Ways and Products to Save Energy and CO2e

On Power
 
New South Wales' electricity supply is generated by black coal power stations. It has been calculated that the average NSW home uses:

7,300 kWh of electricity a year,

which is derived from burning
3.7 tonnes of black coal, 

and causes

8 tonnes of carbon pollution

I've looked at old bills and think that our household used ~5400 kWh/yr before the renovation.

It makes sense to minimise our use of electricity and to use gas or solar energy in preference to coal-fired electricity. This post covers methods and products which reduce energy consumption; a later post will cover passive energy-efficiency measures which we have designed into the house.

Heating Water

Households use about a third of their energy to heat water.
We already have a solar water heater. It has an electric booster on a timer switch, which we have programmed to go on for two periods a day: 6-8am and 5-8pm (of course the power only runs when the thermostat requires it). This covers our showers and the washing up.  I normally wash clothes in cold water, and try to use solar-heated water if I need warm -- that is, I run warm loads in the middle of the day.

Lighting

	INCANDESCENT	HALOGEN	COMPACT FLUORESCENT	LED
Watts Per Equiv. 60w Bulb	60	60	14	6
Lifespan (hours)	1000	2000	15000	30000

Unfortunately, I cannot remember where all the data for this table comes from; I collected it from various sources.  Lighting comprises only about 7% of household energy use, and I imagine that proportion is declining.  LED lighting is only just starting to make an impression; give it another ten years and we'll see it take over from compact fluorescents. We've used a number of LED light fittings and the rest are CFLs.
My favourite LEDs are the strips under my cabinets, which I use while cooking.  A lovely warm white light and definitely worth the price!
 

Heating Air

We have not yet installed  the gas heater which we think we might need in the family room.  This winter will be an interesting test of our passive measures! My Grandmas's draught snake now lies at our front door (that's it up the top).  We have also installed beautiful full-length lined curtains, with pelmets, on our family room doors and window. Glass is a very good conductor of heat and needs to be insulated.  Proper curtaining provides you with an air layer to buffer the room from the outside.  Double-glazing was simply too expensive.

Cooling Air

We have installed a fan in the family room. Sydney's summer humidity makes a fan the best option for a large space. We have retained an elderly air conditioner in our bedroom, but use it rarely.  Last summer was so mild that we didn't use the air con and barely used our new fan!

Refrigerating Food

Refrigeration accounts for about 14% of a household's power consumption. We have one fridge and I am considering buying a small chest freezer as my children's appetites get bigger.  One of the great hidden electricity users of Aussie households is that old, less efficient fridge, which is moved to the uninsulated garage, filled with beer and (often) left running, in case of an impromptu party. Apparently, 40% of freestanding Australian homes have a "beer fridge"!

Household Appliances and Entertainment Equipment (excluding refrigerator)

These are thought to account for about 27% of energy consumption, particularly if you don't turn them off at the mains. We chose our appliances by looking at Choice magazine for efficient products that suit our needs.

We now have a dishwasher, which I use once a day.  It heats its own water using mains electricity, which is a new cost.  My previous dishwasher still operates regularly; it's about 6' tall and needs a kiss to start, rather than a mains connection.  Our new grill and range hood are also electric, but we have a new gas oven and stove.

The washing machine is also new.  We bought relatively efficient appliances but a top-loader (which uses much more water and energy than a front-loader) is the only sensible option for a busy family with growing children.  As is customary amongst Aussies, I own a clothes dryer, but only use it during wet spells.

We have a number of computers but they all have LCD screens, as does the TV.  We have not yet replaced our defunct sound equipment.  Below is one of the unusual things I asked the builders for:

Most people's sound gear is plugged into a power point located inconveniently behind the equipment, so it's usually left on standby.  The black switch you see above will turn off the TV and sound equipment at the mains.   From the kitchen.  My children have not yet worked out the implications of this, but I am sure they will grasp it when they are teenagers.

Have you worked out any ways to reduce your power consumption?

How It All Began

It's time to look back.

How can one recall all the factors that have led to the conception of a design, then brought forth a renewed building?

I suppose it all began when we bought our postwar cottage. It was well-built and comfortable and, I remember saying, it would be easy to extend from the kitchen/dining area, into the lovely north-facing back yard. Not that we wanted to, of course, but it would be possible.


