"Yes-house (jahus) or no house"

Are you living in a "no-house" (poor isolation and old windows) and are wondering how to bring your house from where it is today - to a "JAHUS" standard? We have spent a lot of time and discussed with many vendors before we ended up with our jahus design. I hope that my previous blog-posts have been helpful, and that in the next few days - I can share with you the actual results of this project (and some more details on cost versus benefits).

Key take-aways can of course be that projects hardly ever finish on time, or that ventilation requires more space than you had expected - but I do hope you will see that it is worth it and start planning for a jahus project as well.

Progress:
One heatpump specialist actually showed up today and now the outdoor part of the heatpump is connected to the rest of the system - including the special heat pump refrigerant that flows between the outdoor- and the indoor part of the heatpump.










The electrician, however, did not show up - so the ventilation system and heat pump can not be switched on yet. He has promised to show up tomorrow, so maybe - if the ventilation team also shows up (they are not here today), then we can start the whole system?

If you live in California or Spain you are probably more concerned about the effects during the summer - and theoretically you should do more or less the same things that we have described in our JAHUS projects:

1. Isolate: to keep the heat out during the summer months, but also to keep the cold out during a few winter months. I once stayed in a draughty appartment in Spain (Costa del Sol) over Christmas and it was the coldest Christmas I can remember. There is a lot to gain from isolation in these parts of the world too - winter and summer.


2. Ventilate: to get the appropriate level of fresh air supplied to all rooms. In the summer the energy exchanger makes sure the cool "used air" cools down the fresh outdoor air before this "used air" is sent out of the building (now almost the same as the outside temperature)


3. A/C (heatpump): cools down the air coming out of the energy-exchanger an extra 5C (to comfort temperature at 22C). The ventilation system mentioned above is responsible for the distribution of this "ready for use" air to all the rooms in the house.

The pictures below show:

• the indoor part of the heatpump: and in the lower right part of the picture you see a small piece of the unfinished piping that eventually will take the condensate away from the heatpump (when cooling air in the summer months)
• the piping inside the heatpump: including the new piping with the gray sound trap surrounding the piping on the left hand side of the picture.

Event 1:
There is also a heated discussion in Norway about the need for more power cables between Norway and the continent.

The opponents say that:

• the price of electricity will increase: the utility companies will make huge profits and the average consumer will be paying the price
• loss of jobs: industries who survive because of low energy prices will not be competitive with energy prices that are in synch with the rest of Europe

Proponents say:

• Global: Europe needs the buffer that norwegian hydropower represents. When windmills produce more power than the grid takes out, Norway can use this excess power to pump water up to the mountain dams (storing the excess energy). When the windmills stop because there is no wind, the grid can buy back hydroelectric power from Norway (produced by releasing some of the water from the dams (through the turbines in the powerstations below).
• Businesses: To deliver electricity to the industry at prices well below marketprice is subsidies - and most people agree that this protectionism is a bad thing. If the can't make a profit with the marketprice on power then they must be closed down (or be given a grace period to change their processes).
• Consumers: to deliver cheaper than marketprice electricity to consumers delays the already overdue process of improving the isolation of houses and the deployment of other energy-saving tasks such as heatpumps and smart ventilation systems.

On a smaller scale there is also issues regarding the availability of a powergrid that offshore windmills can use to send their "product" to the consumers. Today there are many offshore windmills in the UK which are not connected to a grid and therefore are not being used...

Who should pay for these infrastructure projects?

• sending or receiving countries ?
• the power companies who have the most to gain if the market expands and they get a higher price for their product (both internationally and locally).
• the users (extra infrastructure fee)?

When do we need these new cables? Yesterday!

It's not like we don't have internationally connected powergrids today, but the capacity is way too low. Two very real examples are from the news this fall: first we had a weekend with quite a lot of wind in Denmark and they reported that the windmills had to be decoupled because the grid could not take all the energy produced (and there is no way to store unused energy in the powergrid). A week later there was reports of dams (owned by BKK) on the west cost of Norway where they deliberately let water pass outside the turbines because the dams were too full and there were nowhere to send the excess power.

My comments:

The high mountains and ability to build dams and create hydroelectric power is a gift from nature to Norway - and we have an obligation to share this with the other "less fortunate" countries. Similarly - it makes more sense to build solar powerplants closer to the equator. The only low-carbon alternative to this symbiosis between dams in Norway and windmills in Denmark and UK - is the roll out of more nuclear powerplants and I don't think the opponents want that....

Summary: Pull more powercables between Norway and continental Europe - now.

Event 2:

California regulators on Wednesday passed new regulations to ban power-hungry flat screen televisions from store shelves.

Why propose energy efficiency standards for televisions now?
In California, televisions (along with DVRs, DVD players, and cable boxes) now consume 10 percent of a home's electricity. Increasing sales of flat screen televisions, larger screen sizes, the growing number of TVs per household, and increased daily use of televisions all contribute to greater electricity consumption.

http://www.energy.ca.gov/appliances/tv_faqs.html

My comments:

One could argue that the energy/electricity used in a TV does not just disappear, it is transformed to heat. In the winter, this heat is required to keep the houses warm (for example here in Norway). The heat generated by the TV therefore replaces heat that would otherwise be produced by a heatpump or wall-mounted panel heaters with thermostats. (Keep in mind that 1KWh used in a heatpump generates 3 times as much heat as 1 KWh used in a TV).

In the summer months, however, heat generated by our electrical appliances and lights mean double trouble - they use electricity to work and we need electricity to "fight the heat" (for those homes and businesses which use airconditioning units to keep cool).

Summarized: more energyefficient TVs will have a positive affect too ("many small streams make a big river").