Green Building - The Greeny Flat Experience

Feb 2, 2015: Rethinking the way we design and build

During the last week I’ve received a couple of emails containing links to stories about some innovations that could really cause us to rethink the way we design and construct buildings.

The first of these is called The Cubitat. It’s a 3m x 3m x 3m cube which turns the idea of a house inside […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

Oct 26, 2014: Last Sunday the Greeny Flat made 4 TIMES as much energy as it used!

The chart above shows the Greeny Flat’s energy use and production for last week. And the little box shows that on Sunday, Oct 19th, we used 4.18kWh of electricity and we produced 17.76kWh. That’s a production of just over 4 TIMES as much as we used!

But then the next two days were cloudy […]

Oct 12, 2014: Lessons learned so far

Cintia and I have been living in the Greeeny Flat for over five months now. Our testing and monitoring will continue for at least one full year so we have a long way to go and lots more to learn. Nevertheless there are a few lessons that we have learned already and will probably do […]

Oct 10, 2014: Why an all electric house?

The Greeny Flat is all electric, i.e. it has no gas, petrol or wood burning appliances. Even our lawn mower and weedeater are electric.

This decision was partly due to our desire to be able to clearly compare how much energy we use with how much we produce, a comparison that is much easier when […]

Sept 22, 2014: Great Day for Renewable Energy

Today marks the end of our fifth month of monitoring the Greeny Flat and we continue to produce well over twice as much energy as we are using. But that’s not what makes this a really great day for renewable energy around the planet… the GREAT thing that happened today is that the Rockefeller family […]

Sept 21, 2014: Greeny Flat Cost Analysis

Two of our primary goals for the Greeny Flat experiment were to try to build a small infill house that was ENERGY POSITIVE and AFFORDABLE. After nearly five months living in the house we’ve made well over twice as much energy as we’ve used so we are completely confident that we’ll meet the energy positive […]

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