Here comes the cold.

I've created a new label for blogs, I've been struggling to come up with topics to write about and I think the last couple of posts haven't really been about anything, they've just kind of been me rambling on about whatever pops into my head. So tonight I've created the ramblings label. When I use this label, it will be because the post is a bit of a bitsa, a little bit of this and little bit of that.
The Canberra tradition is that you don't turn the heater on until ANZAC day. Getting up early for the dawn service is the excuse for turning it up and then it can stay on until sometime in early Spring. The last few years we've never made it to ANZAC day as it has been really quite cold, but maybe just the old house was colder than it should have been.
Last night is the first night that we actually needed to turn the heater on, I think we may have on it a couple of times before but that was mainly because of the timers that I set up shortly after we moved in. I tried to set things up the same as they were in the old house and I think it just goes to show that newer houses that are built and insulated properly, don't need as much heating or cooling. The heater was turning on at 3pm to heat the house before my wife and kids got home for the day but we've been turning off the heater when we got home as it was too warm in the house.

The new heater also has an economy setting where it changes the temperature setting back to a certain temperature after a period of time. This means that no matter what my wife sets the temperature to, after one hour it will revert to the setting that I have put in the economy menu. As the house is so well insulated and the heater recirculates the air in the house, this should mean that once the desired temperature has been reached, the heater will shut off and just the fan will recirculate the hot air until it gets cold enough that my wife gets up and changes the temperature on the controller again or the economy temperature is reached.
There is a similar setting for when the aircon is running in Summer and it will be interesting to see if the house stays cold or if the westerly facing rooms really do heat the house up a lot. If I can finally pull my finger out and arrange for the solar panels to be installed, I can set the aircon to run for an hour or two each day before everyone gets home to really try and drive the temperature down whilst the sun is shining on the solar panels. I guess I may be able to heat the house during the day in winter when we have a nice clear day and the panels are making decent power. That is a nice thing about the Canberra winter, once the fog clears, it's usually clear and sunny even if it is freezing cold.

Bomber
I'm a rambling man