Jan 31, 2020: How To Build a Fire-proof House

As I mentioned in last week’s Newsletter, the fire danger has subsided a lot over the last couple of weeks. Tomorrow will be another test with temperatures in our area predicted to be over 40C (104F) and hot, north-westerly winds. But next week is looking cool again so we’re not too worried at the moment.

As the dust and the smoke settles, Australia is starting to look at what we can learn from these horrendous fires that have so far destroyed about 2,500 homes. Building a house that can withstand an intense bushfire is a very difficult thing to do and I don’t claim to be any sort of expert on the subject. Personally I prefer not to live too close to an area of high bushfire danger. The Greeny Flat is nicely positioned within an easy walk to the bush but not surrounded by forest. So we can enjoy the natural environment without being threatened by it but we still went to a fair bit of trouble to make sure it is fire resistant enough to (hopefully) withstand a heavy ember attack.

South Coast House Survives Fires

With careful design and attention to detail this house came through a bad fire almost undamaged.

There seem to be plenty of people who do want to live right in the middle of the bush and many of them were the ones who lost their homes to the recent fires. The house in the photo above, however, was one that survived because it was very carefully designed and built to withstand a direct hit from a bushfire. Which is exactly what happened to it earlier this month. As you can see from the photo, everything burned right around it but the house came through virtually unscathed.

Here is a link to the article on the Southern Forest Life website which describes what happened and how this house survived, even though the owners evacuated and were not there to turn on the fire fighting pumps and sprinklers.

I found it very interesting reading the details of how they made this house fire proof and I think there are some valuable lessons to be learned. The metal shutters on the windows is something I’ve heard about but not seen before. As the author points out, many of the features that make the house fire proof also help to make it more energy efficient as well.

Hopefully these types of lessons will lead to fewer losses the next time the fires hit as well as houses that use less energy the rest of the time.

Jan 24, 2020: Back To Work

In last week’s Newsletter we focused on the fire threat that has been hanging over our lives for the last couple of months. Since then we’ve had more bad days and more nights with a house full of evacuees. We’ve also had some nice rain and some cooler weather which has greatly reduced the fire danger. Other areas not far away have had severe storms and torrential rain and my sister’s house in Canberra was hit by a severe hail storm which caved in her skylight and flooded her living room ceiling. Meanwhile, on the same day in fact, the western part of the state was subjected to a massive dust storm. So we’re getting hit with extremes of everything which is exactly what the climate scientists have been predicting.

The last week has been a bit cooler and calmer and they’re predicting more of the same for next week. So we’ve been able to relax a bit and think about getting back to work on the house renovations. We’ve got most of the floor laid and most of the kitchen completed (see photos below). Once the new kitchen is up and running we’ll be able to remove part of the old kitchen and frame in a small powder room to provide the house with a second toilet next to the back door. That will complete most of the interior renovation work leaving us with a bit more to do on the outside such as installing another rainwater tank and pump and redoing the fencing and landscaping along the north side of the house.

The new kitchen almost completed

My favourite detail of the new kitchen are these lovely old, art-deco cabinet handles which we are reusing from the old kitchen.

My favourite detail of the new kitchen are these lovely old, chrome-and-bakelite, art-deco cabinet handles which we have salvaged and reused from the old kitchen.

Jan 3, 2020: Childhood Beach Devastated By Fire

Fire strikes near Rosedale Beach

Readers will be well aware of the catastrophic fire situation around Australia at the moment. So far the Greeny Flat has been spared the worst of it although there is a big fire burning not far away. Tomorrow is predicted to be a very hot and windy day so we are in a high state of alert. Meanwhile the fires have affected many people and places that we know and love. My brother’s house narrowly escaped the blaze at Bawley Point a month ago. Good friends just to the north of us lost their pottery business and barely escaped with their lives and their home. Other dear friends were forced to evacuate from their holiday house at Rosedale on the south coast before it was overrun by fire.