But we bought in October, so one of the disadvantages of our house did not become apparent to us for a good six months. While the back yard was full of bright northerly light -- in fact, a bit too much light for comfort in summer -- the house did not make any use of it. Here, count the windows on the back yard side.


One for the dining room, one for a bedroom, and the other two rooms getting that premium light are... the bathroom and toilet! And that's the laundry in the middle, shielding the rest of the house from light and heat. It's a lovely house in summer, keeping its back to the sun. There are big windows on the street side to catch the cooling southerlies. Most of the time, it's a cool, well-ventilated house.

Winter is considerably less pleasant. Cool becomes cold, and ventilation becomes draught. The occasional overnight minimum of -3 C won't sound like much to Europeans, until you realise how Australian houses leak air. Every room has wall vents open to the outside -- and you can't close them. Our windows and doors aren't made to be airtight, and our thickest winter clothes are thin by European standards.

Then I found this amongst the building books at work.


This excellent book is still in print, and is a helpful guide to energy efficient thermal comfort for Australians (particularly in our major cities). I don't know how many times I borrowed Warm House Cool House, fascinated by the possibilities which would make suburban housing so much more liveable. One of my first decisions was that if I ever extended the house, I would need a concrete slab on the northern side of my house for thermal mass in winter, and big windows to let in winter sun. But this fit in with the location of the maybe-extension anyway.

In summer, of course, I'd need to have my slab and window shaded with an external pergola smothered in passionfruit vine. But that's what Sydneysiders do with passionfruit plants: if it isn't a pergola, it's a verandah, and it will have a passionfruit vine. (The choko vine goes over the shed and dunny.)

Then the news of the Greenhouse Effect reached the general public. I'd heard of it, of course; John Seymour mentioned it in his 1987 book, Blueprint for a Green Planet, which I had bought. (I suppose John Seymour had better take some credit for this extension too!) The populous parts of Australia were in drought. I never ran out of cloth nappies for the Twig, because the washing was never rained on.

At the same time I was pondering my own wealth. Unlike many Australians, I'm aware that I'm wealthy on a global scale and on the national scale. It seemed to me that to consume water and energy excessively was unbecoming for a follower of a famously homeless man.

Of course, a major extension is also expensive. You can do a cheap extension, but it's usually ugly, made of cheaper materials, uninsulated and generally tends to result in more consumption later, whether because of increased running costs (eg heating uninsulated rooms) or maintenance and replacement of the materials. We didn't want that. We wanted to do something that would be beautiful and long-lasting. There are plenty of cheap extensions in our area as it is not a wealthy part of Sydney.


Like many gardeners, I've been aware for quite some time that water ought to be conserved (and that there are better things to do with stormwater than push it all out to sea), that artificial fertilisers and so on are not healthy foods for soils, and that pesticides and herbicides often create more problems than they solve as they damage biodiversity. I have a basic understanding of soil chemistry. I love fresh air, sunshine and flowers and didn't want to be breathing in too many outgassed chemicals from glues and paints.

Michael Mobbs made me aware of the ubiquity of PVC in the building trade and the possibility of replacing it with other materials. I even considered leaving the town water supply as he did, but decided that the costs and disadvantages were prohibitive.


The ultimate frustration with our house was down to the simple fact that a house that was comfortable for a working-class family in 1946 was not always a good fit for a middle-class family in 2011. The kitchen was built for the rationing period, and for a family who might have risen to an ice chest, not a modern fridge. The back yard was not a place you took your few guests; it was where you grew your vegetables and hung your washing--the home barbecue had not yet arrived in Australian culture. There was nowhere for us to sit outside, really, until a volunteer mulberry grew to shade the home-built carport. The dining table didn't quite fit into the dining room and we didn't quite fit into the lounge room, either.

Eventually, we went to Archicentre and used their flat-fee service to develop a concept plan. We liked it so much that we retained the architect, Peter Katris, for the project. And last night, we slept in our renewed house for the first time.

Here's the short version of the list of reasons for extending as we did:

• Easy to extend this particular house
• Allow for modern use of space: outdoor entertaining, computers, etc
• Provide bigger kitchen and lounge room
• Provide better articulation to back yard, and an outdoor sitting area
• Improve thermal efficiency of house: better access to sun and light, and better ventilation control
• Replace inefficient/non-functioning appliances
• Improve stormwater management and conservation
• To beautify the house and maintain the heritage of our street
• To minimise the use of certain plastics where practicable

I'll post more information about some of our decisions later.

