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.

Lighting

Lighting is really difficult! Illumination is like sound; it has so many qualities that finding what you want is more luck on the part of the consumer than anything else. Lights can be more or less strong, more or less directional, and it simply isn't something you can work out in a lighting shop, surrounded by other light sources. Some spotlights, for example, are really for security lighting; others are less concentrated and will provide comfortable light for outdoor dining.

Lighting shops, in my experience, are usually filled with astonishingly ugly fittings. Some years ago we discovered Beacon Lighting. Their shops tend to be at least 60% attractive fittings, and even the unattractive ones aren't that bad, except maybe for this one:

How on earth could anyone think this was attractive? Let alone practical! But I digress.

We ended up with the following, all from Beacon Lighting:

Kitchen	Triple LED spotlights on bracket, LEDS for under wall cupboards
Family Room	LED downlights, stainless steel Typhoon fan
Study	Laconia pendant
Entry	Recycle a fitting
Kids' Playroom	Rocket light
Stairs	Project wall sconce
Patio	Sentinel spotlights

HTML Tables

And here are the problems we encountered along the way.

Choice: it's hard to know exactly what you want, and whether it will provide adequate illumination. In some areas, like exposed outdoor lighting, the range is very small. This can mean you choose very quickly, or that you go away thinking, "None of the above!" Even without the returns we made, several shopping trips would have been necessary just to decide on fittings. On the positive side, Beacon were always very accommodating with returns and so on, and their staff are friendly and helpful (if occasionally short on technical knowledge).

Vue from Beacon, for our kitchen, was an easy decision. Few of these rail-type fittings have such clean lines:


The second was supply: lots of things had to be ordered in for us as the Beacon stores don't hold very much stock. And the most convenient Beacon store is 20-30 minutes away, down the motorway. We had to come back for these Sentinel lights for our patio:


Thirdly, we had a problem due to inadequate technical information. The LED downlights were 62mm, not the standard 80mm. The fact that they had no user-replaceable parts wasn't mentioned either. Seriously -- once the LEDs failed we were supposed to pay an electrician to remove the fitting from the ceiling and throw it away. This sounds very wasteful to me even if the fitting is supposed to last 30 years -- for one thing, what if one light fails long before the others? Is anyone going to gamble against Murphy's Law?


Of course we didn't know about the size until after our electrician had drilled the 80mm holes in the ceiling. He replaced the downlights with standard-size, user-replaceable LED fittings, which were cheaper than the ones we had found. Light fittings are expensive and it's worth seeing what your electrician can get at trade prices, especially things like downlights, which all look the same and which nobody will actually be examining closely.

Next, the Laconia pendant's glass shade was broken when the electrician opened the box. Bad luck, I suppose, but it meant a trip back to Beacon for another one.


Then we looked at the light fitting we planned to recycle, and discovered that the rod kit for the old fitting had disappeared during the building process, leaving us with the bowl. Our electrician, understandably, won't fit the bowl to a fitting it wasn't designed for, so we are waiting to hear back about a rod kit that will fit.

The Domus lights, which we bought from OzLighting, have a transformer which must be set 60cm above soil level. For most applications, this is fine: you attach it to the house wall and run the cables where you want them. This won't work on an island bed, however. Guess where we want it? Our electrician is getting a suitable transformer for us.

This is one of the fittings that didn't cause any dramas. Of course, we haven't tried putting a globe in it yet!

Bifold Doors and Chokoes

We have reached lockup stage now. All our doors are in, including the bifolds for the family room. Aren't they lovely?


In winter, the sunlight will stream in to warm the slab in the family room. In summer, the pergola will be covered with vines for shade. In fact, I already have a choko (chayote to some) growing on the windowsill towards next summer. My long-term plan is for a passionfruit vine to cover the pergola, but even if I plant one as soon as I can, there won't be enough of it to provide shade this year. The choko vine, however, will be luxuriant in months.

The choko vine and the passionfruit vine are staples in Sydney, though chokos -- traditionally grown over one's shed -- are much less common than they were. The newer dwellings don't have enough space for a choko vine, for one thing, and secondly, a lot of us grew up eating chokoes way too often! I saw some nasty big yellowish ones at the shops today for $3.99/kg, way too much, and at least twice as big as they should have been. Of course, the one I bought was even worse: I could see it was starting to sprout, which was why I wanted it! I don't understand why greengrocers persist in selling such old chokoes.

I saw the aggregate and the planter box mix being wheeled in this morning to fill the herb bed, but I can't really plant my choko until the pergola is painted. I might sneak in a few late bulbs, though. Or if I can find my strawberry plants... if they've survived... I might pop them in.

Lots of Glass

The first glass installed (apart from replacement of cracked panes in the older part of the house) was the window in our family room. The saw is set up for cutting the window architrave, but look at all those glass doors!


Here's the architrave installed. Note the picturesque view of our future driveway and the fence.


Here's where some of the sliding doors went:


The idea is that we can use the garage as extra space for parties. Handy in wet weather or when the kids take to playing country music.

The other doors are aluminium bifold doors for the family room (as the Geek says, not quite as nice as the cedar ones, but considerably cheaper). There will be lots of sun coming in to our family room, especially in winter, to heat the concrete floor. The house won't be quite so dark or cold. This frame was installed on Friday, so I suppose the doors will go in on Monday.


In the meantime, Lizzie keeps an eye on the materials stored in the garage.


We have found evidence of her inspection visits in various parts of the house, but we won't elaborate...