Sustainable House Day, Upper Lansdowne, NSW

Mount Olive, Upper Lansdowne   An attempt to build a comfortable sustainable house which belongs in the landscape..  

New Build:   Purpose Designed three year old home

Climate Zone: Warm Temperate

Architect/Builder: Gisela & Walter Duber www.duber.com.au. 

Unique Sustainable Elements featured in this home :

 Water Harvesting Systems We are not mains connected and four tanks totalling 63,000 litres supply water for the house and garden. Two tanks collect rainwater from the house and the shed and water is periodically pumped up the hill to two concrete storage tanks and then gravity fed back separately to house and garden. This minimises electricity use for pumping and makes water available during power cuts. An effective but simple first flush diverter is fitted which completely drains the pipes in dry periods.   All waste water (grey and black) is reused by being pumped (sub surface) onto the orchard after being treated by a horizontal reed bed treatment system.  

External Walls
Mud brick walls  with bricks made by Bellingen Bricks; size 250mm x 150mm x 400mm. The lintels are red ironbark recycled from old railway bridge timbers. Internal Walls The core internal walls are mud brick resulting in about 20 tons of thermal mass inside the house. The remainder are Cypress Pine stud walls.

Roof
Light green colorbond roof at 22 degree pitch. R3.5 insulation is fitted in the ceiling cavity and the main room cathedral ceiling was double insulated. The ridge beam is recycled hundred year old timber from the old Wingham abattoir, and the supporting post is the top of a tallowwood left behind by loggers. Floor Suspended tallowwood floor with tiles in the wet areas.

Window Treatments
There are extensive windows especially to the north (the views are special) where 900mm eves allow passive solar heating in winter, while blocking the summer sun. The cliffs to the east and west reduce the morning and afternoon heat, while the veranda on the west side provides afternoon shade. We investigated thermal coatings on the windows but rejected them as there was some concern about them scratching rather easily.

Solar or Wind Power Generation
The 2.5Kw BP and SMA grid connected photovoltaic system was sized to cover our electricity usage over the year but has not generated quite as much as we hoped, probably because the weather has been very wet over its 21 month life. It supplies an average of 7KWHr per day, which is about 90% of our current needs.

Heating & Cooling Heating
Is by a wood burning stove using dead trees collected from the property. The house was designed to channel the through breeze using large louvre windows. The main room has a high cathedral ceiling with a gable window which allows us to vent hot air quickly on summer evenings. The living space stays under 26° unless we get three consecutive days of above 40° temperature. Water Heating A Beasley solar hot water system is installed with a tank in the ceiling space and two panels on the roof. The tank is unpressurized and runs two thermosiphon loops, one from the panels and one from the wood burning stove via a heat exchanger in the first segment of the flue. Hot water runs through a coil of pipe in the tank and so is at the same pressure as the cold water. An electric boost is fitted but virtually never used.

Other
Most of the lights are commercial compact fluorescents which have the ballast in the fitting, but we have not yet found a suitable efficient solution for kitchen task lighting, as we find the LED downlights are not powerful enough. Food scraps are fed either to the chickens or the worm farm, and our veggie patch produces most of our vegetables, especially in summer. The orchard provides all the citrus we need and stone fruit, figs pecans and macadamia nuts. We started keeping bees last spring and so far our single hive has flourished and kept us in honey. 

More information on the house is available at http://www.lessthan2degrees.info/house/sustainable-house/

Directions
Head towards Lansdowne from the Taree airport roundabout.
10km further on (at Melinga), turn LEFT into Upper Lansdowne Road.  (Just before you get to this intersection you’ll see a “children crossing road” warning sign).
After 14 km you come to a “Y” intersection with Mt Coxcombe Rd (gravel). Stay on the tar (i.e. bear RIGHT) and go through Upper Lansdowne village (past the school and community hall).
Just after you cross the concrete bridge in the village, the road turns to gravel. 
A couple of hundred metres further on, turn RIGHT into Muddy Lane.
Go to the end of Muddy Lane and turn LEFT into Hogans Road.
Number 478 is just over the crest, on the right hand side.
Number 451 is 800 metres further on on the left just after a red milk churn >