How Economical is a Vegetable Garden?

Over at Down To Earth last Thursday, there was an interesting comment from Tracy in Brisbane:

A few people have commented to me recently that growing one's own vegetables/salad items is not always financially viable... What would you have to say about such claims....?

I am assuming that by 'financially viable' they mean 'money expended on the vegetable patch does not exceed the usual shop price of the harvest'. That is, is a vegetable patch economical?

I thought I'd consider the matter on my own blog. There are a lot of variables, so it's hard to make a general case. I can only provide specifics for my situation, and raise some of the issues with the calculations.

Vegetable garden costs per annum:

• Seeds ($80)
• 4 bales old hay &/or sugar cane mulch (say $50)
• Additional water (say 2 hours a week @ 4 l/min = 25 kl *$1.87 = $50)
• Bag potting mix ($10)
• Electricity to run my seedling heating pad at night for 2 months (say $5, but it's probably less)
• Chook food, since the chooks provide the fertiliser and eat insects and weeds ($120)

Total cost: $315 per annum

Issues:

• Some gardeners buy most vegetables in as seedlings; this is considerably more expensive. Home-collected seeds are, of course, much cheaper.
  
• I was in two minds about including the hay, as its first purpose for guinea pig bedding in winter. I decided, however, that I would need to mulch the vegies even if I didn't have guinea pigs, so I left it in.
• My chooks are a fundamental part of my vegetable garden, because I tractor them in it for half the year. I rarely move manure about (only when I want it around a plant in the front garden) because the chooks generally deposit it where I need it. Of course, if you don't have chickens, you will have to get your fertilising and pest-killing done in other ways, which are probably going to involve more money.
  
  

Food produced per annum:

• Free range eggs, say 2 a day for 9 months= 45 doz (@ $6/doz, that's $270)

Breakeven cost for vegetables: $45 per year

Now I don't weigh and price my harvests as Scarecrow does, but I'm pretty sure that I am getting more than $45 worth of vegies out of my patch in a year!

Issues:

• I'd probably recoup my $45 on fresh herbs alone. If I didn't grow fresh herbs, however I would probably use less of them in my cooking, rather than buy them in -- so how do I account for that?
• If I grew potatoes, carrots and onions in my back yard, I would not get the dollar value that I do by growing asparagus, fancy lettuces, Tuscan kale, herbs and so on.
• I wonder what the market price of chervil is? I have never seen it for sale, so how do I price it? What about the interesting cultivars I have that are not available in the shops?
• If you have an organic vegie patch, its contents should be priced accordingly. You are not producing forced tomatoes for $2/kg.
• The taste issue is a big one for home gardeners. Even the expensive truss tomatoes aren't a patch on the taste of a fresh, home-grown tomato. Strawberries, peas and sweet corn also deteriorate very quickly, and are never as nice from the shops. But you'll find a 'taste premium' on all home-grown food. Even spuds!

As a final note, someone will no doubt ask how I priced my time. I haven't. The reason is that my garden is also my hobby. I don't buy scrapbooking materials, or cross-stitch, or anything else in the artistic or craft line (note that many crafts are quite expensive). Which, I suppose, raises another question: should I deduct at least some of the money I spend on gardening from my craft budget?

A Sense of Entitlement

On Monday, Rhonda at Down-To Earth posted about the attitude you need to live well on less. She comments:

One of the things that is needed now is to overcome this sense of entitlement that many people feel. They see others with fine houses and possessions to fill them, they think that is "normal" and they should have it too... If you live your life for and through your possessions you will not be living to your potential. You will be constrained by your focus being on paying for your life.

I'd like to suggest that it's the focus of the feeling of entitlement that is the problem. People who feel entitled to expensive houses just don't feel entitled to nice eggs.

I became tired of shop-bought eggs where the pallid yolks broke and the whites ran over the pan like water. I still can't understand why supermarket eggs are never fresh; you'd think they'd have to get new ones in from time to time! Knowing the conditions under which commercial layers are kept made me even less happy about eating shop eggs (I buy free range, but there is no Australian standard to ensure free-range poultry are kept the way I'd prefer).

