On Thursday, the electrician installed the "TED5000" whole house energy monitor. This consists of measurement probes in the electrical panel, transmitting units just outside the electrical panel, and a network-attached "gateway" device. The interface to the system is web-based.  (There is also a wireless display, but we have not gotten that to work yet.)

Our energy monitor has two sets of probes. One is for the whole house. The other is just for the geothermal circuit. This means that from now on, we will know exactly how much energy the geothermal system has used. Are the "cost savings" living up to expectations? We will know once we have enough data logged.

Here are two screen captures from the web interface. The first one shows 24 hours of whole-house usage (green) and geothermal usage (blue). From this graph we can see exactly when the heat pump is running. For reference, the set point was 68 degrees and the outside air temperature was about 25 degrees during the day and 10 degrees at night.

Here is another graph from the TED 5000 - measuring the energy associated with popping a bowl of popcorn.

The TED 5000 will be very useful as we calculate energy usage and evaluate the home performance.

Today we received our official certificate from the Green Built Home program!

Check out the upper right corner of the middletongreenhome.com main page, and you can see our real-time solar array generation stats!

The folks at H&H solar installed our "Fronius Interface Card Easy" on Monday, which allows real-time querying of the inverter via serial connection. We have a home computer polling the interface for its current power output every 3 seconds, and uploading this data to the website. The day's generation is then calculated from the statistics gathered.

Today we received the first full month billed from Madison Gas & Electric. So finally, we can take a step back and see if all this energy efficiency stuff is resulting in real savings.  A new page on this website has been started to track this - see Performance Numbers.

For natural gas, we're comparing the current house (hot water + cooktop) against the summer months of our former house (hot water). The results thus far are amazing -- nearly 65% less natural gas used in the new house, despite extensive use of the cooktop. It looks like the measures we took to reduce the energy needed for hot water are definitely paying off.

I am in the process of analyzing the electric bill in more detail, and in the near future we hope to install a monitor just for the geothermal heat pump. At this point I don't have enough data to compare electrical usage to any benchmarks.

Return to the Middleton Green Home main page.

As part of our landscaping, we have added a 1500 gallon collection basin for rain water that runs off the roof. Approximately 1.5 inches of rainfall will fill this basin. A pump will then make the water available for lawn and plant irrigation.  (The pump will be installed next spring.)

The retention basin is outlined and excavated.

Instead of a tank, "AquaBlox" modules and a plastic liner are buried in the ground. This modular system is assembled on-site.

A total of 48 "AquaBlox" are buried.

Once this was completed, this entire setup was covered with gravel and then buried under the sod that was eventually installed.  We will provide more information about this system on the Water Conservation page.