We bought a house in Redcliffe in early 2010 suitable to meet all of our needs, being a working family with both of us employed, we needed a house with 5 bedrooms, 2 for the children, one for a nanny one for guests for our relatives to visit from Melbourne and one for Melanie and Karl.
A study was also needed as we work from home too. Indoor and outdoor living areas were generous and the property had a pool.
Problem -this was not a very sustainable place to live as the previous owner was spending some $800 (bi-monthly) on electricity and 1500L/day on water.
In addition the house was very noisy due to its proximity to the airport and the Tonkin Highway.
Solution: Got a home energy audit
Cut down useage:
Install and energy monitor.
install a freshwater ioniser for the swimming pool (reduce energy cost by 50%)
Roller shutters were installed on west facing and SW facing windows to keep out the hot summer sun.
double glazed windows with uPVC frames were installed in the master bedroom, dining room and front door.
turn off the reticulation and mulch the garden beds.
Install Solar hot water and 5.2kW solar panels (since upgraded to 7.34kW)
Gave away our energy hungry TV and replace with LED TV's
replace all halogen downlights and replace with LED's, replace all incandescent lights with CFL units.
rubber seals on all doors so as to enable efficient zoning of the home.
additional ceiling insulation in the way of R2.0 noise insulating batts giving a total of ~R4.0.
insualted all hot water pipes, including the ones buried in the ground!
Install ceiling fans in master bedroom and main living area, complete with dimmable fluro's.
worm farm, compost bin, veggies grown in the garden.
Recycled some cardboard and used as insualting material on the garage door.
installed watersaving showerheads, with in-line taps (soap up with water off) and dual flush toilets.
Switch to smartpower.
Result:
Energy usage now well under the national average having used just 5500kWhrs in 12 months for an average of 15kWhrs/day.
This includes keeping the house comfortable year round with ducted reverse cycle Airconditioning.
Home is a comfortable temperature and fluctuates very little, only a small use of the airconditioning is required and we do that in off-peak times only.
Solar system generates approximately enough energy to run our house and someone elses with average generating capacity of 33kWhr (or units) a day.
we sized the system to account for some of our CO2 emissions in terms of cars, food, airplane travel etc.
Our house will be open to the public for sustainable house day 2011.
I have invited some of the suppliers of things we bought / improvements we made
to make the house more sustainable to offer brochures etc.
So far interested I have
-AquaVic -freshwater ionisers run your pool with very little or no chlorine use.
-Perth double Glazing -those boys have been awesome and I highly recommend their work.
-Energy Matters - Suppliers of great PV systems
-Matera Solar -Energymatters Installers here in WA
-Matera Lite -suppliers of low energy lighting LED's that work!
Check out my system at http://www.pvoutput.org/list.jsp?id=3561
(July 2011) (
