Simple steps at home will offset the cost of the carbon tax

AS a householder, there’s one key feature of the federal government’s carbon tax that you mustn’t overlook: you can avoid paying it.

And that’s what you’re meant to do. Ian Porter, CEO of the Alternative Technology Association, observes that the tax is intended to encourage households and businesses to use less energy, and therefore, produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

“Anyone who is energy-wise is likely to experience very little impact at all,” he says.

The government predicts a price rise of about $10 per week for an average household (offset by the average compensation, which is just over $10 per week). Of that amount, the electricity portion comprises $3.30 per week.

But these numbers are based on average usage. They don’t take into account the way we can change our habits. You can offset the rising prices by becoming more energy efficient around the home.

“The normal rule of thumb is that around 10 per cent – if not more – of your energy bill can be reduced by simple, cheap or free measures, such as avoiding standby power, switching lights off and installing draught excluders under your doors to keep your rooms warmer,” Mr Porter says.

So for a savvy householder, the deal is good news: you can reduce your energy consumption and carbon emissions, avoid the tax and pocket the compensation.

Damian Sullivan, from the Brotherhood of St Laurence, agrees that we shouldn’t worry that the tax will cause a big jump in our cost of living. The charity operates a social enterprise, Brotherhood Green, which conducts energy audits and retrofits of existing homes for low-income earners.

“Electricity prices are already rising dramatically, with or without a carbon price,” he says. “The compensation will cover the added impact, but the scheme also provides an incentive for people to implement energy efficiency around their homes.”

As part of the plan, the government has promised to set up a national energy savings initiative, which would oblige energy retailers to help customers to reduce their electricity demand.

“There are a whole lot of measures you can take, from everyday actions and home maintenance, to purchasing efficient appliances when you need new ones,” he says.

Mr Sullivan says it pays to regularly re-assess your habits. The dollars quickly add up, with even the most innocuous changes in household behaviour. By washing your clothes in cold water, avoiding using a dryer, sealing draughts and installing an efficient showerhead, the savings for a family of four could total over $300 per year, he says.

For his part, Mr Porter looks coolly upon the custom of running a second fridge. “So often when we replace a refrigerator, we keep the old one. People like to leave it in their garage and store beer in it, but it’s an energy guzzler if you do that,” he says. “Consider the type and the number of appliances you choose to have.”

If the opportunity arises, you can hardwire cheaper bills and fewer greenhouse gas emissions by designing and building as efficiently as you can.

“If you’re lucky enough to be at the point where you’re designing, buying or renovating a house, that’s when passive solar design comes to the fore – initiatives such as orientation, glazing and thermal mass,” Mr Porter says. “That’s where you’ll make some of your biggest savings.”

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Repairing old things creates something new

A few years ago, Scott Mitchell began accepting busted iPods from all-comers, offering to open them up and tinker with their bits. He dubbed the experiment the iPod Social Outreach Project.

“I fixed over half of them without access to any spare parts, just by taking them apart, cleaning them, seeing if the connections were still ok,” he says. “At the start I had no experience – and that was the point.”

Mr Mitchell is one of the expert fixers involved in The Repair Workshops, which are open to the public on July 30 and 31, as part of the State of Design Festival.

Coordinated by design consultancy Eco Innovators and jewellery-repair project The Treasury, the event comprises two parts. First, a group of artists and technicians will create new artworks from broken items that had been donated to charities; and second, the team of fixers will repair or repurpose goods brought in by the public. (Numbers are limited, so you must pre-register on the website to be involved.)

For his PhD research, Mr Mitchell has studied the way people modify mass-produced goods. Over the last decade, he says, products have become increasingly sealed up and un-repairable – designed for the dump, not for longevity.

“But because of this restriction in consumer access, there’s been a parallel movement to reclaim those rights,” he says.

One example is The Repair Manifesto, which was one of the inspirations for the upcoming workshops. Conceived by Dutch collective Platform 21, the manifesto’s tagline is “Stop Recycling. Start Repairing.”

“The idea is that we’ll save a lot more energy and consumer waste if products are designed for repair before recycling,” Mr Mitchell says. “The manifesto contends that repair is a productive and positive way to engage with the world – and it’s a lot of fun.”

Wil Campbell, an industrial designer and another of the collaborators in The Repair Workshops, agrees. He says the need to save virgin resources will only grow more pressing as oil becomes more scarce and expensive.

