Okay, so there’s ice on my lawn.

Frost is an amazing thing. It’s more than just frozen water. When I was kid working on my Dad’s farm, one of the jobs we had to do was pick up paddock rocks. We would scour the fields and out the rocks on the carry all behind the old Fergy tractor. That paddock would look great until a few years later where we would be back stomping around picking up more rocks. Where do they keep coming from? Apparently frost has something to do with it; called frost heaving. Having the frost freeze the top layer of the ground lifts that layer of soil and then it melts setting it back down and this constant tiny movement keeps dragging rocks to the surface.

Why are we talking about frost this morning? Well I think it’s important as Tassie is a very frosty place. Those frosty mornings test our homes thermal efficiency. If your house is poorly insulated it’s those frosty mornings that really make it evident. It also tests heat pumps as they are trying to extract the last remnants of heat out of freezing ice crystal laden air. This also sorts the poor quality units from the good units on how well they resist icing and how smoothly they pass through the defrost cycle if they do freeze up.

We use our LG heat pumps to get us through these times as they have proven to be a winner in our frosty conditions. On my last trip to South Korea (the home of LG), I was there in December which is their winter. It is a very cold place. It got down to minus 10 degrees Celsius overnight and never got warmer than minus 2 during the day. The days were quite sunny but those northern Siberian winds kept the place cold. South Koreans know cold and this is obvious in the products they sell and as such are well suited to our climate.

To read more about our LG Heat Pumps, click here.

Another thing that frost can affect is solar panels. One of the gradients of wear and tear we encounter is thermal cycling. This is where the panel gets cold and then hot, cold and then hot day after day. From a physics perspective this is contracting and expanding the panels over and over again. It’s an elemental force and cannot be contained or stopped. The product has to be designed to cope.

One of the faults we see on cheaper, lower quality solar panels in the field is cracking of cells and water ingresses into the laminate of the solar panel. One of the causes of this is that the panels have not been designed around constant thermal cycling.

Tasmania is one of the worst places for this. Europe for example once it gets cold it stays cold until spring. Basically the product stays frozen. Here, during winter it freezes most nights and thaws out and get hot most days making it a place of extremes. Both our South Korean panels (the LG NeON and the QCELLS DUO G5 panels) have a 25 year build warranty against this ever being a failure. Like us, South Korea is a place of extremes. Stinking hot in summer, with monsoon season, freezing cold in winter and a touch of everything in between those two seasons.

Just reminder DMS Energy has done all the research on the products we offer so you don’t have to. You are in safe hands with us.

Finally this week, we wrap up home electrical safety month. It’s been an eye opener with some of what we have seen but mostly it’s been a great way to increase the public awareness of their home electrical systems. If you have ceramic fuses in your switchboard consult and electrician. If you don’t have RCD’s in your switchboard consult an electrician. If you have frayed cords, dicky switches or flickering lights you need consult an electrician.

Guess what DMS Energy are? Electricians. So if you have any of these things talk to your electrician and if you haven’t got a preferred electrician, keep DMS Energy in mind as we want to be your electrician.