Put your energy into measuring electricity consumption

EVERY time you press down on your toaster, it costs you money. But how much? And how does that compare to your second fridge? Or the air conditioner?

Something’s been missing in between our power points and our utility bills. Most of us don’t know how much electricity we’re consuming, let alone which of our gadgets take most of the load.

Five years ago, Sam Sabey started tinkering with a way to show electricity consumption in real time, working on the principle that we can’t change what we don’t measure. The project began at the Melbourne HackerSpace, a weekly gathering for tech hardware enthusiasts.

Mr Sabey’s hobby has now become a business, called Smart Energy Groups. His product – the SEGmeter – is a set of current sensors that detect the electricity flowing through the different circuits in your home. It sends the information to a web platform, which displays it in all manner of graphs and charts.

“It’s the ultimate energy saving gadget,” he says. “The data tells a story – it’s a wonderful tool to help make the invisible visible.”

Earlier this year, Mr Sabey and his family moved house. With the SEGmeter, he discovered that their new home was consuming 400 watts in the middle of the night. One of the main culprits was the air conditioner, which drew 60 watts, even when it was switched off.

“It’s about understanding when and where we’re using electricity,” he says. “Every house is different and they don’t come with an energy efficiency manual.”

A SEGmeter for householders with 6 different channels, costs about $1000, including installation. Mr Sabey says it’s best suited for big electricity users who want to reduce their bills, and also for houses with solar panels, because it reveals the split between production and consumption.

They’re also good for the curious-minded. Peter Reefman, from Energised Homes, has set up a similar system, using the Current Cost EnviR monitor. He’s developing his own set of online data displays.

Some of his findings are quirky: “I now know that when my wife cooks herself bacon and eggs for breakfast on our induction stovetop it costs 6 cents,” he says.

Others are more significant: his solar hot water booster was running too long during the night, because the temperature setting was unnecessarily high.

“It’s a really good way to show you where your energy blackspots are – things such as my hot water unit. Some of them will be really low-hanging fruit, but they can be difficult to find without ongoing monitoring,” he says. “It’s also a gentle reminder to check how you’re going, because behaviours can improve and they can also slip back.”

Mr Reefman says that while the expensive meters will help households save money in the long run, there are cheaper alternatives. Simple in-home displays are available from electronics stores and eco-retailers for around $100.

Until now, smart meters haven’t delivered useful information to householders, but that seems set to change. Electricity distributor Jemena is trialling a web portal that will display its customers’ electricity data online. But, like the simple in-home displays, it will show total consumption, not a breakdown of what uses what.

If you want to measure individual appliances, you can try a Power-Mate, an Australian-made gizmo that plugs in between the socket and an appliance and tells you exactly how much juice it’s guzzling.

Read this article at The Age online

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

There are good reasons to buy your home off the back of a truck.

WHEN Andrew and Tilley Govanstone first saw their house, it was in Vermont, in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs.

“It was ideal,” Mr Govanstone recalls. “It was a classic 1950s Australian home. It had a lot of glass down one side – but it was all facing east.”

But the house’s poor orientation didn’t matter. A few months later, it was delivered to their vacant block in Portland, in four parts. There, it landed on new stumps, with the glass oriented north to best catch the sun.

That was 15 years ago. It cost $40,000 to purchase and move the home, plus rewiring, plumbing and re-plastering costs. “For $50,000 we got a fantastic split-level house. Every day we wake up in there is a pleasure,” he says.

Before they decided to recycle an old house, the couple had drawn up plans for a brand new dwelling. They had previously lived in a passive-solar designed home and become hooked on the comfort, natural light and cheap bills.

They wanted one of their own. “But the reality was that it was going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and we didn’t want to spend that sort of money,” Mr Govanstone says.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

By relocating a house they could get the orientation right, at least. And it gave them another kind of comfort too.

“We were able to pay it off very quickly,” he says. “We know other people who’ve made the same decision and have been very happy, because they’re not paying for it with their lives: they’re not locked into significant mortgages. It is extremely liberating.”

But it’s not without pitfalls – a lot can go wrong if the dwelling isn’t transported with care. Mr Govanstone suggests asking the moving contractor for the details of recent customers. Likewise, it’s smart to check your council’s rules before you invest too much time.

Under the building regulations, relocated houses are expected to meet the six-star rules, but surveyors have discretion to allow partial compliance where that’s not possible.

