Refrigerators eat up energy, unless you choose wisely.

BACK in 2004, Dr Tom Chalko had just built an off-grid eco-house at Mount Best, in South Gippsland. But during the summer, while he waited for his solar panels to arrive, he was short on electricity.

“I needed refrigeration, but I didn’t have enough energy for it,” he recalls. “My small vertical fridge was consuming more energy than my wind turbine was able to produce.”

So the retired physics academic set about solving his problem. Suspecting that chest freezers were more efficient, he began tinkering with one to suit his needs.

After just a few days, he gave his old vertical fridge away.

When it comes to retaining cold air, conventional fridges have a bafflingly straightforward design flaw: every time you open the door, cold air escapes. That doesn’t happen with a chest freezer.

“When you open the horizontal door, no warm air gets in – because cool air is heavier, it stays in the fridge,” Dr Chalko says.

He devised a thermostat that kept a chest freezer at fridge temperatures and, for even better efficiency, cut off standby power while the compressor wasn’t running.

His converted chest fridge now runs for only about two minutes every hour, and consumes an average of about 0.1 kilowatt-hours per day. That’s about ten times less than the best vertical fridges, and up to fifty times less than the worst energy guzzlers.

There’s been another, unexpected benefit too: reduced food spoilage. “My motivation was efficiency, but the best thing is the food preserving performance,” he says.

“I still can’t get over it. Because of the reduced temperature fluctuations, food-spoiling microorganisms don’t breed. I can go shopping once a month and I always pull fresh produce from the fridge.”

If you want to make your own one, Dr Chalko has published instructions (including a lengthy list of parts) on his website. He also makes and sells the thermostats himself ($150).

He argues that in Victoria, because of the inefficiency of brown coal power plants, and further losses that occur in electricity transmission, any energy waste at the household level is amplified many times.

“Earth is a system of limited resources and I started considering my house and property that way too,” he says. “My question is always, ‘How can I make the most of what I’ve got?’”

For many Australian households, the first step is to switch off the second fridge that’s whirring away in the garage.

“If you buy a new fridge and keep the old one running, you’ve actually taken a big step backwards,” says building efficiency expert Peter Reefman. “It’s important to take your old fridge to a good recycling centre.”

When he tested the energy consumption of his refrigerator, he found it was the biggest energy user in the house, by a long way. Now, his new, more efficient one saves him about $200 a year.

You can compare different makes and models on the government’s Energy Rating website. But, as Mr Reefman says, always bear in mind that “the stars lie”.

The ratings compare like with like, so a huge double-door fridge can score more stars than a small unit. To understand what it will cost to run, look at the energy consumption figure on the sticker.

“Buy the smallest fridge possible, and try to get one that consumes 1 kilowatt-hour per day, or less,” he says.

Read this article at The Age online

Wild mushrooms are just the tip of the iceberg.

FOR this year, stone fruits are over. Berries have been and gone. But another kind of fruit has begun to bloom. “If you get early rains and the earth’s still warm, then you get early fruiting of fungi,” explains Alison Pouliot. “They’re the ideal conditions to see mushrooms popping up.”

Each autumn, Ms Pouliot, who is a research scientist and photographer, runs a series of workshops on fungal ecology in several towns around central Victoria. For these few months, she goes fungus spotting nearly every day, and photographs and surveys what she finds.

Mushrooms, she’s quick to point out, are like the oranges dangling from a tree – they’re the fungal fruit. The fungal mass, known as the mycelium, grows underground all year round.

That’s the first thing to know – but there’s more. Fungi have colonised almost every kind of terrestrial habitat, from arid deserts to city backyards. Ms Pouliot says they matter for householders, not just scientists.

“If you’re thinking about how to live sustainably then you need a good appreciation of natural ecosystems. You need to be aware of the connections, whether it’s weather patterns, the way water moves through the earth, or understanding soils and vegetation,” she says.

Although they’re often overlooked, fungi are a critical part of those ecosystems: nearly all plants have fungal partners below the surface, helping their roots take up nutrients.

Even so, many of us look warily upon a clump of toadstools on our compost pile. Ms Pouliot says we need to challenge our preconceptions.