This was particularly distressing for me and my family because, for my whole childhood, we had a holiday shack at Rosedale. Every year we used to spend many weeks relaxing, surfing and playing on the beach and in the surrounding bushland. We know the place intimately and it holds a very special place in our hearts. So it was heart-wrenching to watch the horrible scenes in the video in this article that appeared in The Guardian yesterday,

Thankfully no-one was injured as far as we know but reports are that 50 houses were lost in the little community. Our hearts go out to all those who have lost homes in these fires. Unfortunately this fire season is far from over and tomorrow is likely to be another shocking day.

The Greeny Flat and the house next to it are not surrounded by bushland but there is bush not far away. We’ve deliberately kept the area around the houses clear of trees and shrubs and there are almost no combustible materials on the outside of the buildings. We also designed and built the homes to be relatively fire resistant with metal roofs and wall claddings, metal flysceens on the windows, aluminium frames to the windows, etc. So we feel fairly confident that these houses will survive if and when the fire eventually gets here. But, if it comes to that, we won’t be here to see what happens. Our plan is to take our valuables, evacuate to safe ground and hope for the best. That could happen tomorrow, next week or next month but the way this fire season is going, it seems bound to happen sooner or later.

We’ll let you know what happens when it does.

Nov 22, 2019: Energy Positive Success

We’re making steady progress on the interior renovations to the old cottage next to the Greeny Flat. We were a bit distracted for the last couple of weekends due to opening the Greeny Flat for the Arts Trail which turned out to be a really nice thing to do. On all four days we had a steady stream of the nicest people you could hope to meet. Cintia sold quite a lot of pottery and we made lots of new friends so it was well worth the effort. Now I’m back to the renovations. We’ve hung the gyprock and are ready to plaster and paint. Then we’ll be installing the new kitchen which we ordered last week and the new flooring which is also on its way. Once we have the new kitchen up and running we’ll be able to take out part of the old kitchen (the rest will stay and become a sort of mudroom-come-butler’s-pantry) and close in a small room for a second toilet which will be handy in a four bedroom house.

As reported in our Newsletter back on August 30th we have had 5kW of solar panels installed on the roof and we are now fantastically energy positive. Since the new meters were installed in early September we have imported 450kWh of electricity and we have exported 1280kWh. That means we have put almost three times as much power into the grid as we have taken out and we’re thrilled to bits.

Obviously this is a good time of year for solar. It’s been cool and sunny and we haven’t needed to run either heating or air-conditioning (not that this house will need much of either now that we have completed all the energy retrofit work) so our solar production is up and our energy use is down. But we have been charging our Plug-in Hybrid Electric Outlander most days and it looks like we’ll be well and truly energy positive over a full year which is a great result for what started out as an old fibro cottage.

Below is the monitoring results for our best day so far which shows that we produced 36.46kWh or solar power which is very impressive for a 5kW system.

Monitoring results for our best day’s solar production so far.

You can also see that we consumed 10.85kWh and a lot of that was for charging the car. I have circled the times when I had the Outlander plugged in. I usually try to only charge it during the day but if I know I will need it in the morning I will sometimes charge it late at night. I try to wait until after 9pn to plug it in because that is when the evening peak has passed so my charging the car won’t put any further stress on the grid.

What the monitoring doesn’t show is our off-peak water heater. I wrote about this at length in our Newsletter back on October 18th. I won’t go into the details again here but, suffice to say, our Enphase monitoring system is not configured to keep track of the electricity we use for off-peak water heating. I was going to try to get Space Solar to reconfigure it so it would show the off-peak but I’ve decided that the better solution will be to take the water heater off the off-peak circuit and put it on a timer to run during the day when we have all that excess solar power.

Meanwhile we continue to monitor the Greeny Flat which we started doing when we moved in back in April 2014. So it’s been five and a half years now and I’m very happy to report that over that time we imported 8107kWh of electricity and we exported 19424kWh. So we put about 2.4 times as much power into the grid as we took out! Given that one of our original goals was to make a house that was energy positive (i.e. produces more power than it uses) we can safely declare that the Greeny Flat Experiment has been a resounding success!

Another one of our goals was to try to use as much harvested rainwater as town water. So I’m happy to report that, over the last five and half years, the Greeny Flat has used 226167L of tank water and only 109168L. That’s almost exactly twice as much rainwater as town water. So the Greeny Flat has met or exceeded our expectations in every way.