If that’s the case, is it still a good environmental choice? Ralph Horne, director of the centre for design at RMIT, says the life cycle benefits of reusing materials are significant. Unless you’re moving it a very long distance, the transport impact will be small in comparison.

For ongoing performance, consider whether the design suits the climate zone in the new location (for example, a Queenslander won’t cope well in Castlemaine) and the appropriateness of the orientation.

“Our studies of new housing in Victoria show you can lose a star of energy rating performance – and pay higher bills – if you point the house in the wrong direction,” Mr Horne says.

Relocated houses usually need to be re-plastered, and that’s a perfect chance to install insulation.

“The costs of the second-hand dwelling are much lower than a new one, and some of the savings should be ploughed into upgrades: adding insulation, sealing gaps and cracks, and adding double-glazing or shading according to the local climate,” he says.

As well as re-orienting their house, the Govanstones laid insulation in the ceiling and walls. They’ve since invested in a 5-kilowatt solar array and begun to replace the old windows with double-glazing. The next items on their list are solar hot water and underfloor insulation.

“With every passing year the microclimate within the house gets better,” he says.

Read this article at The Age online

Reducing our impact requires more than efficiency alone

IN 1940, Dr Ted Trainer’s father bought a bush block 20 kilometres southeast of central Sydney, and called it Pigface Point. Dr Trainer and his family still live there and, by choice, their way of life has changed little.

The skills popularly associated with wartime austerity – darning, patching, fixing and vegie growing – remain prized at Pigface Point. Just four solar panels provide enough power for six residents living in the main house and a caretaker’s cottage.

Dr Trainer has built his own windmill and rigged up motors and pumps attached to the 12-volt electricity supply.

“I like to talk about my lifestyle being that of a scruffy peasant. I almost never buy anything new. But there’s no sense of deprivation or hardship whatsoever,” he says. “In consumer society we work three times too hard, for the sheer idiocy of producing all the junk we don’t need.”

Instead, he spends his time on his research and hobbies – among them, sculpture, model-making and painting.

Dr Trainer, a conjoint lecturer at University of New South Wales, is a sociologist and long-time environmental campaigner. His way of life is more than a matter of personal freedom. He argues that renewable energy alone won’t be sufficient to mitigate climate change and overcome resource scarcities.

“There’s overwhelming case now that our level of production and consumption is far beyond anything that’s remotely sustainable and it has to be dramatically reduced,” he says. “Lifestyle changes of a kind that are to do with changing your showerhead fittings or buying a Prius are totally inadequate.”

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

In an essay on the Simpler Way website, ‘How cheaply could we live and still flourish?’, he outlines his rough calculations about the footprint of a society based on his kind of radically simple living.

Although he concedes that most people would prefer a life less austere, he believes the inhabitants of a thoughtfully designed town could enjoy their lot on less than one-tenth of today’s largess.

“We have to move to systems that are mainly localised,” Dr Trainer says. “I’m talking about big changes that will take a long time. Don’t worry, just start doing the things you can in your household – and more importantly, join in community initiatives – the common gardens, swap networks and skill banks.”

New Yorker writer David Owen shares some of Dr Trainer’s preoccupations. In his new book, The Conundrum, Mr Owen challenges the notion that we can overcome environmental problems by way of more efficient technology alone.

For example, although modern artificial lighting is vastly more economical than candles, that doesn’t mean we use less energy on lighting. Rather, we’ve chosen to illuminate every corner of the night.

Likewise, he suggests, a truly green car might be one with no air conditioning or radio, uncushioned seats, a low top speed and terrible fuel efficiency. “You’d be able to get your child to the emergency room,” he writes, “but you’d… take public transportation to work.”

In other words, an eco-friendly vehicle is one that you don’t drive. For householders and policymakers, Owen’s argument is that frugality must come before efficiency.

“If we impose limits on our consumption of fossil fuels, advances in efficiency will enable us to live well with less damage; if we pursue efficiency alone, we will only make our problems worse,” he writes.

Read this article at The Age online

Green developers are getting a toehold in the market.

FIFTEEN years ago, when Mike Hill and Lorna Pitt sought financing for their eco-housing development, WestWyck, the response wasn’t wholly enthusiastic.

“We put up our model for funding and the banks were really sceptical about the shared facilities,” Mr Hill recalls.

The ground has shifted since then. In the planning for the next stage of development, their financiers pushed them to add more communal features.

“They said the most popular aspect of WestWyck has been the shared living,” he says. “They put it down to a Brunswick thing, but we think it’s a broader market change.”

