The arrival of the light

11 Oct 2011
I don't suppose anybody looks forward to getting up in the dark - a sure sign of  the beginning of winter. For me it comes at the end of summer,  in my favourite month: September. It's part of what I can only describe as a joyful melancholy which comes with the gradual slowing down of the natural year. It goes with clear, warm still days when leaves slowly spiral down and the over-abundant growth of the summer is cut back to reveal the plain brown earth. In the arable areas the big artificial looking fields of uniform cereals with their tractor-wheel tramlines give way to something much more natural - stubble, a friendly environment for the birds and animals.

Getting up in the dark in a nearly carbon-neutral home has its own interest too. Many of the lights take a while to reach full power; when they do it is with a warm, gentle light. I found this a bit irritating at first but now I look forward to the slow arrival of the light. Would we love the dawn as much if it happened suddenly?

Since this house is a recreation of an old rural house of mixed origin, we decided not to go for the full "passivhaus" concept of zero energy input, but a typically British compromise where we have chinmeys and fires. This decision is also re-inforced by my conviction that the hearth is something we humans have evolved to cherish. Why else would we have imitation hearths in houses with no chimneys: fireplaces with imitation flames and no heat? Radiant heat and fireplaces make us feel good. So we have a Stanley Donard solid fuel cooker. This is cleverly designed to be easy to light and to burn wood. We also have a large solar water heater and a calor gas boiler as back up. All three feed into a big heat store tank in a shed outside. (Need I add that both are well insulated?) The heat from the tank is drawn off at different levels for underfloor heating,  towel rails, upstairs radiators and domestic hot water.

Since the boiler only operates if the water at the top of the tank is between 45 and 52 degrees, most of our hot water in the summer comes from the solar and in the winter from the Stanley, and Stan takes some looking after. He is like a much loved but demanding teenager - temperamental and fussy and often hungry at the wrong time.

I always have an awareness of the temperature of the hot water. If we've had a cold night then the room thermostats for the underfloor heating will start "calling" (for heat) and warm water will flow through the pipes, bringing down the tank temperature. Then I need to light the cooker.

Sometimes it feels like a nuisance, but usually I welcome this link with the past. Lighting fires was for centuries one of the main jobs for the early riser. In the wealthier households it would have been the servants, but even in my own past I can remember my father rattling around with a coke-burning rayburn. Until recently most of the heat generated by domestic ranges was wasted. Now I know that only the small part which emerges at the top of the chimney is wasted; the rest is stored in the tank or heats the air in the house. Even this heat is stored in the walls. Our walls have an inner layer of blocks which are sealed off from the outside air by 100mm of insulation, a 50mm cavity and a second, outer layer of blocks. It's called "thermal mass" an has the effect of smoothing out temperature differences in the whole house.