Andy's rantings - The Greeny Flat Experience

August 22, 2014: Four months and going strong.

Drought is bad for water harvesting but good for a solar powered house!

Today we’re one third of the way through our year-long experiment and things are going very well. It’s been a very dry winter, not quite drought here but very little rain. The silver lining to the lack of clouds is that it’s […]

July 22, 2014: Three month’s results… All Positive!

Our third month’s results are just in and I have to say that I’m feeling extremely optimistic for meeting our goal of an Energy Positive year. For each of our first three months we’ve made a lot more energy than we’ve used. In fact, if you look at the updated table on the Results page, […]

July 4, 2014: Energy Independence Day!

Well, ok, so we’re not exactly energy independent but for the second month in a row we did make about twice as much energy as we have used in the Greeny Flat.

Click here to view the Results page which shows the monthly and accumulated results of our little experiment. You’ll see that for the […]

May 27, 2014: Greeny Flat on ABC

Last Friday, apart from getting a Blower Door Test done on the Greeny Flat, we also had a visit from Justin Huntsdale, a reporter with ABC Illawarra. Justin had heard about the Greeny Flat from a mutual friend of ours and came up to do an interview and take some photos. I’m not sure yet […]

May 27, 2014: Cool Fridge Wins Energy Star Wars

In the process of moving into the Greeny Flat, Cintia and I decided that we needed to get a new fridge. The one we had been using was an older Fisher and Paykel that we borrowed from a friend and it had icing-up problems. But it also had a 4-Star Energy Rating sticker on the […]

May 23, 2014: Testing the air-tightness

Everyone knows that a leaky or drafty building can be pretty uncomfortable to live in. It can also lose a lot of heat in the winter time and end up being a bit of an energy hog. So a big part of the job of making the Greeny Flat energy efficient was to try to […]

May 19, 2014: First month’s results… VERY promising!

Well we’ve been monitoring the Greeny Flat for almost a month now and the early results are very promising for us to reach the goal of being Energy Positive over a full year. As you’ll see from the following graphs, we’ve already made significantly more power than we’ve used in spite of the fact that […]

Apr 22, 2014: Earth Day marks the start of one year of monitoring

Today is Earth Day which seemed like a fitting occasion to begin monitoring the performance of the Greeny Flat experiment. So for Earth Day next year we’ll host a get-together on site to present the results which will hopefully prove that the Greeny Flat has made more energy that it has used over a full […]

Mar 24, 2014: start of a big week

This is going to be a big week on the Greeny Flat project. Cintia and I have to be out of the main house by the end of the month (next Monday) so the Greeny Flat has to be ready to occupy by the end of the this week. Luckily the council will allow us […]

Mar 7, 2014: BASIX is a JOKE!

I was pleased to learn from our local building inspector that we can obtain an Interim Occupancy Certificate (I’ve been lived in Montana for twenty years so I’m still getting reacquainted with how things work here at home). This means that Cintia and I will be able to move into the Greeny Flat as soon […]

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