Also worth noting in regard to the solar power system is that, so far, it has produced approximately $3700 worth of electricity (that’s about $673/year). At the time we installed it the cost was $4299 for a 3kW system (they’re cheaper now). So our simple Return on Investment has been about 15.7% and, by this time next year, the system will have almost paid for itself.

You beauty!

Nov 1, 2019: Art Studio Trail This Weekend

As mentioned in last week’s Newsletter, the Greeny Flat will be open this weekend and next weekend from 10am – 5pm for the annual Southern Highlands Art Studio Trail. In past years we’ve enjoyed traveling around the Highlands and visiting various artists in their studios and this will be our first time opening for this wonderful event. This year…

‘…over 90 artists will be gathering in 46 studios…’ including…’painting, sculpture, pottery, bookbinding, printing, woodwork, jewellery, weaving, textiles, photography, illustration, drawing, botanical art, ceramics and more.’

So there should something for everyone.

You can find more information at the Art Studio Trail website here and we hope to see you over the weekend.

Right now we’re off to the opening party at the Southern Highland Artisan Collective in Robertson which promises to be a fun evening.

Below are a couple of examples of Cintia’s ceramics and a couple of my photos in case you’re interested in what we do when we’re not building or renovating sustainable homes.

Thanks for reading, Andy

Small vase by Cintia Yamane Lemann 2019

Photo by Andy Lemann 2019

Oct 18, 2019: Solar Monitoring and Upcoming Events

In our Newsletter on August 30 I wrote that our new solar system had been installed but that we weren’t able to turn it on yet. Well, we’ve had it turned on and operating for about three weeks now and it’s performing brilliantly. I’m very happy with the monitoring system provided by Enphase except for one small issue and one big one. I’ll get into the details in a minute.

Upcoming Events

First a quick bit of shameless self-promotion…

Meet Damon Gameau at the 2040 Regeneration Weekend in Bowral.

I wrote a very positive review of the 2040 Movie by Damon Gameau in our Newsletter back in June.

Now the movie is coming back to Bowral but this time Damon Gameau is coming with it. Here’s an excerpt from the Event Brite page about the event

From 6pm on Friday 25 October 2019, an exclusive screening of the film, 2040 will take place in The Mill’s courtyard and be followed up by a panel discussion including filmmaker, Damon Gameau, Bob Hawke Landcare Award winner, Charlie Arnott, Hamish Mackay Director of Biodynamics2024, Lizzie Buscaino from Piccolo Farm and Joanne Dodd from Quarter Acre Farm.

Then…

On Saturday from 10am until 6pm, The Mill will come alive with more 2040 film screenings, sustainability workshops, expert speakers, local fresh produce for sale as well as artisan stalls to enable locals to be informed and take immediate action.

Which brings me to the self-promotion bit… I have been invited to run one of the ‘Sustainability Workshops’ on Saturday at 2:30pm. The workshop is entitled ‘How to design a house that keeps itself warm in winter and cool in summer’.

The film screenings and workshops are free but apparently registration is essential although I’m not quite sure how you do it. I think this Eventbrite page (click on Register) is supposed to list all of the workshops but mine’s not there yet. But maybe give it a try and hopefully all the workshops will be listed by the time this Newsletter goes out.

2019 Art Studio Trail – Southern Highlands

Cintia and I have decided to open the Greeny Flat this year for the annual Southern Highlands Art Studio Trail over two weekends in November (the 2nd/3rd and the 10th/11th from 10am to 5pm).

With around 100 artists gathering in 46 studios across the region, the Trail offers something for every artistic interest. Don’t miss this once-a-year chance to meet the artists in their studios, see where they create their work and buy direct from the studio door. Painting, sculpture, bookbinding, printing, woodwork, jewellery, textiles, photography, drawing, botanical art, ceramics and more…

Cintia is the real artist in our household and will be showing some of her beautiful, functional ceramic art like this bowl she made recently.

One of Cintia’s lovely ceramic creations.

