Hindsight (and other improvements)

As we were driving off on our roadtrip to France there was a flurry of activity in our small hamlet.  One of our neighbors sent a security video to a local WhatsApp group from the previous night showing a man with a knife in his hand moving furtively up the long stairway to their back door.

Soon there were reports from around 5 homes in a small radius, that they had been robbed.

The intruder didn't get into the home that had caught him on video, but elsewhere people reported having had their rooms rifled through and money and jewelry stolen during the night.

When we originally moved into our home Anne had mused about why all the fences and gates were so high.   I told her that it was probably a privacy thing more than a security thing and we had asked and were told that although "gypsies" sometimes stole things like solar panels, in the past decade or two there had been no incidents in our town.  Gypsies (or the Romani) are a minority that have been persecuted in Europe and are often blamed as being indigent and criminal.  More recently (in 2010) laws have been enacted in Portugal to make it illegal to discriminate against them but they are still fairly widely described as a groups of people whose lifestyle promotes crime and delinquency.  

So not long after we arrived in Portugal, for good measure, I bought two wireless cameras and mounted one in the front and one in the back of the house as a deterrent to potential intruders.

Front view security camera image

While we were on our road-trip a neighbor visited the house regularly to water some of the plants but with the news that someone had broken into local homes, I kept an occasional eye on the video feeds from the cameras.  We didn't think much more about the incidents until a week or so after we came back from our trip.

I usually wake up before Anne in the mornings.  I go downstairs, open up the doors, make coffee and sit on the front porch or in the sitting room to read the news.  It is a quiet, peaceful way to start the day.

On this day I noticed that Anne's knitting bag had been emptied on the sofa where she usually sits.  It was unusual but I thought that maybe she had been looking for something in there before bed and had left it to  be repacked  in the morning.

When she came down she asked me why the hell I had thrown all her wool on the sofa!

It suddenly dawned on us that someone had been in our house the previous night.

The realization didn't trigger immediate panic but our sense of disquiet strengthened as the day progressed.

We called the GNR (Portuguese police) and two young cops came over and let us know that everything we had done relative to these intruders was wrong.  We felt a little offended but they explained that since we had touched some part of the windows or doors that they had gained access with, this meant that they wouldn't take any  fingerprints.  I read about this after they left and there are examples of criminal trial lawyers getting cases dismissed because of chain of evidence problems if the homeowner had touched the door or window that had been used to gain entry.

Yes, it also doesn't make a lot of sense to me since the owner's fingerprints will always be all over their property and the odd fingerprint would be the intruder, but there wasn't anything we could do. 

The intruder(s) had used a screwdriver or chisel to wedge in and force the suddenly fragile looking door lock on our sliding door.  I had also touched the door of the car that they had gained access into, but we hadn't locked the car which apparently also made it impossible for the police to follow up on the crime.  An unlocked car even if in our yard with a locked gate would not help our case.

The most alarming thing was that they had been in our study/music room while we were asleep.   

The study has a short wall separating it from our bedroom with no doors and there were some things that had been knocked off the shelf above my new guitar and left on the ground.  A couple of boxes from the shelf had been unpacked and repacked as they went through our stuff looking for valuables.

New guitar in our study/music room

We lost around €30 in loose change from the center console of the car and on a shelf in the house where we keep loose coins.  No expensive gear (camera, laptops, phones, musical equipment) was taken.  But we had this mental image of that guy from our neighbor's security footage with a knife in his hand standing just a few feet from our sleeping forms.

The camera at the back of the house had been installed low enough for someone to reach up and take it, which they had done.  In hindsight we could have done this a little better.  Of course if someone grabs a camera before it has uploaded its images and takes it out of wi-fi range there will be no footage to examine.

Afterward  we wondered if, when the objects dropped from the shelves it had maybe woken me.  Perhaps, not realizing why I had woken, I had taken a quick trip to the bathroom and back to the bed while they were still in the study?  We thought that this might be the reason that they left without repacking the wool in the bag at the sofa.  All of the other boxes and Anne's handbag had been searched carefully and then vaguely repacked.

Not long after this there were a few other robberies in the area and about a month or two later there were news stories about three separate arrests that had happened in our area.  I don't think they were all Romani either.

