Art at the Haus

For the past couple of weeks, Nerin and Frank have been hiding out in the basement on Sundays, working on their new collaborative masterpiece. A tryptich painting for the living room. It's been hanging in place between sessions to acclimate and to inspire the two artists for their next session. It's finally been completed and is now the center of a lot of conversations in the Haus. The photo above shows the painting and the artists at substantial completion.

Performance charts

Now, everyone knows that a picture says more than a thousand words- Thus we've generated three bar charts of the data published last week to illustrate how the house has been doing in it's first year.

Happy Anniversary Nob Hill Haus

On this day exactly one year ago, we moved into the Nob Hill Haus and started our long term experiment. Now, exactly one year after the big move, it is time to check whether the house has living up to the expectations in regards to the energy performance. We've been very hopeful that the Nob Hill Haus can serve as a prototype for the home of the future in terms of water, gas and power use.

Frank has been tracking our water, power and gas use and is already crunching the numbers to see how much we used/ saved over the past year. Here is the long awaited result:

Our electric meter has 837 kWh surplus energy banked and we've been generating 96kWh more than we used last week alone and with the days getting longer, the tendency is rising again. So we are net- zero on the energy side. More than all of our power has been generated by the small PV array on the rooftop!

Gas use has been 262 therms or 21.8 Therms per month. The household average (per Southern California Gas) is at 38 Therms per month. So we are 43% better than the average here.

On the water side, we used 61 HCF over one year- or 5 HCF per month on average.
Per LADWP, the daily average (as of 2008) is at 359 gal/ household & day, with the goal of lowering that by 2035 to 331 gallons/ day.

Taking our 61 HCF, multiplied by 748 (to convert HCF into gallons) and divided by 365 days gives us a daily use of just 125 gallons- about a third of the average household use in Los Angeles!

That's a big surprise to us, since we thought we'll be saving only about 50%! And the rainwater cistern is full to the rim after last week's rain.

The Nob Hill Haus has been actually performing better than we thought. The design has been working very well for the energy, gas and water use.