temp

[Ferdinand]

I guess that one thing to add here is  rid of any remaining halogen bulbs, and switch to LEDs, as they put out a fair amount of heat.

[daiking]

Has normal service resumed yet?

 

seeing as the country’s infrastructure is creaking as it is and there’s no appetite to invest in it, we need to accept that every year there will be some days when it’s very cold, some days it’s very hot, some it’s snowing/windy/wet.

 

Those losses aren’t an economic negative, they’re the costs because we can’t afford to make the changes necessary to overcome them.

[lizzie]

From my photo memories, taken at 6.15pm on 26 July 2018.

 

Going forward and with climate change I really think cooling/aircon should be something that gets as much consideration in the build as keeping warm.  If I ever (bring on the white coats) do another I will have whole house aircon as well as mvhr etc.

 

 

[Jeremy Harris]

7 minutes ago, lizzie said:

 

Going forward and with climate change I really think cooling/aircon should be something that gets as much consideration in the build as keeping warm. 

 

 

I agree wholeheartedly.  I know I bang on a bit here about the risk of overheating, and how solar gain is a significant problem for a well-insulated and airtight house, but that's because I've spent far, far more time and money trying to resolve overheating than I have on heating.  Heating is a complete non-issue for us, if push came to shove a small fan heater in the hall would keep the whole house more than warm enough in cold weather. 

 

The reality is that we have to cool the house, either by passive means, like the solar reflective film and window overhangs, or by active means like floor cooling and air conditioning, for a far greater proportion of the year than we spend heating the house.

 

Every time I see a new house design that has acres of glass, the thing that immediately springs to mind is the overheating risk that may pose.

[ProDave]

Last night was probably the first in the 17 years we have been in the Highlands that it never really cooled down enough overnight for the night purge not to work very well.  Bedroom was still 22.5 this morning.

 

Downstairs, with the floor cooling been on all night, was down to 21 degrees.  The ASHP has used 3KWh in the last 12 hours cooling, so has probably extracted about 9KWh of heat from the house.

 

I did try reducing the water flow temperature to 16 degrees but then noticed a bit of condensation forming in the circulation pump, so put it back up to 18 degrees.

 

This little spell has confirmed we need to fit fan coil units to the bedrooms for cooling, something I never thought we would need up here, though I may not get those done for this year. 

[joth]

3 hours ago, Ferdinand said:

 

Ooh. What a story to have.

 

Did you video the glass elevator?

We certainly did!! (Full disclosure: that was my team mate videoing; 4-tandem bike relay team, we'd just done the final pull to get to the top of the pass and they took over for the descent, as he has stronger nerves than me. Here's a shot of us rolling into Kansas early on day 4)

 

2 hours ago, Ferdinand said:

Are these any good? I see that the sports ones are about double the price of the work ones !

 

 

4 years ago now so details are hazy, but... they definitely do work, but I just didn't like wearing them. Large problem is unless you regularly train in >100F temps, and train actually using them, they just add another unknown risk which is the last thing you want on race day. (So long as it's <100F I found the body can self regulate enough given a reasonable forward motion creating movement of air. It's above 100F things rapidly come apart. And this is the only thing Fahrenheit is any use for)

 

What helped me more is various "cooling towels": we kept a stack of them in cool boxes full of ice water in the chase van, each change you could drape those over and cool down quick. And the old favourite: nylon stockings stuffed with ice wrapped around the neck like a french man carrying onions. Exploiting the latent heat of vaporization effect, I now know to call it (thank you, MVHR enthalpy exchanger!)

 

Edited July 26, 2019 by joth

[Ed Davies]

10 hours ago, NSS said:

where's the "whoosh, that went straight over my head" emoji when you need it.

 

Sowwy. OTOH, I'm sure ProDave, who I was answering, had at least a rough idea what I was talking about.

[ProDave]

45 minutes ago, Ed Davies said:

 

Sowwy. OTOH, I'm sure ProDave, who I was answering, had at least a rough idea what I was talking about.

I understood enough to know the concept of what you are taking about although if implementing it I would have a learning curve / questions to ask first.

 

I would be interested if you could have a look at my Weather HQ link to see if you are only seeing the graph update every few hours. https://www.weatherhq.co.uk/weather-station/inverness-%2F-dalcross

[SteamyTea]

15 hours ago, ProDave said:

I normally use Weather HQ to get live weather data (and historic data)

How do you get that, I had a quick look and could not see anything obvious to download it.

[ProDave]

8 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

How do you get that, I had a quick look and could not see anything obvious to download it.

No it's not a question of downloading.  Just scroll down and look at the temperature and wind speed graphs, do they look like they are updating regularly or only every few hours?

 

e.g it is saying for me right now "last observation 11:50" which is nearly 2 hours ago.  It should normally update every 20 minutes or so.

[SteamyTea]

4 minutes ago, ProDave said:

No it's not a question of downloading

Right.