“They’re the earth’s major decomposers, so anyone who wants to improve their soil should take them into consideration. As soon as you put pesticides and toxins into an environment, fungi won’t grow. In a sense, they’re an indicator of a healthy environment,” she says.

In Australia, we have much a greater diversity of species than Europe, but we’ve only identified about one-tenth of them. So far, we know very little about what we’ve got and where it grows.

That’s where Fungimap comes in. Run by Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, it enlists experts and enthusiasts to document the whereabouts of 115 target species.

Ms Pouliot says interest in the mapping project is growing, spawned in part by newfound enthusiasm for foraging. But while she considers wild mushrooms “an untapped food source”, she’s adamant that our culinary desires must come a distant second to general knowledge. Correct identification takes practice and care, because many species have poisonous lookalikes.

“There are so many fungi out there and many are edible, but I can’t emphasise enough how important it is to know what you’re picking. You should never ever collect anything unless you can be 100 per cent sure of its identification,” she says.

Ms Pouliot lives half the year here and half in Switzerland. She has two autumns, and hence, two mushroom seasons. Her fascination stemmed from sightings on childhood rambles through the bush. “They were always curious, bizarre things, like jewels of the forest,” she recalls.

“You see these amazing colours and forms. Some are shaped like starfish, some like mirror balls and some like cups. And some are so short lived – they only appear for a day or so and then they’re gone. There’s an intriguing, ephemeral quality about them.”

Read this article at The Age online

One suburb’s plan to take over the streets.

THE transformation of Chippendale, in inner city Sydney, began three years ago. “We held a ‘Food for the Future Fair’, invited local farmers and closed off three city blocks,” explains resident and sustainability expert Michael Mobbs.

The council donated 200 fruit trees to be given away, and people were shown how to plant them in front of their homes.

“From then on there was a change in momentum in the suburb. Now it’s understood that this is a place where we grow food and do things differently,” he says.

Mr Mobbs is the author of Sustainable House, a detailed guide to the way his family retrofitted their home, together with the lessons and results garnered over more than a decade.

Now he’s drawn a blueprint for overhauling the entire suburb. The ‘Sustainable Streets and Community Plan’ covers matters as diverse as transport, stormwater harvesting, heat-reflective roads, food growing, and greening buildings and businesses. It’s available to download from the Sustainable Chippendale website.

One of the most innovative proposals is to link rate rebates with householders’ sustainability behaviour. For example, residents who compost (and attend a council-run workshop) would receive a discount on their rates; likewise for businesses that grow vertical gardens, or householders who trap stormwater on their blocks.

“I’m trying to link financial and other rewards to public and private actions in our streets,” he says. Many of these changes would reduce councils’ spending on infrastructure, maintenance and waste collection.

Similarly, Mr Mobbs sees a role for a streamlined or pre-approval process for projects that meet defined eco-criteria. “So many councils say they want to be sustainable, but they don’t give priority to sustainable projects. You just go in the queue with the business-as-usual,” he says.

Last year, the residents submitted their plan to the City of Sydney. They’re still waiting for a decision. Although Mr Mobbs fears it has disappeared into the council’s “black box”, he and his neighbours are forging ahead with several activities, including installing bike parking, converting stormwater drains and running a box scheme for local fruit and vegies.

There are about 50 residents who are actively, but informally, involved: they tend to devise their schemes while they’re at work in the garden. “We’ve found that it’s better to do things, rather than hold meetings. It’s projects that bring change faster than discussions, I think,” he says.

Because the suburb comprises about 4000 workers, as well as 4000 residents, they’re also beginning to work with businesses – starting by training an employee from a local café about how to better recycle waste and grow food.

Mr Mobbs says the plan isn’t just about Chippendale; it’s the kind of transformation required – and replicable – in every city. Already, delegations from two Chinese provinces have visited for a briefing.

“It’s really important that we make our suburbs and our cities sustainable this side of 2020,” he says. “Government is too slow. Communities have to show the way – that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

But so far, the biggest change in Chippendale isn’t in the hard infrastructure. It’s become a place where neighbours introduce themselves in the streets.

“The ultimate goal of sustainability is not a conversation about water efficient taps. It’s really a conversation about how we see the world and relate to it.”