Cold Temperatures Before Central Heating

[MortarThePoint]

How are others coping on site with the cold temperatures? I thought I would share what I'm doing, which could probably be a fair bit better.

 

We don't yet have central heating in the build. I've set up a cheap "Diesel Heater" from  eBay that I'm using Kerosene in. There aren't many of the "All In One 5kW" type left on eBay like the one we have:

 

Last night was properly cold, below -7C in Cambridge which is below most year's minimum (bottom third 1995-2021). We recorded -6.8C in the garage (no doors) and the kerosene heater upstairs in the house stopped at around 3am unfortunately (-6C in garage), so the temperature dropped there more quickly. We're putting about 2.3kW of heat in (heater set to 3Hz to make 5L last ~24 hours) from the Kerosene heater plus the log burner downstairs, but that stopped at around 10:30pm.

 

I'm surprised the log burner can't raise the temperature downstairs more than ~7.5C but there are quite a number of drafts / weak points downstairs (e.g. Polythene over a 2.2m x 2.1m door opening which has some gaps).

I'm quite pleased that we can keep the temperature in the house above 8C upstairs (bar it stopping) and above 5C downstairs in such an extreme outside temperature. I was hoping for 10C or above, but these are extreme temperatures (for here). Only upstairs is MF framed and plasterboarded so far. So far the loft only has 1 layer of 100mm / 150mm Loft Roll (44) with some areas not yet done. The walls have been blown with their cavity insulation (beads). All windows are in but not all doors.

 

I have a dehumidifier running to take some of the water away that the heater will be producing.

 

Garage:

Upstairs:

Downstairs:

 

Cambridge Weather Station minimum temperatures calculated in Excel:

 

 

ThermoPro TP357 Bluetooth Hygrometer Mini Room Thermometer:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B093PT1NL1/

[Conor]

Does the therompro store the data in the unit and you just need to be connected to download? I had something similar from meross but the unit doesn't have any internal storage, so if it loses connection with the hub, it's useless. The the battery lasted less than a year and it's an £5 replacement. I see this uses a single AAA.

 

[MortarThePoint]

3 minutes ago, Conor said:

Does the therompro store the data in the unit and you just need to be connected to download? I had something similar from meross but the unit doesn't have any internal storage, so if it loses connection with the hub, it's useless. The the battery lasted less than a year and it's an £5 replacement. I see this uses a single AAA.

 

Yes, internal storage. It's good. I've a load of Xioami Mijia as well but this has three pluses over those:

 - data logging

 - unencrypted BLE beacons making it easy to make your own data aggregator - Cheap AAA batteries

 

I haven't seen a teardown so don't know the sensor they've used but their claimed accuracy is good.

 

Not so cheap though at £11.50 if you get a pair