Shame, WeatherUnderground had a historic download option, but that seems to have gone now.  I think you can specify between dates in the URL, and get it to display as text.

I just wish it was as simple as it was, type in dates, download the text, import into favourite data package.

[Ed Davies]

10 hours ago, ProDave said:

I would be interested if you could have a look at my Weather HQ link to see if you are only seeing the graph update every few hours. 

 

Yes, when I looked at 21:16 BST (20:16Z that is, UTC or, if you must, GMT) weatherHQ was showing the last observation as 16:50 (whatever time zone they use, BST I'd guess).

 

When I look on checkwx it gives a much more recent observation at 19:50Z (20:50 BST so about 25 minutes ago). You don't need an API key just to look on the web, only to use the API for easy programmatic downloads:

 

https://www.checkwx.com/weather/EGPE/metar

 

BTW, adding a bit of whitespace for readability, this is the JSON you get back from the checkwx API for Inverness:

 

{   "results":1,
    "data":[{
        "wind":{"degrees":0,"speed_kts":2,"speed_mph":2,"speed_mps":1},
        "temperature":{"celsius":21,"fahrenheit":70},
        "dewpoint":{"celsius":15,"fahrenheit":59},
        "humidity":{"percent":69},
        "barometer":{"hg":29.76,"hpa":1008,"kpa":100.79,"mb":1007.92},
        "visibility":{"miles":"Greater than 6","miles_float":6.21,"meters":"10,000+","meters_float":10000},
        "elevation":{"feet":29.53,"meters":9},
        "location":{"coordinates":[-4.0475,57.5425],"type":"Point"},
        "icao":"EGPE",
        "observed":"2019-07-26T19:50:00.000Z",
        "raw_text":"EGPE 261950Z VRB02KT 9999 FEW035 21/15 Q1008",
        "station":{"name":"Inverness"},
        "clouds":[{"code":"FEW","text":"Few","base_feet_agl":3500,"base_meters_agl":1066.8}],
        "flight_category":"VFR","conditions":[]
    }]
}

 

[Dan F]

12 hours ago, JSHarris said:

 

I agree wholeheartedly.  I know I bang on a bit here about the risk of overheating, and how solar gain is a significant problem for a well-insulated and airtight house, but that's because I've spent far, far more time and money trying to resolve overheating than I have on heating.  Heating is a complete non-issue for us, if push came to shove a small fan heater in the hall would keep the whole house more than warm enough in cold weather. 

 

The reality is that we have to cool the house, either by passive means, like the solar reflective film and window overhangs, or by active means like floor cooling and air conditioning, for a far greater proportion of the year than we spend heating the house.

 

Every time I see a new house design that has acres of glass, the thing that immediately springs to mind is the overheating risk that may pose.

 

Think I'm going to insist our PHPP/M&E consultant plugs in a climate change numbers into PHPP and models overheating on this basis, comparing options for:
- external blinds

- brine ground loop for MVHR

- active cooling (from PV) via UFH and/or MVHR.

 

I'm thinking I'll probably make sense to use 2 of the above 3, rather than rely on one, but we'll see.

 

 

[ProDave]

49 minutes ago, Ed Davies said:

 

Yes, when I looked at 21:16 BST (20:16Z that is, UTC or, if you must, GMT) weatherHQ was showing the last observation as 16:50 (whatever time zone they use, BST I'd guess).

 

When I look on checkwx it gives a much more recent observation at 19:50Z (20:50 BST so about 25 minutes ago). You don't need an API key just to look on the web, only to use the API for easy programmatic downloads:

 

https://www.checkwx.com/weather/EGPE/metar

 

BTW, adding a bit of whitespace for readability, this is the JSON you get back from the checkwx API for Inverness:

 

{   "results":1,
    "data":[{
        "wind":{"degrees":0,"speed_kts":2,"speed_mph":2,"speed_mps":1},
        "temperature":{"celsius":21,"fahrenheit":70},
        "dewpoint":{"celsius":15,"fahrenheit":59},
        "humidity":{"percent":69},
        "barometer":{"hg":29.76,"hpa":1008,"kpa":100.79,"mb":1007.92},
        "visibility":{"miles":"Greater than 6","miles_float":6.21,"meters":"10,000+","meters_float":10000},
        "elevation":{"feet":29.53,"meters":9},
        "location":{"coordinates":[-4.0475,57.5425],"type":"Point"},
        "icao":"EGPE",
        "observed":"2019-07-26T19:50:00.000Z",
        "raw_text":"EGPE 261950Z VRB02KT 9999 FEW035 21/15 Q1008",
        "station":{"name":"Inverness"},
        "clouds":[{"code":"FEW","text":"Few","base_feet_agl":3500,"base_meters_agl":1066.8}],
        "flight_category":"VFR","conditions":[]
    }]
}

 

Thanks for that link.