Of course this has resulted in some extra thinking about how to secure things better for the future.  We have metal storm shutters that we had never closed and it turns out that storms are just one of their functions.  They really do secure the windows and sliding doors.  People also use them to keep the sun out of the south facing side of their houses and so we have changed our nighttime ritual to include locking the shutters downstairs.  A number of homes in Portugal have electric or manual metal blinds that roll down to block the sun and secure the windows and doors but those would be expensive to install even though they make for a less irritating evening routine.

I also bought a few motion and vibration sensors to put on the downstairs windows with built in alarms so that we and any intruder will get a loud alarm if the window or door are bumped or opened.

I also replaced the original cameras with two that are mounted out of reach and that write their captured video to a hub in the house rather than first on an SD card and then in the cloud.

It has been a couple of months now and we are still a little jumpy about our security but I think we have enough in place to seriously discourage another intrusion. 

* * * * * *

Over the next couple of months of the summer we started to implement a plan to improve the heating system.

Kitchen wood stove

I had gone to great lengths to document and understand the interaction between the vacuum tube solar water heating system in the back and the wood stove in the kitchen that supplemented the solar heat during the winter.

This past winter we had struggled more than a bit with smoke in the house and Anne's asthma.  We had had a chimney sweep clean both the kitchen wood stove and the small one in the sitting room.  I had also replaced the seals at the top of the kitchen stove but every time I lit the stove it let smoke out until it was pretty hot and there was a good draw from the chimney.  I had to resort to warming the chimney with a hair dryer to mitigate the smoke when the fire had to be started from scratch.

Anne said emphatically that she couldn't have another winter without clean air in the house so we had a local contractor who had rebuilt our gate come with his crew to remove the stove.  It was heavy but luckily the previous owner had mounted it on a wheeled base and they ended up wheeling it out onto the porch and into the back of their van.  I had tried to sell it in Facebook marketplace but we settled for getting a discount on the construction work and our contractor now has the stove to sell to someone over time.

As they were removing the chimney, one of the contractors showed me the elbow joint that went through the wall to the outside chimney pipe.  It was built with a 90º angle and had become completely packed with creosote.   It explained all the smoke and also made us wonder how the chimney sweep had missed this detail and how, in hindsight I hadn't thought to check that too.  

We had already decided that the wood burning kitchen stove was not really optimal so this discovery didn't prompt us to change our mind about removing the stove.  We used 6 tonnes (3 cords) of wood last winter at €160 per tonne and we believe that an efficient electric stove will cost less to run and be much cleaner burning than wood.

The next step after getting the stove was to improve the water heating and find a replacement heat source for the hot water tank during the winter.

I came across a Solar installation/maintenance company that was willing to take a look at our engine room and the complicated pumps that we have.  We decided on an approach that has turned out to be pretty good.

The first thing was the 2000l (530 gallons)  tank for water that we had.  The vacuum solar tubes were not really keeping it hot enough in the spring and autumn or when we had more than just the two of us using the hot water.  We had used the kitchen wood stove a few times in late May and early June to get the water heat up for us and visitors.

2000l (530 gallon) tank with insulation sleeve

I took the side off the "engine room" to give the installation team room to maneuver and they disconnected the tank and dropped it with the intention of cutting it up and removing it after their installation.

2000l tank ready to be taken away

I bought an 800l (210 gallon) water tank with coils inside it for the underfloor heating, the vacuum solar heat and our domestic hot water.  We also ordered a heat pump to heat the tank.

Before we did the installation of the 800l tank the graph of the heating process shows the daytime solar heat not really recovering the heat needed to keep the 2000l tank above 45ºC (113F).

The yellow in the top graph is solar heating and the red is the tank temperature

 

 

Note that the green/yellow graph below shows the daytime temperature variation in the shade - 25ºC (77F) at night and 35ºC (95F) at noon.  This was August.

After the 800l tank was installed the solar heating was making a more pronounced effect on the tank water temperature.

Tank temperature response to the solar heat is more immediate than before

The heat-pump has a controller that is set to only activate if the outside temperature goes below 25ºC and will heat the water in the tank to 50ºC (122F) in Spring and Autumn and 55ºC (130F) in the winter (Jan/Feb) when the underfloor heating is on.

The underfloor water pump is also programmed to go on if the outside temperature falls below 15ºC (59F) but I expect I'll be tweaking that as we figure out the optimal start and end to the underfloor heat demand.

The cost of all of these changes was fairly high but we expect it will pay for itself over time.  

Brochure illustration

The installation technician also pointed out something about legionella that had not occurred to me when I wrote about it before.

