One of our original goals for the Greeny Flat was to make it water efficient. Before we built it we were hoping to use at least as much tank water as town water. We put meters on both the tank and the town water lines and I’m very pleased to report that, after five years, we have used more than twice as much tank water as town water.
We are almost finished with the renovations to the old fibro cottage next to the Greeny Flat and one of the last jobs has been to install a pump and connect the house to the two water tanks. So that was today’s project which involved our wonderful plumber, Tony Dirks, and I spending about two hours scratching our heads and trying to figure out how to set it up so that we could have the following three options:
- Run both the house and garden on town water;
- Run both on tank water; or
- Run the house on town water and the garden on tank water.
It turned out to be quite a jigsaw puzzle but we eventually figured it all out and we now have the whole place running on lovely clean rainwater plus we have the other two options up our sleeves.
The finished jigsaw puzzle.
Aptera 1000-Mile Solar EV
This article from New Atlas caught my eye this week about a new solar-powered electric vehicle called the ‘Aptera’. Who knows if this will be available in Australia but at least it seems like a step in the right direction.
‘The top-spec Aptera can self-generate as much as 45 miles (72 km) of range per day in ideal conditions, which is more than twice the average daily mileage of American car owners. And that doesn’t have to be a terribly large amount of energy, thanks to its extreme frugality.’
The super-aerodynamic Aptera EV.
What interests me is that, apart from being covered in solar panels (and looking very futuristic), the Aptera has electric motors in the wheels. I look forward to the day we can convert any old car to an EV simply by adding a battery and swapping some or all of the wheels with in-wheel motors.
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