Andy's rantings - The Greeny Flat Experience

Jan 25, 2015: Latest Results and Electric Vehicles.

January 22nd marked the end of nine months of recording the performance of the Greeny Flat in its first year. As you can see from our Results Table, things are going very nicely and we are on track to meet our original goals.

To sum things up, overall:

we’ve exported (put into the electricity grid) […]

Jan 20, 2015: The GreenPower plot thickens

In our last Newsletter I wrote about the can of worms I dived into when I began looking into Switching To Green Power. Well things got even wrigglier when I received the following response from one of our readers. Mary is an energy auditor and consultant from Brisbane and she writes; ‘Hi Andy I was […]

Jan 18, 2015: Switching to Green Power

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve described some of the details of our solar power system and our surface mounted electrical system. All of this writing about electricity got me thinking about the source of the electrons so I finally got around to investigating our options for Green Power. From the beginning of the […]

Jan 11, 2015: Our surface-mounted electrical system

The zincalume coated picture rail in the Greeny Flat doubles as a conduit for the electrical system

One feature that most visitors to the Greeny Flat notice and comment on is our picture rail that doubles as a conduit for the electrical wiring in the house. For many years now I’ve been […]

Jan 4, 2015: Our Solar Power System

Everything is going very nicely at the Greeny Flat. Our passive solar shading is working well to help keep us cool on the hottest days. We’re lucky that we generally have cool nights in this part of the world. It allows us to open up the house at night and cool down the concrete slab […]

Dec 28, 2014: Sandwiches for Cathedrals

The Trouble With Cathedral Ceilings

Cathedral ceilings (sloped ceilings where the lining is attached directly to the underside of the roof rafters or battens) can be an attractive feature in any building and, especially in a very small home like the Greeny Flat, can help to create a sense of space by allowing for higher […]

Dec 24, 2014: December Results

Energy Positive with Renewable Energy

We’ve been living in and monitoring the Greeny Flat for 8 months now. A basic table of the results so far can be found on our Results Page. Looking at the Results Table you’ll see that we have now exported a total of 836kWh of electricity from the grid and […]

Dec 16, 2014: Eco-home Display Village Concept

Recently one of the people who came to visit the Greeny Flat during Sustainable House Day asked me, ‘What do you want to do next, now that the Greeny Flat is proving it is relatively easy to build an energy positive home?’ After thinking about this question for a while I concluded that there were […]

Dec 14, 2014: All New Homes to be Energy Positive by 2016.

Dear Santa, what I would like for Christmas this year is for the Australian Government to pass legislation requiring that, by 2016, every new home be designed and built to make more energy than it uses.

Is that really too much to ask?

On the one hand, if we look at the poor standard of […]

Dec 7, 2014: $41 Energy Bill for last three months

Back in September I posted an article in our Newsletter about our energy bill for the first three months of the Greeny Flat experiment. At that point I was pretty stoked about the fact that our entire energy cost for the first 91 days totaled $89.51 (or $0.98c/day) and that was for the three months […]

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