Trying to figure out heat...does this make sense?

Not really. It doesn't get down to absolute zero, at least in my neighborhood.

You are concerned with the heat flow out of your house. Heat flow is proportional to the DIFFERENCE in termperatures, inside and outside. And it's inversely proportional to the R-factor of the walls.

In a previous house I wired an old electric alarm clock across the circulator pump so I could measure how much the system was producing heat for the house. The result was that only loose correlation with the degree-days. Wind seemed to have a much bigger effect.

Some degree day monitoring systems I've seen do attempt to take wind into account.

One I saw looked like a birdhouse on a pole. It had a small electric heater and a remote reading thermometer inside it.

You can figure out the rest.

Happy Holidays,

jeff

I must be slipping on a mental bannnannannaanaa peel. I oughta thought of that.

And on the second day it was full of nesting sparrows, which changed the thermodynamic principles as they started to build a nest. Which insullated the sensor.

More inserted.