For the second stage, Mr Hill has teamed up with BioRegional, the founder of the One Planet framework – a set of principles to help property developers, businesses and governments reach for the highest environmental and social standards.

While those goals remain well off the radar for most new housing projects, the changing attitude of the banks is a sign of what is becoming possible. BioRegional recently established an office in Australia and it has already held discussions with several developers and councils.

Ed Cotter, from BioRegional Australia, says the One Planet framework springs from an analysis of ecological, water and carbon footprints – figuring out what the Earth can produce renewably and what’s required to for us live within those means.

To help individuals achieve that “one planet lifestyle”, developers must aim to meet a series of targets, including that buildings are carbon and water neutral by 2020, and only 2 per cent of domestic waste ends up landfill (by total weight produced).

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

The goals are “stretch targets”, Mr Cotter says – even more so in Australia because of our current reliance on coal and cars. But the stretch is necessary. “If everyone lived like an average Aussie, we’d need four planets to sustain our lifestyle.”

For Mr Hill, the framework is appealing because it’s internationally recognised and covers more than the thermal efficiency of the dwellings.

“We like it because it’s a cradle-to-grave set of indicators, from the way in which people work on the project through to post-occupancy – the food people eat and the way they move around,” he says.

Set on the site of the old Brunswick West primary school, WestWyck is already an unusually green development. The first stage, finished in 2008, comprised 12 dwellings – some new and some converted from the old schoolhouse.

The terrace houses were rated up to 8.5 stars, and grey and blackwater treatment systems were built into the site, along with water tanks and landscaping to reduce stormwater runoff. An early study completed by CSIRO found that occupants were using nearly two-thirds less water than average.

The new plans allow for another 18 apartments and extra communal facilities – a shared function area, workshop and a spare room that residents can book for overnight visitors.

Mr Hill says his other major focus is on sustainable transport. He’s aiming to radically cut car use and ownership, and promote public transport, bike riding and walking instead.

Among the incentives will be covered bicycle parking, a WestWyck bus shelter and a designated space for a car share vehicle. Car owners will pay for parking on a sliding scale, with four-wheel drives attracting the highest fee. Electric vehicle–owners will get their spot for free, along with free GreenPower for recharging.

Read this article at The Age online 

Can community-funded solar panels transform our skyline?

WITHIN year and a half, 400 photovoltaic panels could be glinting from a single commercial roof in the City of Yarra – and all of them will be owned by the local community.

The medium-scale solar project would be the first of its kind in Australia. It’s kicking off next Saturday, May 19, at a public meeting in Clifton Hill organised by Yarra Climate Action Now.

Neil Erenstrom, a volunteer with the group, says they’re conducting a pre-feasibility study and have begun to identify possible hosts, such as factories, schools or large retailers.

“We’re looking at installing about 100 kilowatts, which will produce enough energy to power about 40 typical households in Yarra,” he says.

The project won’t power households directly; instead, the co-operative will sell the electricity to the owner of the building, at a price roughly equivalent to the domestic retail rate. Investors from the community will receive dividends for as long as the panels are producing – probably about 25 years.

Mr Erenstrom is a solar photovoltaic engineer. He’s worked in the industry for eight years, but this project would allow him to participate in another way. “I want to see solar electricity everywhere and I think it’s starting to become financially viable. But I’m a renter, so I can’t put solar panels on my own roof,” he says.

The community-solar scheme is targeted at people who, like him, can’t install their own renewable electricity.

In the City of Yarra, nearly half of all residents are tenants – almost double the proportion across the rest of the city. And many more live in apartment buildings, have heritage overlays or roofs that are shaded or poorly oriented for catching the sun.

The group has learnt from the funding and ownership model established by Hepburn Wind, a community-owned wind farm near Daylesford. But because it will operate on an even smaller scale, its administration costs will have to be minimal.

“We’ll need a very efficient, skin-and-bones type operation, with lots of volunteers and probably some grant funding,” Mr Erenstrom says.

For the time being, the project will make the best financial sense on buildings where the panels’ output is “behind the meter and below the load” – that is, it will be used to offset normal usage.

But as time goes on, the business case is only going to get better. “The price of panels fell by about 40 per cent in 2011 and could do the same again this year,” he says.

Several other community groups have got the same idea. By the bay, Locals Into Victoria’s Environment (LIVE) has met with the Port Phillip council with a view to funding hundreds of panels for the new roof on the South Melbourne Market.

