Installed a rangehood in the kitchen

I installed a rangehood extractor fan over the oven/electric elements on Sunday. This should reduce the amount of condensation in the main living area. I bought a second hand Robinhood Grange II for $60. After reading the website I noticed that this model is one of their noisiest, 65 db - doh!

So I took some spare sound dampening foam and cloth that I used to have in my web server closet and glued that inside the unit. Which seems to have helped "a bit". (Shame I didn't have a db meter.)

We cooked salmon on Monday night and that didn't stink the house out too much.

The only other downside is the unit has two 40 Watt lamps in it. I'll see if I can get lower powered replacements - it seems like a good situation for white LED's maybe.

LED spotlights

I'm testing an LED spotlight from EcoInnovation It comes in the form of a standard screw-in spotlight and contains over 100 LED's. It draws 8 Watts and produces roughly the same light output as a standard 100 Watt spotlight.

It cost NZ$118 - which aint cheap, but LED lights are supposed to last up to 8 times longer (we'll see). The light is at the blue end of the "white" spectrum.

I'm happy enough with it to replace the rest of my spotlights.

Cheap double glazing options: one month later

I've been trying three different double glazing options now for about a month. And we're now finally starting to get some cold weather (although we haven't had a lot of rain all year).

The "real" double glazed unit is working fine. On a very cold morning the is sometimes a bit of condensation on the room face of the window (the side you can touch when inside the room). I'm waiting for a nasty southernly with driving rain to see how well the way I've fitted it works, but from a insulation perspective it seems to work fine. The double glazed unit, from Ultra Glass cost $110 for a single 512mmx1250mm window.

The cheap acetate (plastic) extra layer seems to work just as well. But cost about $5. I've read that they last 1-2 years. Not sure what happens to them after that time. On a very cold morning there is sometimes a little condensation on the room face of the window (in side you can touch when inside the room). One of the sash windows also has condensation in betweeen the glass and acetate so I'm assuming there is a gap in the putty holding the glass in the frame. I plan to renovate this window and replace this glass with laminated glass sometime - I won't doubel glaze it because it's on the (sunny) north side and a double glazed sash window would be heavy and cumbersome. The plastic film is available from Community Energy Action in Christchurch and here's some other comments about it.

The bubble wrap works OK - it does gather some condensation on very cold mornings. Given that the price is not much better than the acetate option, and the look is not appreciated by some observers... I will favour the first two options.

First "real" double glazed window

Installed a double glazed unit into one of the lounge south windows today.

It's a 4mm, 4mm glazed unit with 16mm spacer, built by UltraGlass for $110 (512mmx1250mm in size).

• I removed the existing window frame
• removed the three panes and two muntins
• routed the inside space to allow the much thicker double glazed unit (24mm) to fit
• painted window frame
• used wood beading to fit window in place
• reattached window.

This window is one of three. The second window has acetate on it and the third is unchanged. In the mornings there is condensation on the standard window and none no either of the other two.

Cheap double glazing

I've started experimenting with double glazing. I've chosen three options:

• bubble wrap
• acetate (plastic stuck on the window frame with doubel sided tape)
• retro fitting double glazing units
  

I'll report more as results come in.

Finished insulating walls

Yep - it's all done. (Except for under 3 windows.) Read the full details on the cheap wall insulation project.

New web server installed, but adds 2 kWh per day!

Just upgraded the machine that runs my home web server to a second hand Compaq Proliant 460 with dual RAID array drives. But it's noisy as hell and a real power hog. The old machine was a no-name P3 box that used less than a third of that.

Looks like it may suck up as much power as I save on the solar water heater!

Doh! This is a classic problem that has been warned about concerning energy efficiency - people tend to use up any savings they make "to improve their lifestyle". I'm just as guilty.