These modern tanks, intended for use with water heating systems like solar panels or wood stoves, have a large body of heated water in them, but the water that actually circulates through to the solar tubes, underfloor and to the domestic hot water is all in a closed system of pipes that loop through the main enclosure.  The loop for hot water for showers etc comes in at the bottom directly from the town water supply and loops through the heated water and comes out hot at the top.  The water in this loop is never open to the air so there is no chance of the legionella bacteria proliferating in there.  With the heatpump in action the point is more or less moot, but in the summer when we won't use the heat pump at all, the fact that the solar tubes keep the temperature at around 45ºC is no longer concerning. 

We have been thinking of using photo-voltaic solar energy for electrical power but Portugal recently allowed their tax break to expire so now instead of paying 6% tax on panels, inverters and batteries, we will have to pay 24%.  We have decided to wait until 2027 before we look again at solar power for the house in case they re-introduce an incentive for solar electricity for homes.

We are looking forward to seeing how the heating of the home works this winter and Anne has said a few times how relieved she is that we won't be burning wood as often as before.  It will be interesting too to see how the electric stove and heat pump costs compare to buying all the wood we needed.  The price of wood just went up by €20 a tonne which may help to justify our choices.

Anne in the engine room with the heat pump outside and the insulated 800l tank to her left

We will still use the little wood stove in the sitting room for dreary rainy nights every now and again.  

Wood stove and the Australian series "Bump" queued up on TV

 At least this stove has never leaked smoke into the house.

Legionella, tech stuff and stepping out

It is deep into our second winter in Portugal.  We saw the tail end of last year's winter but got to experience a cold house with no hot water when we moved in so I felt we needed to be well prepared this time around.

I described our engine room and the solar heating for our water - at the time I mistakenly referred to the water heating array as photovoltaic when in fact it is an evacuated tube solar collector. 

The difference being that these vacuum tubes heat fluid that is passed over a small, hyper-heated metal tip at the top of each rather than by producing electricity that can be used to power a hot water element.

My concern as I tried to get familiar with the three pumps and how the water in our large water tank is heated was eased over the summer when the solar array had no trouble keeping our hot water at around 45ºC (113F) which was more than adequate for showers.

As we moved into fall I had a few different contractors come over to look at the water heating system to see how it could be improved.  I has bothered me that we have to light a fire in the kitchen stove to heat the water especially in the spring and fall when we are not getting enough heat from the solar tubes to keep the showers hot though it is not cool enough to need a fire burning in the kitchen.  

Anne and I have been so jaded from all of our previous months of travel that we have been reluctant to move around much and it took a forced trip to Lisbon to get South African passports renewed for Nick and me.  It got us to think about moving around a little more.  I had booked tickets soon after we arrived to see Jacob Collier in November in Lisbon and had an appointment to handle some administrative tasks for my residency permit in December. 

Jacob Collier concert

This forced us to travel to Lisbon a few times, with the added need to spend at least one night in Lisbon each time.  So we started to look into low-key places to visit while we there.

It turns out that going to Lisbon distance-wise is much like driving up to the White Mountains from our home in Boston (2hrs) or driving to Port Elizabeth from Grahamstown (ok, maybe a bit further than that) - two typical journeys that we were willing to make reasonably often when we lived there. 

Banksy museum

Because Portugal is so small these trips feel huge but we put on our American attitude about distances where we'd have no problem going from Boston to New York for a weekend (5-6 hours drive) so why hesitate to go to Lisbon?

We loved some of the parks and museums in Lisbon and now feel less intimidated about walking in the city or visiting to watch some culture when it  comes up.

And why not visit Seville for that matter?  One of Anne's best friends from our days in Grahamstown was visiting her sister in Madrid and we drove to Seville to meet her and spend time catching up the day after New Year's day.  

 Cindy is a fellow artist and has a son a little younger than the boys are.  It was great to visit the grand cathedral in Seville with her and to go out for a meal on the river before she had to return on the high-speed train to make her flight back home.

Returning from Seville put the heating situation back into focus.  Because the system we have is complicated, I could see the visiting plumber/heating person's brain shutting down when they saw it all and I would wait for the inevitable: "I don't really understand this system so I think you should install (a) a new electric boiler, (b) a heat pump or (c) photovoltaic cells to heat water on the roof".  

I guess I understand how this works - people don't want to take on something that is complicated and may end up costing them a lot of time, but it bothers me that the prices for these alternative systems are high and I'd rather find out how we can mitigate the specific problem in the short term and then hear a plan for how to improve it over time instead of just fork-lifting it all out and replacing it.

