Bat House Project

[reality_boy]

I have been looking into various ideas on how to control temperatures in the house. Here are some potential ideas to explore

- Print a shade on the outside that keeps direct sunlight off the walls of the house. Ideally the overhang would be designed to reduce shade in the winter months to help heat the house.
- Build an outer chamber with a solar chimney built into it. The idea is to use convection from solar energy to cool the air around the house.
- Build in an attic with a plug of foam insulation.
- Experiment with aluminum foil as a radiant barrier. It is suppose to act as a one way heat valve to reduce the temperatures in the house during the day, without adding thermal mass for night. This may help in some humid and hot climates where heat builds up excessively.
- Experiment with exterior color, white for cooling, black for heat and to produce a solar chimney effect.

[reality_boy]

My thermisters came in, I picked up 8 thermisters with 3 meter cables that are housed in metal pipes and epoxied into place. That should be safe enough to leave in the house even with bats (if I ever get so lucky to have bats). The up side is these are dirt cheap, it cost $9 for 8. The down side is you need a MUX or a device that can log analog voltages from 8 or more inputs, and they are uncalibrated so I have to go through that step.



I'm still waiting on my i2c temperature probes. I went ahead and picked up 8 of those as well, at around $30. The nice thing there is they can share a single wire for the data bus, and are easily to gaing together. They are also calibrated and have there own 12 bit A/D converter built in. The down side is the cost and the slightly larger size. Also they are exposed, so I would need to print a housing if I was to leave them permanently in the house. For now they are good enough.

I also picked up several light sensors to see if I could work out the thermal load on the house. My light sensor from above is not good for much more than a binary on/off value indicating the sun is up.