I am entitled to have fresh eggs that have been produced by happy hens. And now I do. We own the hens.



But do that, I had to think, "I am not satisfied with this situation. How could I change it?" and feel that I was entitled to both ask the question and make the change.

Sometimes, people are so caught up in doing-what-they-do that they don't consider whether there are alternatives. A prime example is the depressing family life described in this article. Now I live in Sydney, and I cannot understand why this family are choosing to live this way. They could remove a good deal of stress from their lives with one simple step: moving closer to the wife's workplace. Petersham and Epping house prices are not dissimilar (I've just checked a real estate guide), but Epping gives the wife a commuting time of 15 mins or less. That's a lot of stress removed and a lot of time added with the child. The poor kid might get a healthy meal occasionally, too.

I realised something for myself recently: as I work three days a week, I cannot have my home clean for the weekend if I am out on the other two weekdays. For my own sanity, I must commit to one weekday at home a week. As simple as that, but it has taken me nearly two years to work it out.

What's making you dissatisfied with your life? What can you do to change it? Are you focussing in the wrong place?

Upon Simplicity

Scrub Oak has been pondering why simple living is "so darn difficult". I think it's... because it is! Simple living isn't brainless living; that's what we're leaving behind. In fact, I would define Simple Living as a lifestyle based on making choices in favour of sustainability. And that means questioning our assumptions, the hardest form of thinking, along with the hard grind of keeping ourselves informed. It's the mindfulness that makes it difficult, the sudden rethinking of all the old ways all at once. But how can we move forward when we get stuck?

I think the first step is one from permaculture: design by analysis. You start by listing the characteristics of components of a system. An honest assessment of who we are and where we are is important. As one of our assets is money available, I think a look at the budget is essential. But there are other resources, particularly your time and your emotional resources. Is there a possible activity or goal that doesn't fit with the money, time or energy you have available? Then it's off the list. I have poor fine-motor skills and not much time. Sewing my own clothes isn't on my list of aspirations! But I love gardening and cooking, so I do have a vegetable garden.

The other part of design by analysis is putting various components together so that you have a system that works efficiently. I haven't baked bread for ages, but I love doing it, and I have a little more time now that I am no longer spending it at the physiotherapist's.... and our preferred commercial bread has just hit $5 a loaf. Baking my own bread has just reappeared on the agenda.

Another permie idea which can help is the notion of making the least change for the greatest possible effect. Think of small, meaningful changes, not grand gestures. In Flylady terms, take baby steps. Treat life with the patience and care you take with early tomato seedlings, and then see what a harvest you get.

Thoughts on Simple Living

A recent post at the contentment-filled Down to Earth has given me mixed feelings, and I'm trying to sort them out. I am wondering if Simple Living is as simple as all that!

It is very easy to move from contentment with a simple life to smugness about it. Hardly conducive to moving other people forward, though. I also think it's often a bit simplistic. Often a decision early in life sets a trajectory which is very difficult to shift. As a positive example: The Geek is a computer programmer -- it's all he has ever wanted to be. Now in Australia, there are only two cities where you can get the kind of job he wants: Sydney and Melbourne. We're Sydneysiders. As it happens, the parts of Sydney with computing jobs in them are all at major transport hubs, except for one. The Geek has always walked and/or used public transport to and from work. But if he were in the building trades, the story would be quite different. The Geek's apparent eco-friendliness is a result of his career choice, rather than a transport choice.

We can't always see how our previous choices will affect the options open to us later, and for some people, the usual prescriptions for starting Simple Living are close to insurmountable. How do you cook from scratch, for example, if you have never been taught much cooking and all your family have a firmly-set taste for processed foods? (Don't look at me for the answer: I chose a family which could cook!) Perhaps more entry points to the simple lifestyle need to be shared around?

That's my first feeling: that sometimes simplifying one's life is quite complex! And in particular, that if you have more money to start with, you have more ability to live simply.

On the other hand, sometimes I feel that more medium-level articles are what I need. The Geek commented the other night that the usual items in Make Your House Greener articles are things we have already done -- we're now heading for the expensive-and-daunting end of the spectrum, where the photovoltaics and grey-water treatment kits live. Surely there is something in the middle, between $200 and $20,000?