Let there be light …

Posted by in Miscellaneous

Today marks a MAJOR milestone in the new house my parents have been building and which my Dad and I have been doing all the electrical work on

Today the house was inspected, passed and finally connected to the grid by the States Electrical Inspector … YAY !!

This follows a year of work involving planning, wiring, drilling .. you name it. A year in which we’ve layed over 4 miles of cable including : Cat V: video surveillance cable; satelite cable; and of course miles of multi-core cabling.

There were only a few glitches but the place is now lit up like a Christmas tree, the PV’s are connected and the ground source heat pump is humming away and has heated up a tank full of water to 53C in only a few hours !!! … that’s water heated only from the underground pipes and passed through the heat exchanger … WOWSERS ! [check out the what & how here and below]

Lounge

Lounge

Kitchen

Kitchen

Master Bathroom

The result is a state of the art , super-green , techno-stupendous house. My Dad has incorporated every innovation possible. It’s a Geek’s dream-house …

  • A Ground source heat pumpGround source heat pumps use solar energy naturally stored in soil, bedrock and groundwater as a heat source. They do require electricity to operate, but efficiently produce up to five times as much heat energy for every unit of electricity they use. [check out this article I wrote on them here]
  • Solar Panels (Photo Voltaic cells) capable of generating 3KW of energy [check out my article here ]
  • Heat Recovery Ventilation System – a system whereby hot air can be redistributed from one room to another.
  • LED lighting eveywhere … 5W LED lights generating the equivalent of 50W light from traditional bulbs
  • Underfloor heating driven by the ground source heat pump.
  • Underground storage tanks that collect rain water off of the roof for use in flushing the toilets and watering the garden.

Everything is run from a central control room … VERY Star Trek! 😀

The control room systems have blue tooth connectivity … so maybe I can write some code to …

Control Room - Ground source heat pump & heat exchanger

Control Room - "Jules Verne like" pipe system

Control Room - Heat pump & exchanger control panel

Control Room - Water temperature readout from ground source alone !!

If you want to bore yourself with hundreds of photos of the whole project check out this gallery…