“Each product existed as resources before it was turned into a product and, in most cases, it’s going to continue to exist for many thousands of years after you’ve finished with it. It’s good to make the brief window of usefulness as long as possible.”

And you don’t need to be an engineer to try; mending household items is well within reach of the average person.

“You can go online and find out how to fix almost anything – so many people are willing to give it a go and post instructions on forums, or videos on YouTube and websites like ifixit.com. You can skill yourself up on a situation by situation basis,” he says.

Mr Campbell argues there’s a deeper benefit to the practice. The beauty of repair, he says, is that it not only saves money and resources, but also shifts the way we think about products, the way they work and the effort involved in their creation.

“Repairing forces people to engage with the stuff of their life. When you fix something, you develop a relationship with it,” he says. “It gives you a story to tell. People like telling stories about products – about the way they use their grandmother’s old cookware – and it’s that type of thing that is so rewarding.”

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Professor Ralph Horne, from RMIT’s Centre for Design, has a warning for new homebuyers: don’t rely on the sticker price.

For the last four years, he’s been working on a project called Lifetime Affordable Housing in Australia. The research was spurred by controversy over the way minimum energy ratings influence the price of housing.

“Some people argue that the regulations make houses more expensive to build and therefore, less affordable – and that they exacerbate an already serious problem in Australian cities,” Professor Horne says.

“So we set out to discover what impact energy bills have on housing affordability. From a household’s perspective, is it better to buy an eight-star house than a five-star house?”

His team analysed over 80 designs from volume builders, modelling changes that raised the ratings as much as possible. Rather than making major alterations to the plans, the researchers upped the standard of the materials, insulation and glazing.

They calculated the cost of stepping each home up from five to six stars, then to seven and eight. Next, they compared those upfront costs with predicted energy savings over time frames ranging from five to 40 years.

“We think the optimal star rating for a house in Melbourne is somewhere between seven and eight stars,” Professor Horne says. “Below that level, householders are worse off: over its lifetime the house will be more unaffordable than if it were built to a higher standard.”

There is a catch, however. The best returns accrue to householders who stay put for the long haul. But while a new house has a lifespan measured in several decades, many people move on within years.

Professor Horne found that when costs are measured over a 40-year time frame, houses that reach eight stars become the most affordable. Based on these results, he argues the case for standards much more stringent than the current six stars.

“When you buy a house, you don’t know how long you’re going to be there. The energy efficiency regulations provide a ‘social payback’ over the lifetime of the building, because they give you the comfort of knowing that if you move, it will be into another eight-star house,” he says.

“We can confidently improve the standards in building regulations without Victorian families being out of pocket. In fact, it would improve the resilience and the ability of those households to pay their bills in the future because those bills will be much smaller.”

Even in the absence of tougher rules, he argues that householders should go beyond the minimum requirements. “For a Victorian family buying a new house they intend to live in, I think a seven-star home is a good place to start. If you go above that, you’ll need to stay there quite a while if you want a private return.”

Professor Horne and his team found that the most flexible designs achieve higher standards most cheaply. Shifting the orientation of a home – to make sure living areas face north – can boost five-star plans by up to a star.

“If you’re building a new dwelling, it is worthwhile pushing your builder to deliver a more energy efficient home. You will save money in the short term and you’ll save even more money in the long term.”

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To slow climate change we must know our own impact

IF you want to deflate your household’s black balloons, you should first pinpoint exactly how many there are, says energy efficiency expert Alan Pears.

Last month, the Environment Protection Authority Victoria launched the latest version of its free online Greenhouse Calculator.

The tool, developed by Mr Pears, RMIT’s Centre for Design and Education Services Australia, connects our household habits with their greenhouse repercussions. It covers car use, public transport, flights, heating and cooling, hot water, lighting, appliances, cooking, shopping and waste.

“One of the crucial messages is that there are lots of ways to cut your carbon footprint,” Mr Pears says. “For example, if you can cut your food waste by not letting it go off in the fridge, it would reduce your expenditure on food – and that by itself would make a big difference.

“The idea behind the calculator is that instead of people throwing rocks at each other or feeling disempowered, they can get a sense of what the issues are, with enough sophistication to look at different ways to solve them.”

In a matter of minutes, the calculator’s “quick mode” will give you a good idea of your greenhouse emission profile. It graphs the results against both a typical and a green household, by way of comparison.