“We’d be like a stall holder, except we wouldn’t be selling fruit and vegetables – we’d be selling clean, renewable electricity to people in the market,” says David Robinson, from the group.

It’s very early days, but they’re hoping to secure financing to install the panels and on-sell them to local investors. If it’s successful, Mr Robinson says they’ll make the template available for any community to follow.

“We don’t plan on stopping at just this one roof in Port Phillip,” he says. “We have lots of big-box buildings with roofs that have nothing on them other than tin.”

Read this article at The Age online

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

One Melbournian has turned an epiphany into an example.

IN September 2006, Melton resident Gavin Webber attended a movie screening organised by his workplace. “There were about 100 of us and we all went and watched An Inconvenient Truth, of all things,” he says.

Before that day, the IT-professional admits, he was a “conspicuous consumer”.

“I’d buy a new computer every year, entertainment gear, DVDs, clothes – I didn’t care where they came from. I was just steaming along like anybody else.”

But halfway through the documentary on climate change, he was physically and emotionally overwhelmed. “This wave of guilt from sins past came over me,” he says. “I started to think, ‘Holy shit, why don’t I know about this? This is going to affect the future of my kids, my unborn grandkids and everybody – all life on the planet – if we don’t do something about it.’ By the end, I was blubbering.”

Afterwards, when his colleagues caught a cab back to the office, Mr Webber walked instead, trying to come to terms with what he’d just seen.

“I worked in South Yarra at the time, so I walked back along the river. I was crying and angry, and wondering: ‘What am I meant to do?’ I was totally confused.

“But when I got to work I started researching and found out what I could do. It all went from there; I haven’t lost that passion or the sense of urgency that spurs me on everyday to live a more sustainable lifestyle,” he says.

There was a minor catch, however. After a fortnight observing his strange behaviour, Mr Webber’s wife, Kim, was worried. “She thought I was having an affair,” he laughs. “I was just researching like fury, trying to find out more and more.”

When Kim saw the documentary, she had a similar realisation. Within four months, the family had reduced their household power consumption by nearly two-thirds.

Encouraged by friends, Mr Webber decided to start a blog. He called it The Greening of Gavin. He posts something new nearly everyday: podcasts, videos, photos, opinion pieces and DIY advice, on topics ranging from peak oil adaptation to mozzarella-making. Recently, he won a blog of the year competition run by eco-magazine ReNew.

“I’m an average bloke. I’ve got a nine-to-five job during the week and I’ve got four kids and an average suburban block. If I can do it, anyone can,” he says. “It’s been very rewarding – taking our home from a bog-standard, four-bedroom house and converting it into a sustainable living paradise.”

Inside, one of the more unusual steps the family took was to convert open archways to walls and doors, so they could zone heating and cooling to smaller living areas. Outside, they’ve installed several large vegie beds, built chook runs and planted over two-dozen fruit trees.

“The front yard is no longer lawn, it’s a 13-fruit-tree orchard,” he says. “As soon as you walk through the main gate, you see the food growing and you get a big eye-full of solar panels on the garage roof. We designed it that way.”

It’s all part of spreading the word. To that end, Mr Webber has also founded a local sustainability group. So far, the members number in dozens, not thousands, but it’s growing. “Melton wasn’t that sort of place and now it’s starting to change,” he says. “You’ve got to start somewhere.”

Read this article at The Age online

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Get ready to haggle at garage sales all over the country.

THREE years ago, Andrew Valder was helping organise a community festival in Bondi Beach.

“We had things like surfing, music, film and arts,” he says. “But we also had a garage sale trail component.”

Around Bondi, he says, abandoned furniture is as common as bikinis and board shorts. The suburb has a transient population and people often ditch their belongings when they skip town. While some of the goods are scavenged, most wind up in landfill.

“We gave people the opportunity to register a sale on a website, give it a name, and list what they were selling,” Mr Valder says. “It went bonkers. We hoped to have 30 garage sales on the day and we got 130.”

Spurred on by their surprise success, Valder and his team decided to take the Garage Sale Trail national last year. It went bonkers again. There were over 3000 sales on the day, attended by about 80,000 shoppers. On average, each seller earned $330.

This year’s Garage Sale Trail will be held next Saturday, May 5. To be part of it, you can list your event online and post pictures and prices for items. Bargain-hunters can search the sales and map out your route for the day.