I also dabble in a bit of photography and will be showing some of my photos as well. Here is a link to a my photography website if you want to see some of my work.

Solar Power System Monitoring

Regular readers will know that I think anyone with a solar power system should have some sort of monitoring to make sure that everything is working properly. It’s also a good idea to monitor the electricity usage in your home to make sure nothing is malfunction and to help you look for ways to save energy.

One of the best monitoring systems comes included with every Enphase micro-inverter solar system which, as I mentioned above, is what we have recently installed on the house next to the Greeny Flat. Here is a screenshot from the Enphase Enlighten webpage for our system. This is where we can log in to see our daily electricity production and consumption.

191018 Ephase Solar Monitoring

This is the page for yesterday and you can see in the top left that we produced 30.55kWh, we consumed 3.77kWh and we exported 26.73kWh for the day. At the top right you can see the production figure for each solar panel individually. This is the great thing about the Enphase system because, if there is ever a problem with the system, we’ll be able to see immediately which panel is causing the problem. The bottom of the page shows the complete graph for yesterday in 15 minute intervals with solar production in blue and household consumption in orange. The dark blue shows the net production exported to the grid after any daytime consumption is deducted (i.e. the light orange bars deducted from the light blue bars). And the dark orange shows the energy imported from the grid.

This is all great information but, as I mentioned above, there are two problems. The small one is that the graph is in 15 minute intervals so if I want to know how many kW the system was producing at any time I have to take the production figure for that 15 minute period (in the graph above you can see that the bar highlighted was for 1:15pm and the net production was 1,069Wh) and multiply it by 4 to get an idea of the total system production (e.g. 1,069 x 4 = 4.27kW). This is a bit clunky and confusing but we can work with it.

The bigger problem is that the system hasn’t been set up to monitor our off-peak hot water electricity consumption. This means that the consumption figures are missing our single biggest user, the water heater. I have contacted both the installer, Space Solar, and Enphase Australia directly and they both told me that I was the first person to ask to monitor their off-peak hot water system so they aren’t even sure if the system can do it. They think it can but they won’t guarantee it. They’re supposed to be providing me with a price to try and set it up so I’ll have to let you know what happens.

Meanwhile the lesson is, if you already have an Enphase monitoring system be aware that it won’t be monitoring all your electricity usage if you have an off-peak hot water system. Or, if you’re considering getting an Enphase system and you have off-peak, I would suggest that you make it a condition of the contract that they set it up to monitor ALL of your electricity usage, including the off-peak.

Cheers and maybe we’ll see you at The Mill next week for the 2040 Regeneration Weekend.

Oct 11, 2019: Queen St Renovations

We’re now in the thick of the interior renovations to the Queen St house (the original house in front of the Greeny Flat). We started by knocking down the old brick chimney in the kitchen. Luckily there’s a quarry nearby which takes old masonry and concrete, crushes them and recycles them into new road base material so nothing was wasted.

The old brick chimney in the kitchen had served its purpose and was in the way of where we need a new door so out she comes.

Mind you this won’t be the kitchen for long as we’re removing one wall of the living room and opening it up to what will become the new kitchen.

The current view from our living room through to where the new kitchen will be.

As luck would have it, the wall we need to remove (that’s the brown framing in the photo above) is holding up about half of the roof so we can’t just tear it out. First we have to build temporary support walls (that’s the blue/green framing) on either side of it (only done one side so far) to hold up the ceiling and the roof while we take out the old wall framing and install a beam in its place. It’s an interesting puzzle figuring out how to do that without the roof collapsing in the meantime.

The other interesting piece of this puzzle is how to do all the work without damaging the beautiful cornices in the house. One of the quirky delights of this house is that, while most of it was fairly typical of post-war fibro cottages, they went to the trouble (and probably considerable expense) of installing gorgeous cornices throughout the house. This might be the nerdiest thing you’ll ever read from me but the cornices are actually the highlight of house. The following photo doesn’t do them justice but it might give you a bit of an idea.

Poor detail of the cornice in the living room.

This is the cornice in the living room and they are different and special in every room. We can’t match them or reproduce them so it’s fun to try to figure out how to remodel the house without damaging them.