The hot water tank is enclosed in a room made out of insulated iron cladding and the tank itself has a large insulated cover on it.  The person who did our pre-inspection for the sale of the house said that the hot water tank can be fitted with an electrical element so I'm planning to open the room up and see if I can find where this fitting is and then get a plumber to just install the element and a thermostat.  If that works we can start to talk to him about upgrades along the lines that he prefers.  Anne is not enjoying how the air in the house deteriorates when we add wood to the fire so we will probably aim to switch that stove out in favor of something that will be less problematic with her asthma.

I mentioned in my previous post that Rob and Eurika visited from Melbourne. He described his sophisticated heating system and septic handling.  He does have a heat pump and is able to set things up so that he uses batteries during prime time and then get the solar array to work charging the batteries and providing electricity for the rest of the time.  Their septic system is amazing too,  designed to produce water for irrigation with all of their grey water and the outcome of processing the sewage being cycled back into watering the plants.  

I read about this and don't see that the septic arrangement is possible for us because you need a pretty large area for a septic system like this.  The solar electricity is feasible.  Portugal is almost 80% on renewable energy so our electricity is not very expensive but it would be nice to lower the need for electricity from the grid where we can.

I have become a little less tolerant of running the tank at 45ºC after the conversation about legionella with Rob so I’ve been working to keep the tank water on or above 55C which has meant more frequently having to light the fire even if it is warm out.

So now, in the dead of winter I have been stuck with a daily routing: come down in the morning to check that the fire still has glowing embers, get it burning again and then go outside to check the various temperatures (top of tank, stove generated heat, solar tube temperature) - I usually check the temperatures a few times during the day.  The under-floor heating and showers drain the heat from the tank, so we have leave the under the floor pump off if the tank temperature isn't higher than 55ºC.  

It's a pain having to make this trip outside a few times a day (and then again at night just before we go upstairs to get ready for bed).   If it is raining for a few days in succession as it has been for the last couple of weeks it becomes even more of a pain.

I remembered that a friend who managed a training/recreational retreat on an island with a lighthouse in Maine had given me a link to his notes on how he set up monitors for equipment and temperatures and controlled some of the electronics.  I dug it up in an email from a few years ago for some of the details - in particular the type of temperature sensor and how to store the data coming from them in a way that can be used to graph it.

This would be ideal, because being able to see what the temperature trends are over the course of a few days could help me decide when to turn on the pump for the underfloor heat and also to see how much heat is actually coming from the solar tubes (I had more or less decided that they are not doing much at all).

I paid about €18 for a small IoT (internet of things) device from Shelly to which you can attach an ad-on that will allow up to 5 temperature sensors (costing about €18 as well). 

The small red and black Shelly with add on

A bonus was that the Shelly device is intended for measuring electrical usage and has an electronic switch in it.  That tiny box has 2 wifi radios and is about the size of a regular matchbox so it is easy to install in an electrical encasing.  The 2 wifi radios allow you to use one of them for initial configuration and the other to connect to the home wifi so that it can push data to whatever you have set up to receive it.

It was a bit strange dusting off some of the  software tools that I used at work.  We used software that a colleague installed to graph test-bed performance. I installed it here to measure internet speeds and my internet router performance and so I was able to pull together the bits that I need to start graphing the water heating system as well.

I discovered that the heat from the solar tubes is not insignificant.  It looks like I should get a larger array.  It circulates fluid into the hot water tank close to the bottom of the tank where the temperatures are a bit lower and you can see in the screenshot of the graph below the yellow lines show how it has varied over the past week of mostly raining days and then again was doing better yesterday and today when the sun came out for a few hours.

The blue graph shows when the underfloor heating is on and the green graph is the temperature of the fluid returning to the tank from the floor.  It goes up to just under 30ºC - I usually turn it on in the morning and sometimes leave it on all day depending on how comfortable we are at home.

The Shelly control panel with the electronic switch

By Boston standards it is mild here but with the outside temperatures between 2ºC and 14ºC we find that our home is toasty with the woodstove going and the underfloor heating on.  Without the underfloor heating we have to use traditional heating from fans blowing over heated elements and so it is a much more comfortable heat if it comes from a warm floor.  

Not to mention that Anne loves to not wear shoes whenever possible.

Anne posing at our new gate with her Scatterlings of Africa design