Earth Notes: About Our Greenish Home aka 16WW, with Bonus Bats and Sparrows

Updated 2024-03-15 14:30 GMT.
By Damon Hart-Davis.
Learn more about our council-house turned SuperHome, that this site is based on! #podcast #greenLiving
solar PV panels on roof
219s "about 16WW" Uploaded . Downloads:
Transcript:
solar panels light snow solar PV being installed at home pumpkin homegrown over 4kg Sept 2018 amongst strawberry leaves superinsulating bedrooms with aerogel drylining dry lining with rigid insulating board for timber framed house in Kingston London England 1101 DHD front entrance after

Hi, I'm Damon Hart-Davis.

I was asked to describe Something about your sustainable home. Something about the nature visiting the garden and how you feel about your neighbourhood. Anything at all in fact.

Our house is in its 50s like me. It's timber-framed with a concrete-tile roof, end-terrace with hanging tiles on the side walls, and has a small garden front and back. It is on the Cambridge Road Estate in Kingston-upon-Thames, very close to a cemetery and the Hogsmill river. And not so far away from us, though usually downwind, is the local sewage works!

I have for one reason or another in the past run quite a few computers. I ran an early Internet Service Provider from home. It was pointed out to me that I was probably wasting a lot of energy with them — I was having to run air-con in summer to keep them cool! I took that as an energy-efficiency challenge to do more with less. My Earth Notes Web site at Earth.Org.UK is one outcome. A house that uses less than half of the electricity and gas of those around it is another. Indeed, the house is about net-zero-carbon for those two, given the solar panels on the roof.

We have small gardens, front and back. Both have lawns, but somehow in the back garden we also manage to squeeze [in] herbs, pumpkins, blueberries, beans, tomatoes, and some of radish, rhubarb, peppers, carrots, cucumbers, and courgettes. Never mind lots of flowers and some trees! Our apple tree struggled with the heat and lack of rain last year and dropped all its fruit early, but this year I'm hopeful that we may end up with something to taste. The pumpkins try to take over the garden, and they finish up in autumn and the nasturtium then tries to out-do them!

The variety of birds we get is astonishing. From pigeons (wood and feral) and magpies, to more exotic green and spotted woodpeckers and jays. Parakeets swarm up to seven or eight at a time on our feeders, hanging from our washing lines, coming from nearby Richmond Park and the cemetery I think. We also get hordes of smaller birds: robins, blue tits, coal tits, great tits, goldfinches, and more rarely chaffinches, greenfinches, dunnocks and wrens. Noisily, sparrows are swarming and squawking again recently in a way I don't remember since I was a child. Occasionally, starlings murmurate overhead!

There also seems to be a thriving bat population, and at dusk you can see them whooshing past just above head height it seems.

In the cemetery I think that crows are still probably top of the pile, though the parakeets may be muscling in. And some of the loudest sounds are from the squirrels by day! At night the foxes bark and squeal and whine, and make other noises that I don't have words for.

We also have had excitements, such as boys apparently lighting a fire behind our back wall and setting fire to our ornamental tree, and things that maybe I shouldn't air publicly!

Our house stands out a bit with the solar panels on top, and at least one nearby house has followed suit. Our walls are lined with the same stuff that the Space Shuttle used to survive the heat of re-entry, called aerogel, to keep us warmer in winter and cooler in summer. The triple glazing helps too, and helps keep out noise.

We have a warm and efficient home, with rather more nature on our doorstep than I'd realised. I hope that our energy saving is also nature saving, taking a little heat out of climate change.

(2019-09-09: this year we got about 1.5 apples, ie two did not drop but bits of them were damaged!)

(2020-09-03: this year we got no apples at all; everything dropped from the excessive heat I think.)

Sounds of the Suburbs

Sparrows (house sparrow, Passer domesticus) raucously tweeting their version of social media in the hedge at the front of the house December 2018:

57s "16WW front garden Pyracantha sparrows AF" Created/encoded . Uploaded . Downloads:

Some small ambient sounds from a quiet sunny June afternoon in the back garden:

51s "20190616T1305 16WW back garden ambient" Uploaded . Downloads:

A dull morning a few days later, at the front of the house, sparrow, pigeon, and more:

33s "20190626T0550Z 16WW dawn chorus sparrow pigeon other" (i) Uploaded . Downloads:

16WW ambient garden sounds with Blue Yeti mic, Good Friday lockdown afternoon. 44.1kHz sample rate, analogue gain at max, omnidirectional mode.

10s "20200410T1620Z Good Friday lockdown Blue Yeti omnidirectional" Uploaded . Downloads:

16WW ambient garden sounds Blue Yeti sample, Saturday lockdown morning. 44.1kHz sample rate, analogue gain at max, omnidirectional mode.

126s "20200411T0722Z 16WW 2:06 holiday Saturday 8am ambient" Uploaded . Downloads:

16WW ambient garden sounds Blue Yeti sample, Sunday lockdown just before 3am. 44.1kHz sample rate, analogue gain at max, omnidirectional mode. The normalisation is doing a lot of work here as the non-normalised signal is essentially inaudible.

75s "20200412T0245 16WW lockdown holiday Sunday 3am ambient omnidirectional max gain normalised" Uploaded . Downloads:

Sunday lockdown just before 3am, not normalised.

10s "20200412T0245 16WW lockdown holiday Sunday 3am ambient omnidirectional max gain" Uploaded . Downloads:

More 2020 lockdown dusk and dawn ambience at 16WW...

Sights

A partially-erected "MotorWind" turbine on the garden wall, from before the solar panels:

3s "MotorWind [VIDEO]" (poster) Uploaded . Downloads:

February snow at the front:

4s "snow falling in suburban front garden on hedge and metal railings fence in February cold snap in Kingston London England video 1 DHD [VIDEO]" (poster) (i) Uploaded . Downloads:
8s "pollination of poppy flower purple by bees bumblebees frantic buzzing video closeup 1 DHD [VIDEO]" (poster) Uploaded . Downloads:

In these shots and others You have white-tailed bumblebees and buff-tailed bumblebees, according to Professor Dave Goulson, University of Stirling.

18s "bee bumblebee bumble bee pollinating pollination of lavender purple flowers from bush flowering in July in London England video 12 DHD [VIDEO]" (poster) Uploaded . Downloads:
Transcript:
Buzzzzzz, buzzzzz, buzzzzz!
12s "bee bumblebee bumble bee pollinating pollination of lavender purple flowers from bush flowering in July in London England video 13 DHD [VIDEO]" (poster) Uploaded . Downloads:

Batty!

Local bat survey October 2018, by Alison Fure
October 2018 survey of bats in the 'hood, by Alison Fure.

2020-09-12: some bat chat with Alison Fure and a couple of bat detectors just outside the far corner of our garden in the alleyway, then up the alley and round the front:

308s "20200912T19:00Z bat chat around 16WW with AF at dusk" Uploaded . Downloads:
Soundwalk 2020-09-12 near 16WW
September 2020 snapshot of activity on CRE near 16WW at end of Soundwalk, by Alison Fure.

Also, spectrograms and log files mainly from the night of 2020-09-17, captured by a static bat detector in the tree in 16WW's back garden close to where the loudest signals were heard a few days before:

Alison says:

It shows really what we know that there is a common pipistrelle but it appears to have set up a mating roost (possible interpretation) and is song flighting. This means it is fairly constant activity all through the night. There was one soprano pipistrelle also.

There is some interference which is CF around 25 kHz that begins around 3.20, there is a bat that can do that but it would be exceptional to find it there.

(See also bats at 16WW.)

~1174 words.