I’ll let you know how it all turns out.

Cheers, Andy

Sept 28, 2019: Greta vs Growth

16-year-old sticks it to the UN.

Regular readers of this Newsletter will know that I think the pursuit of perpetual growth is the root of all kinds of evil. But the concept that ‘Growth is Good’ is so deeply ingrained in the global economic, political and social fabric that none of our so-called ‘leaders’ have the brains or the guts to question whether it’s true.

So I was both heartened and dismayed this week when Greta Thunberg included the following phrase in her address to the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York…

‘We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!’

I was heartened because, finally, someone was smart and brave enough to stand on the biggest international stage and question the holy grail of growth. But I was dismayed that it took a 16-year-old Swedish school student to break the silence. The idea that we can achieve infinite economic growth on a finite planet with finite resources is so ludicrous that it should be ridiculed by every ‘leader’ at every opportunity. However it is so pervasive that it has become invisible and sacred and no political or economic leader will dare to question its sacredness.

Hopefully the scolding they just received from a school girl will wake those ‘leaders’ from their dreams of growth before they sleep-walk us all right off a cliff.

You can read the full transcript of Greta’s speech here.

And the following is a piece about the evils of growth which I wrote in our Newsletter back in November 2015 and which I repeat here because nothing has changed except that now one person has spoken up. Good on you Greta!

Perpetual Growth = Cancer

We are labouring under a global economic system that is founded on the principle that ‘Growth is Good’. This founding principle requires perpetual growth in every measure of economic achievement. There is no question that this philosophy has led to an unprecedented spurt of technological and scientific endeavour, but at what point do we stop to question whether this is beneficial? Has all this economic growth actually made our lives any better? Has it been worth the cost in terms of human suffering and damage to the planet? I wonder what an aboriginal elder would have to say on the subject. Indigenous people all around the world seem to have a deep understanding of the need to nurture the earth that nurtures us. So what do they think about perpetual growth? To me it looks a lot like cancer… it grows and grows, gradually consuming, and eventually killing, its host. Are we on the same path?

When you think it through, the only way we can continue to ‘grow’ the global economy is by encouraging more and more people to consume more and more resources. I think this is why population growth is such a taboo subject… it lies at the heart of a belief that pervades every government, nation, religion and business in the world… the belief that ‘growth is good’. The addiction will only end when the resources run out unless we voluntarily, and globally, decide to break the habit. But right now, like any true addict, we are in complete denial over the cause of our problems.

From ‘Growth’ to ‘Balance’

This economic paradigm of perpetual growth is killing the planet. I strongly believe that we need to change the goal from ‘growth’ to ‘balance’. Can you imagine a global economic system that strives for balance? For a start we would have to figure out how many people the planet can sustainably support. Then we’d have to find a way to more fairly distribute the available, sustainable, renewable resources to ensure that everyone has a decent quality of life. These thoughts would not sit well with the people and institutions that run the current system and who, not coincidentally, gain the most from it. I may well be crucified for uttering such blasphemy in the face of an economic and political system for which growth is god but we have these 7.4 Billion elephants in the room and I think it’s time someone mentioned it.

Of course I’m not the first to do so… there are all sorts of people out on the fringes, shouting from the hills that we have to consider the limits to global growth. But no-one in the middle of things, no-one at the centre of the global stage, seems willing to risk putting their hand up and saying, ‘there is a huge problem looming and we had better take a long, hard look at it.’

Sept 6, 2019: Sustainable House Day 2019 next weekend.

Click on the image above to visit the SHD website.

Just a quick note this week to remind all our readers that Sustainable House Day is here again. This year it’s on Sunday, September 15th. As usual the Greeny Flat will be open from 10am to 4pm. Naturally all our readers are most welcome to come along and say hello. For those who won’t be in our area on the day, you can sign up on the Sustainable House Day website and find out what’s happening in your part of Australia.

Because we usually open the Greeny Flat on Sustainable House Day we never get to go and see the other houses that are open in our area. This quick search on the SHD website shows there are 6 homes open this year within 50km of Mittagong so if you’re planning to visit us, you might like to go along to a few of the others as well.

