Back at the beginning of 2019 I had a go at finding a formula to approximate the heating requirement of the rental house I'm in now. I wasn't too satisfied with the results but I've recently added some features to my software which help with looking into this a bit more and also have a lot more data available to base the approximations on.

The recent cold and very windy weather has also helped focus my attention on the matter. The small back bedroom I use as a study and the downstairs bathroom have kept comfortably warm and the kitchen, which is on the west side of the house, has actually been warmer than normal but the rest of the house, which is all exposed to the easterly winds, has been pretty chilly.

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Since my last post I've put up the rest of the tarpaulins I have to hand and one of the ones already up has ripped in two, but that wasn't too unexpected.

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It was quite windy yesterday (Thursday) so I went up to the site briefly this afternoon to see how the tarpaulins had got on. Mostly OK.

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I've made quite a few mistakes building this house (not to mention finding a lot of things I'd do differently in hindsight) but I think the worst has been thinking I'll get the roof covered soon then not doing so.

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Four years ago, in 2016 November, I slung together a few hundred lines of Python to do some logging of data from around the house. It was intended as a plan-to-throw-one-away effort for exploration before writing something a bit more general. As with all things temporary, it's continued in operation since and has grown a bit to about 10'000 lines of Python and 5000 lines of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, Rust, C/C++ and other eldritch horrors.

There are a few aspects of it which might be worth discussing so a brief overview to give some context seems a good way to start.

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As previously noted, I'd got most of the easy bits of the east-gable cladding done by the end of August but it still took me most of September to finish off the lower part.

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Here's how I've done the board-on-board cladding on the gable ends of the house.

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I don't suppose I'm the only person to have found 2020 pretty frustrating so far.

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Today has been a bit frustrating and nicely encapsulates how the year as a whole has gone so far.

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Unlike more southern bits of Britain, the northern part of Scotland hasn't had exceptional short-term quantities of wind or rain this winter but the wind and rain has been rather unrelenting; there have mostly been only a few isolated dry days.

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