Rachel Botsman, author of What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, says the Garage Sale Trail is a perfect example of the way technology can help to redistribute goods from people who don’t want them to people who do.

In her book, she summarises the costs of our hyper-consumption society, from environmental disasters such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to the straightjacket of an earn-spend-store lifestyle. Then she explains how the internet is enabling a different approach altogether by efficiently matching people who want to share, barter, lend, trade, rent, gift and swap.

She argues that the rise of this ‘collaborative consumption’ draws on a realisation that we can’t solve our problems by buying more “greener goods”.

“A hybrid car is fantastic, but it still sits there for 23 hours of the day – that’s an efficiency problem,” she says. “In creating environmentally better products, we still create more of them. That isn’t a long-term, sustainable solution in itself.”

Instead, she sees the start of a deep shift in the value we place on ownership. “People are getting used to accessing the benefits of things, rather than needing to own them outright.”

Ms Botsman says another benefit of the Garage Sale Trail, and other tech-fuelled initiatives like it, lies in getting people together face-to-face, away from their screens.

“We’re just starting to see how technology is enabling us to forge very local connections and that’s the next wave of change – it will help bring us back to our neighbourhoods,” she says.

In surveys from last year’s trail, participants reported they’d met an average of six neighbours for the first time. “It’s really about building community and giving people an opportunity to do what they want to do, which is to connect with one another,” Mr Valder says.

And they have fun in the process. “You see such interesting things for sale – someone has listed a horse and cart this year,” he says. “Last year someone listed a whole house. They also listed a flatmate, but I’m not sure how serious that was.”

Read this article at The Age online

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Pep up your soil and cut landfill waste with spent coffee grinds.

WHEN Shane Genziuk was very young, he loved gardening – but by his teenage years, he’d lost interest. Then in 2010, he had an epiphany. A stray onion had sprouted in his cupboard; on a whim, the 39-year-old IT-manager popped it in the earth.

“I didn’t think twice about it, but later when I saw it had started to flower all by itself, I thought it was so beautiful. I just wanted to try growing other things,” he says.

He approached his new hobby with zeal, but something slowed him down. Mr Genziuk and his family live on very sandy soil in Bentleigh.

“It’s a real struggle for gardeners out here,” he says. “I wanted to build up my soil fertility as naturally as possible, so I didn’t want to use commercial fertilisers.”

Surfing the web for tips, he came across a reference to used coffee grounds. “I got my hands on some and started using them in compost and it was so good I needed more,” he says.

Now, he collects grounds from five different cafes. He uses them to make compost, together with other unwanted resources mined from suburbia: his neighbours’ grass clippings and wilted vegies from a local greengrocer.

“I bring home tonnes of stuff and compost it all and create this amazing soil. But coffee grounds are the basis of it.”

Mr Genziuk started a blog, called Ground to Ground, extolling the virtues of collecting the daily grind. He has even created a logo for participating cafes to put in their windows.

While he doesn’t keep track of participants, he knows of at least 50 cafes, and more than 100 householders who are taking his advice. In his CBD office, over forty people collect from several cafes – between them, they haul away about 200 kilograms each week.

A similar scheme, called Compost Mates, has been trialled elsewhere in Melbourne. Coordinated by Cultivating Community, the project involves householders collecting coffee grounds and certain kinds of kitchen waste (no meat, no plate scrapings) from cafes.

The organisation’s composting guru, Hannah Moloney, says the used grounds have a good balance of carbon and nitrogen and are slightly acidic. “They’re perfect to use in compost, layered with a mix of materials,” she says. (Fallen autumn leaves and food scraps are easy, free accompaniments.)

Ms Moloney says gardeners can also apply spent grounds to vegie patches as mulch (in moderation), or spread them around seedlings as a snail deterrent.

In Clifton Hill, residents have been collecting buckets of coffee grounds and kitchen scraps every day from two venues, Squirrel Café and Café Quince. “They’ve diverted over 8 tonnes from landfill in the last year,” she says.

For Mr Genziuk, observing the way we discard coffee grounds has been a catalyst for thinking more broadly about our way of life and the resources we waste. Now, his fertile backyard is not only stocked with vegies, but also fruit trees, quails, and fish (in an aquaponics system).

“I think we have a lot of problems in society, with the way we’ve become so disconnected to natural cycles,” he says.

“Coffee is just one thing, and every café generates at least 50 kilos of grounds a week. Every time I see a café, I know they serve coffee, but now I know they give away fertiliser as well.”

Read this article at The Age online