Jen’s Boot Camp and Allerton Abbey Experience

Austin playing with the kittens:



(Picture Thread Day 40)

After staying up late last night playing games, eating, and watching movies at basecamp, I ended up sleeping in this morning until almost nine! When I woke, it was 56.4 degrees inside Allerton Abbey. Much more pleasant than the freezing temperatures (25 degrees) and snow outdoors, but not as toasty as I might prefer.

The biggest challenge we are facing with the annualized thermal inertia test is that it hasn’t actually annualized—we were still constructing the building all through the summer (in fact, construction is still finishing up, and some has been postponed until spring) rather than charging the mass. We made an attempt to give it a bit of a charge by bringing the indoor temperature up to 86 with the cook stove before beginning the test (which was difficult since the stove is designed for cooking and not heating, and the mass of the building absorbs the heat) but one hour of maintaining the temperature at 86 doesn’t compare to a summer full of temperatures in the eighties or higher.

The goal of the test is to see how the wofati performs under normal living conditions while only using the stove to cook, not to heat, but one other drawback is that, being in bootcamp all day, I am not here for most of the day cooking, working inside, or contributing my body heat. We expect that this winter’s results will not be entirely representative, and will improve dramatically in future years, but we want to begin gathering some data with this initial test and iterate from there.

(ATI Day 5)

I got a little work in this weekend cleaning and organizing at the Abbey. Things are starting to shape up nicely!

(Day 41)

Good temperature trend according to my observation. The outside wall is nt transmitting heat too rapidly while the mass wall is absorbing heat as intended (but in the summertime) Therefore the outside wall on the inside is warmer thhan the mass wall when heat is generated inside.

Thanks for testing this out and documenting the results so carefully!

About how long does it take you to build a fire and make tea?

Jennifer Richardson wrote:I woke up at 6:30 this morning and started up the tracking thermometers to begin the thermal inertia test. The four thermometers are placed: outdoors away from the Abbey, on the outside of the front exterior wall, on the inside of the same wall, and on one of the mass walls in the bedroom far from the stove.

After that, I built a fire in the stove to make my morning tea. Allerton Abbey was 61.6 degrees Fahrenheit in my bedroom, so it wasn’t too bad getting out of bed. When I checked the outdoor temperature a few minutes after waking up, it was below freezing (30.4). Inside the Abbey, it was even warmer in the front room than in my bedroom (64.1), so I got dressed and sat on the sofa there to enjoy my tea and write up this journal before heading to basecamp at 7:30 to join everyone for boot camp.

(ATI Day 1)
(Picture thread day 39)