 

I have been using Weather HQ for years. I keep an eye on the WX at Inverness before going sailing. I like it because not only did it show current weather, but historical so you could get a good feel for what the wind had been doing and therefore likely to do.  But not much good if it is only updating once every 6 hours.

 

CheckWX.com seems to offer what I want as a replacement unless or until Weather HQ sorts itself out.

[Jeremy Harris]

8 hours ago, Dan Feist said:

 

Think I'm going to insist our PHPP/M&E consultant plugs in a climate change numbers into PHPP and models overheating on this basis, comparing options for:
- external blinds

- brine ground loop for MVHR

- active cooling (from PV) via UFH and/or MVHR.

 

I'm thinking I'll probably make sense to use 2 of the above 3, rather than rely on one, but we'll see.

 

 

 

 

A great deal depends on what you personally feel is uncomfortable. 

 

The threshold temperature for overheating in PHPP is critical, as, by default, it's set to 25°C.  We don't like the house to be warmer than about 22°C, and prefer the bedroom to be around 20°C.  If you change the overheating threshold temperature to a lower value then the number of days when there is an overheating risk increases pretty dramatically.  The same applies to SAP, as that also significantly underestimated the overheating risk for our build, and a part of that is the threshold temperature assumption that SAP uses.

[SteamyTea]

9 hours ago, Dan Feist said:

plugs in a climate change numbers

By this do you mean different scenarios, or actual climate regimes? 

The UK is a tricky place to model climate for, it depends so much on local weather, which can significantly vary over a few miles.

Edited July 27, 2019 by SteamyTea

[Ed Davies]

47 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

The UK is a tricky place to model climate for, it depends so much on local weather, which can significantly vary over a few miles.

 

Indeed. Global warming means the whole globe warming on average over the long term, not all places warming all the time. There are two areas of the world which have cooled as a result of climate change: a patch of the North Atlantic south of Greenland and bits of the southern ocean around Antarctica. Since Britain's weather and climate is so influenced by conditions in the North Atlantic it's not obvious to me that the UK will warm that much, on average.

 

Also, the actual weather we get is heavily dependent on the position of the jet stream. Arctic amplification (proportionally more warming in the polar regions than in lower latitudes) means that the contrast between low-latitude temperatures and polar regions would decrease and there are very credible theories that this results in the jet stream getting  more wobbly. I think that might mean that hot spells would be hotter but not necessarily more common; there might equally be damper and cooler summers as a result.

 

In general, I think it'd be very naive to assume that a global temperature rise of, say, 3°C would mean that Britain would have the same temperature distribution as now, just shifted right by that amount.

 

My neighbour, who's been involved in farming the same land here in NE Scotland all his life, points out that it simply wouldn't be possible now to farm in the way he first remembers in the early 1960s. Then they relied on having a week or two of dry weather in the autumn for harvesting. Now you have to pick the right days (not weeks) to do it which is only possible with the much more powerful tractors and other farm machinery they have available. In general the contrast between winter and summer has decreased significantly. I said “now it's just meh all the time”; he agreed. It's easy to be confused by “when I were a lad” type anecdotes but when they're based on somebody's recollections of decision making of some considerable economic importance to themselves perhaps they can be taken at least a little bit seriously.

[SteamyTea]

5 hours ago, Ed Davies said:

My neighbour, who's been involved in farming the same land here in NE Scotland all his life

Next time you chat to him, ask if he has decent weather and crop yield records.  Many farmers do.

Edited July 27, 2019 by SteamyTea

[Ed Davies]

22 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

Next time you chat to him, ask if he has decent weather and crop yield records.  Many farmers do.

Very unlikely, he's quite a well read chap but not terribly sophisticated for that sort of thing. His crops all go as winter feed for his livestock or sold locally for his neighbour's similar use so he won't have sales records or anything. Also he's expanded the croft he inherited from his father quite a lot so comparison year-to-year would be difficult.

[daiking]

On 26/07/2019 at 08:46, daiking said:

Has normal service resumed yet?

 

 

Rained solid for about 24hours now. The stream running along the garden is as high as it can get. Lovely summer.

[daiking]

6 hours ago, daiking said:

 

Rained solid for about 24hours now. The stream running along the garden is as high as it can get. Lovely summer.

 

Now have a flood warning ⚠️ 

 

https://tinyurl.com/y3ggwdva

Edited July 28, 2019 by daiking

[Bitpipe]

Bit late to this thread. I checked the temp probe we put in the render cavity on the south wall and it hit 38.8^oc 4pm on Thursday. 

 

Don't know what the internal was as I switched off the internal stats. This is because on Tuesday night, I left one of the sliders locked open for stack ventilation but forgot that the UFH stat was directly opposite, so as the room temp dropped below 22^oc, the UFH came on (don't bother with the timer) so I came down to a suspiciously warm floor on Weds morning. To prevent a repeat the UFH is now off at the power source until winter

 

 

 

[daiking]

Quiet this week...

[SteamyTea]

All dodging the floods.

18.25°C at 31/07/2019 14:44