The DIY Energy Efficient Home Project Magazine By EcoMaster

Improved Air
Circulation
I’m standing at the east end of the home. One of the things
that we did was to improve the cross-flow ventilation of the
home. There use to be a regular awning window here, which
are really poor for ventilation purposes. We took out the
whole awning window unit and replaced it with this doubleglazed
door. On those few really scorching hot summer days,
in the evening, we can open this door and get a rush of air
straight through the home. This resets the home at a lower
temperature for the next day and we have a more pleasant
evening. As you can see, it’s got a blind tilt and very easy
to operate. You can also pull up the blind with this other
control. It’s been a really great thing.
Draught Proofed
Cavity Sliding Door
So the next thing that we did is we got an electric towel rail.
We figured, “Well, we’ve got damp towels all day long. That’s
not really good, so let’s get an electric towel rail and have nice
warm and dry towels.” It is connected to a timer, so it comes
on in the morning and dries the towels, and a little bit at night.
Again, it helped a little bit, and we did have nice, toasty, warm
towels, which is great but still not really fantastic. We did install
the Solaventi, which did help a lot. And finally, the thing that
really made a really big difference is that we fitted on top of our
shower our own version of Showerdome. I’m a big fan of the
Showerdome product, and I would have bought the real McCoy if
our shower had been a standard size, but it’s not.
So what we’ve done is made our own effective shower dome,
making the shower a booth rather than just an enclosure.
Having done that, there actually is almost never a reason to run
the exhaust fan, because all the steam from the shower actually
condenses on the glass in the shower, and none of it comes in
the room at all. Our shower’s big enough, that you can towel dry
in there in a nice, warm space rather than out here, so it actually
has worked fantastically well. After showering, we leave the
shower door open, and the Solarventi actually just dries
out the shower during the day, so makes everything dry.
And there certainly is no tendency towards any mould
issue here at all anymore.
See our Product Feature Section for Draft
Stoppas
https://ecomasterstore.com.au/products/
draughtproofing-exhaust-fans-draftstoppa
As is usually the case with master bedrooms, there’s often a walkin
robe. In this case, we’ve got a cavity sliding door that slides into
an external wall, so almost always causes a draught issue. In this
case, we fitted the Draught Dodgers for Cavity Sliding Door, so that
we can shut the door and have it draught-proofed on this side.
Zoning
See our Product Feature Section for
Draught Dodgers - Cavity Sliding Door Kit
ENSUITE / BATHROOM
Introduction
There is a longish story of evolution in here. There’s a little bit
of an echo in here because there is no external opening to this
room. You can see behind me that we can see straight out the
back, but that’s because there’s a glass wall on the other side of
the shower enclosure. So it looks very nice, but the problem was
that it was always damp in here. We’ve progressed over time,
and done various things to try and address that dampness, and
there was also the tendency towards mould on the ceiling.
The original fan was choked with dust and it wasn’t really
a great fan, so we replaced it. But replacing it didn’t really
make a lot of difference.
As we used to accidentally leave the fan on for a long
time, we put a pneumatic push button on the fan. We
would push the button and it would run the fan just for a
number of minutes rather than all day long. That kind of
helped a little bit - but not very much really.
See our Product Feature Section for RP2A,
Draft Stoppa
internal_door
https://ecomasterstore.com.au/products/
draughtproofing-exhaust-fans-draftstoppa
https://ecomasterstore.com.au/products/door-draughtproofing-draught-dodgers-cavity-sliding-doors-set
https://ecomasterstore.com.au/products/doordraught-proofing-rp2a-19mm-door-brush-seal_
https://ecomasterstore.com.au/collections/perimeter-
seals/products/door-draught-proofing-emv-one-door-
set-effective-low-cost-door-perimeter-seal
When we heat our home, it’s a good idea, not to heat areas
that you don’t really need to heat. And for us, it’s the wet
areas. It’s the laundry, toilet and bathrooms.
We treat the doors (as in draught-proof them) and keep them
closed. Now here’s an interesting thing - if you’ve got little
kids, it’s pretty hard to keep them closed!. But we don’t have
little kids. So this door has been treated with an experimental
perimeter seal and just a regular brush on the bottom.
So when we close it, it’s pretty well draught proofed. We can
leave the window open if we wish to ventilate the bathroom.
It’s not going to affect the rest of the home. Another thing
that’s in this bathroom, is that we’ve treated the exhaust fan
with a draught stopper, and we’ll have a look at that when we
get in the roof.
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