You can then delve into the detailed sections to better understand the areas that interest you, or those in which you fare the worst.

The options are astonishingly comprehensive. You can factor in the withered seals on your fridge or the lack of ventilation space behind it, and watch the emissions rise up accordingly. You can examine the effect on your car’s fuel efficiency when you inflate the tyres, schedule regular services or install roof racks.

“It’s very empowering,” Mr Pears says. “You can explore a much wider range of options for cutting your carbon footprint than you can with any other calculator in the world.

“Some behavioural things have much bigger effect than you realise. For example, changing your heating and cooling thermostat by one degree in Melbourne really does make a big difference to your energy use,” he says.

Among other findings likely to surprise, Mr Pears identifies the super-low emissions of public transport and the dazzling inefficiency of halogen downlights. Likewise, a large flat-screen TV might gobble more electricity than the family fridge (unless it’s one of the “amazingly efficient” new 8-star screens).

And although our shopping habits are often overlooked, they account for over one-third of the average household’s carbon footprint. “I think a lot of people will be surprised by how significant food and consumer items are,” he says.

The calculator’s “weekly shopping” section allows users to compare different kinds of meat and all the food groups, as well as drinks, processed goods and other supermarket products.

Mr Pears says there’s a benefit to the online tool beyond its potential to spotlight excess carbon emissions. “In most households people become fixated on certain things. Someone will say, ‘It’s the kids’ computers’, or, ‘My wife does this’, or, ‘My husband does that’.

“But with the calculator you can specify how many showers you have, long they last and the flow rate of the showerhead. It’s a big opportunity to resolve longstanding arguments,” he laughs. “In that way, it’s potentially a household conflict-resolution tool.”

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Over a building’s life, greener is also cheaper

IN the construction industry, the accepted wisdom is that eco-friendly translates as hip-pocket hostile.

Perth-based engineer Richard Haynes disagrees. Last month, he launched eTool – web-based software that figures out the full greenhouse impact of your new home or renovation.

Both he and his collaborator, Alex Bruce, were surprised by the results when they tallied the long-term costs and impacts of different building materials.

“The most interesting thing we’ve discovered using eTool is that there’s a good relationship between sustainability and prices. Now, even if I was making purely economic decisions, I’d choose many things that are very sustainable, just to save on the costs,” he says.

The reason green products are often cheaper over their life cycle, Mr Haynes says, is because of the higher replacement and maintenance expenses of many conventional products. But those costs normally remain hidden.

Internal fittings and finishes, such as floor coverings, paint and plaster can eat up a hefty portion of a home’s carbon pie, over its lifetime. “When you build, the embodied energy of the carpet might only be five per cent of the carbon emissions, but if you re-carpet every ten or fifteen years, it becomes significant – and in a cost sense as well,” he says.

Similarly, a low-embodied energy rammed-earth wall that doesn’t need painting could prove cheaper than double-brick and plaster, even if it costs more to begin with.

The eTool software is free for householders. It uses life cycle assessment to provide an estimate of the building’s carbon footprint and its likely costs, both upfront and ongoing.

It takes into account the energy that goes into manufacturing the materials, as well as transportation, assembly and maintenance. The program also considers the energy required to run the home once construction is complete, by combining the building’s star rating with extra factors, including the lighting, hot water and heating systems, and the number of occupants.

“We’re engineers, so we’re all about quantifying,” Mr Haynes says. “But our motto is to be vaguely right, not precisely wrong. Any life cycle assessment could be out by a third, due to the differences in the way people operate the same house.”

Based on his research for eTool, however, he has clear advice for anyone considering a building project.

“The best thing you can do is to increase the design life of the home,” he says. “It’s an unfortunate reality in Australia that the vast majority of buildings get demolished for fashion or economic reasons, rather than the building envelope wearing out.”

So how can you prolong your home’s longevity?

Mr Haynes suggests investing in top-notch design, opting for higher density, or renovating instead of rebuilding.

“Better design means the home has a more timeless quality. It will be appealing well into the future,” he says. “And if you can surpass the average density for your suburb then it’s likely your building will be a lower priority for redevelopment.”

Renovating extends the lifespan of the existing home, but for long-term energy savings, you have to do it with passive solar design and energy efficiency measures in mind.

“By preserving the structure, you’re preserving that embodied energy,” Mr Haynes says. “You can make an enormous difference to the aesthetic value and liveability of your house by renovating.”

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