Pissin about with solar panels and saving the planet ideas

It improves your immediate cashflow at the expense of your capital due to smaller electric bills, but of course that relies on having a decent sized installation that is going to make a difference to the size of your bill.

My electric bill is bigger than my bill in the UK, I pay about £1000 a year for electric in the Phils partly because they never pay me any attention when I try to explain how to use power sensibly but also partly due to the direction the house faces and the overall construction which leads to a very hot living room which they make hotter by running 4 fans all day, fine mesh like a mosquito net on the windows and leaving them open all day would make a huge difference.

The other thing about solar is that it should also improve one's energy security, if I were to do this in the Phils I would add a storage system, just guessing but a 3K or 4K array would probably be enough to reliably meet the needs of continuous refrigeration and air conditioning and have enough left over to pump and evenings worth of power into some battery storage.

The thing is that power is sufficiently expensive in the Phils to potentially justify this kind of investment although I am unlikely to ever do this myself.

We have a vent above the kitchen area which is at one end of the huge living room its about 50cm x 50cm it should allow hot air to rise but at night there is no inlet lower down for cooler air to be drawn in.

At least during the day the door to the terrace is usually open, which acts as the main vent, we only use aircon in the bedroom but they always turn it up to maximum which means that it never shuts off, they don't understand that the coolness is due to the length of time the compressor motor is running, a compressor always cools the by same amount so after they get to a setting of 2 (out of 10) it's already as cold as it will get and turning it up just keeps the compressor running longer and using much more electric.

I think I will replace it with a 500W unit next time the room is small and does not need a 1kw aircon, at least 2300 of the bill each month is aircon, really stupid. Another 1500 a month probably goes on the four electric fans and the fact that the living room/ kitchen is so hot means that the fridge is running flat out all the time too and of course adding to the heat pressure in the room, at least the lighting is all low wattage LED.

Since she left again the bill has come down to 5415, that's this month, and hopefully that should drop to about 4500 or less next month as Nanay is better at managing it, but the kids are as bad as their mother when it comes to the aircon.

You are right the general house design over there is not right for that environment.

The bedroom is 7 to 8 sqm max with a tapered roof so the volume of air is quite low, the problem is that the kids run it flat out and it is the compressor in these small units that is eating the power so because it almost never switches back to just running on the fan, it's effectively using 900 to 1000 watts continuously for 8 hours a day 31 days a month that's 200 to 250 units a month which is half of their entire bill, a 500 watt unit would cut that in half and would be better geared for the size of room.

They used 483 units last month at a cost of 5412 peso last time the aircon broke their bills were 2700 ish.

That extractor looks like a good idea but the vent we have vents to a covered area that one you show the WT-600 is a wind or turbine ventilator and probably would not turn using convection alone where our vent is.

When we lived in the Condo we had the benefit of being twenty floors up and you could get a good draft going through the flat just by opening the bedroom door onto the terrace, but she would always close it to stop insects getting in (closing it never ever stopped the insects ).

With the door closed the whole condo could actually be kept cool enough by a 1HP aircon on the bedroom window and the bills were a lot smaller back then.

When I retire I don't know if I will keep renting the current place or move, the kids will be getting older so it would only be Janna's school I would have to worry about, so any solutions in the meantime will be cheap and cheerful, however if I had a property in the kid's names I would definitely look at solar for power and at venting solutions like these for cooling.

That's what I would like for where we are just now, we have loads of windows that could be screened, the problem is she locks them all at night at exactly the point in time when she needs the ventilation, we have the usual window bars so she's not making the place any more secure by closing them.

The thing is I can't see how that would be any more efficient than a plain vent with natural convection, if there is no wind then some of the energy in the rising air has to be converted to motion in order to spin the turbine, the motion of the turbine as it is due to that same convection cannot improve the convection as well otherwise you would have a perpetual motion machine with energy coming from nowhere.

I can see that they could encourage airflow and that a light breeze could be a big help in encouraging that flow but honestly I think the rotation has to be driven by the pressure difference inside the building compared to the outside when there is no wind on the outside.

If I had a ridge roof in a Philippine climate I think I would definitely install something like that it is a good idea.

21 percent of Europe's gas comes from Norway, 44% of UK gas in home based production, 9% is LNG in ships.

https://www.britishgas.co.uk/the-so...gys-grand-journey/where-does-uk-gas-come-from

Of the 47% that we import via Europe (2017 figures) a substantial part of that will be from Norway's production, Centrica did a six year deal in 2015 with Gazprom so we have increased our dependence on Russia but Reuters calculates that it will represent 9% of total UK consumption over the 6 year deal.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-centrica-gas-deals-idUKKBN0NY1FH20150513