We hope to see you here and, if not, we hope you have a wonderful day wherever you are.

Cheers, Andy and Cintia

Aug 30, 2019: Solar Installed

In last week’s Newsletter I mentioned that we had ordered the solar power system for the house next to the Greeny Flat. I was expecting it to take a month or so to get it installed. So I was pleasantly surprised to get a call from the installers (Space Solar based in Sydney) yesterday to say that they had a cancellation and they could come today. Naturally I rearranged my schedule so I could be here and told them to go ahead.

Part of our solar system being installed on the West side of the roof.

A couple of very nice fellas showed up this morning (almost on time) and proceeded to install our system with a minimum of trouble. Of course it helped that we had planned for it in our previous renovations on the exterior of the house including leaving an accessible pathway to get wires down from the roof to the meter box.

A very tidy installation (note the ‘chase’ next to the meter box for running wires).

Last week I listed the main reasons why we chose an Enphase microinverter system including improved performance, exceptional monitoring and better safety. But one advantage I hadn’t considered was that, because there is no need for a large inverter box next to the electricity meter box, the installation is very neat, tidy and unobtrusive. This is particularly good for this house because the meter box is right next to the front door.

Microinverters are located in small boxes under each panel.

The photo above shows the rack-mounting system ready for the panels to be attached with one microinverter located under each solar panel.

All told I was very happy with the installers and the job they did… except for one thing… and this is a BIG pet peave of mine. Where they had to run wires through the roof space of the house, they moved some insulation out of the way and they weren’t careful enough about putting it back properly.

This photo shows where insulation was moved to allow wires to be installed and then wasn’t put back…. bloody typical!

The sad fact is that these blokes were MUCH better than most tradies who do work in attics. In my work as an energy auditor and energy -efficiency consultant I have had the opportunity to inspect a LOT of attics and roof spaces and I can honestly say that I have hardly ever been in a roof space where the insulation had NOT been stuffed up by an electrician, a plumber, an antenna guy or a heating/cooling installer. In most cases I find insulation thrown all over the place as if the tradie in question was really annoyed that someone had been so rude as to put some stupid fluffy stuff in the way of his (or her, but usually his) crucial job. At least our guys made a reasonable effort to put the insulation back where it belongs. Most tradies just chuck it out of the way and leave it there with great, gaping holes in the thermal boundary of the home.

So my stern advice to you is… don’t pay any tradesman (or woman) who has been in your attic or roof space until you have carefully inspected to make sure that they have put the insulation back where it belongs.

I’m afraid this is just another symptom of a pervasive attitude in the Australian building industry that insulation is not important and is just an inconvenience and an unnecessary expense.

Anyway, we sorted it out and our attic is now properly insulated again and we have a shiny new solar system on our roof.

The completed part of our solar system on the East side of the roof.

Unfortunately we can’t turn it on yet (apart from checking that it is working today) because we have to wait for a new smart meter to be installed and configured to allow for our solar to be exported to the grid and earn us a Feed-In Tariff. If we were to turn on the solar now we would actually be charged for the power we sent out to the grid as well as for the power we take from the grid. So we won’t be doing that. It should take about two to three weeks for the new meter to be installed then we can start enjoying the benefits of our new solar system.

Finally I want to give full credit to my mother who owns this property as an investment. Not many landlords are prepared to install solar on the roof of a rental house because typically, the landlord bears all of the cost while the tenant gets all of the benefit in the form of lower electricity bills. But Mum was willing to take a bit of a gamble because a) it seems like the right thing to do and b) we think we will be able to recoup the cost of the solar over the next ten years via an additional charge of about $12-13 per week on top of the normal rent. This shouldn’t be too hard to sell to tenants given that they are likely to save at least $30 per week on their power bills from to the solar on the roof. And it would still give Mum a 10% return on her investment. And that’s without factoring in depreciation or the potential increased value of the property. Not as good as the 18-20% return most home-owners can expect from putting solar on their roof but much better than you can get from a bank and much safer than the stock market.

I’ll let you know how it all pans out.