2050 Vision: Sustainable Civilisation

New car

2010-12-15T09:07:00.002+10:00

It's always a compromise when you replace an item with a more efficient one - some of the efficiency gains are lost by the embedded energy and other costs of producing the new item.

But anyway I've had my current car for nearly five years. It uses a lot of fuel. The official rating says it emits 274g of CO2 for each kilometre travelled.

I'm about to place an order for a new car. It's one of those small European turbo diesels and it's rated at 145g CO2/km. That's going to almost halve my vehicle emissions, and in light of oil production having already peaked it's going to be economically beneficial too.

My Copenhagen Letter to Dirty Kev

2009-11-02T13:51:00.004+10:00

I used to battle depression over the climate crisis. These days I'm having more trouble with anger towards "the establishment". Obama makes me want to hope, but I'm terrified that he'll do a Kevin on the climate too.

There's just over a month to go before Copenhagen and activism is in top gear. I went to a local 350.org gathering last weekend and just now I took advantage of Greenpeace's Dirty Kev campaign to send a letter to the federal government. The form letter is nice, but I had more to say:

Above is a form letter which I support 100%. Personally I wish to also express my anger and disgust at the way your government has handled the greenhouse gas issue over the past two years. Your action has fallen appallingly short of the inspiring promises and uplifting rhetoric we heard in the months either side of the election.

Professor Garnaut gave you sound, realistic advice which you arrogantly (or is it fearfully?) discarded. Your proposed CPRS does almost exactly the opposite of what is required to make a meaningful, morally-justifiable contribution to protecting the climate for my children. Your renewable energy legislation actually undermines efforts to reduce our nation's use of fossil fuels.

My family, along with thousands of others around this country, is prepared to pay actual costs, suffer actual hardship and make actual sacrifices to help realise an actually sustainable future for humanity. And what a wonderful future it could be!

Please: have the guts to face up to the reality of this climate crisis. We need genuine leadership to inspire this country to make strong decisions as individuals and communities. We need:
- radical improvements in energy efficiency
- deep cuts to energy consumption
- rapid phase-out of coal power
- to stop wasting money on CCS
- real investment in appropriate cost-effective renewable energy
- an actual debate on nuclear options (Gen4 designs, especially thorium-powered ones, and yes I'd have one in my back yard in preference to coal)
- a national decision to get off our arses and do something worthwhile

In closing, it's only fair to also thank you for your investment in education and internet infrastructure. I am in absolute agreement that building a sustainable, prosperous future requires the best possible education culture and world-class information technology infrastructure. But it will all be futile if we fail to turn around the global GHG emissions trend and get back into safe territory (currently estimated to be sub-350ppm) in the next several decades.

If you have even a mild concern about the climate and global warming etc, please make yourself heard now. There are lots of ways you can express yourself - sending Dirty Kev a letter is quick and easy.

Low energy

2009-09-05T09:04:00.002+10:00

To quote Tim Hollo on his Crikey blog:

"There’s a lot of burn-out in the climate movement right now. A lot of tired people, a lot of grumpy people. I know - I am one!"

It's really hard to maintain the intensity, especially in the face of the CPRS farce.

Looking ahead: 350.org day of action on October 24th, and the Copenhagen conference. I'm musing about a rebuttal to the conservative argument that's been prominent lately, ie that human influence couldn't possibly be changing the climate.

6.57kWh/day!

2009-05-12T07:31:00.002+10:00

Quick one.

Somewhere in March we took up the State Government's ClimartSmart Home Service and had a power meter installed. I thought it wasn't reading very accurately because the figures it was showing recently seemed quite a bit lower than the trend I'd been tracking through the regular meters.

But I hadn't read the meters for about six weeks. Did it just now - and our consumption has dropped again, down to just 6.57kWh/day for the past 44 days.

Apart from the fridge needing a bit less power thanks to cooler weather (1.2 instead of 1.5) we think the biggest drop comes from stopping our 4-yo son from having a pedestal fan blowing on his face all night, which he became accustomed to over summer. He liked it on the fastest setting.

I'll have to plug it in and measure its power draw to see if the numbers are in the right ballpark.

Water efficiency has become a lifestyle

2009-04-06T19:14:00.004+10:00

It's a significant day for my part of the world: for the first time in a hundred months our regional water storage capacity is above 50%. At its lowest in 2007 we had only 16.7% and the government was seriously considering the need to truck or ship drinking water in to sustain the roughly two million people in the immediate area.

Thankfully that worst-case scenario never eventuated, and there have been a number of rain events that have brought the levels up bit by bit. Most interesting, though, has been the success of water conservation programs.

Under the most severe restrictions residents were urged to target an average per-capita water use of 140 litres each day - an enormous reduction from previous norms of around 300. By the time dam levels rose to 40% in July last year, we had stayed below "Target 140" for 52 consecutive weeks. Consumption dropped to as low as 112 litres per person today in one week near the end of that period.

Reaching the 40% storage level was the trigger for easing of restrictions and the revision of our target to 170 instead of 140. And what do you suppose happened to our water consumption?

I've trawled through the weekly press releases to obtain the reported usage stats since Target 140 was introduced almost exactly two years ago and graphed them against the target at the time. Blue line shows water consumption per person per day against the red line which is the target in place at the time: 140 and 170 respectively. There are 66 weeks reported for Target 140 and 32 for Target 170, both with a couple of weeks gap over the New Year breaks.

Visually, you might think that with the relaxed restrictions our water use went up dramatically. But in fact, the averages for each target period are 131.8 and 138.3 respectively - still under 140 even with the higher target!

Very shortly we'll be operating under a Target 200 regime. It's my hope that Brisbane residents have taken the water conservation message to heart and will continue to keep their consumption well under the nominal targets.

Because despite all the good news, our State Government still wants to dam the Mary River and is building desalination plants that will be powered by burning coal.

Oh well, it's a start.

Stats update

2009-03-29T08:59:00.003+10:00

It's the end of March, about to start a new calendar quarter, and a good time to review data for the quarter just ending.

Here's an interesting figure: our 1kW PV array has produced exactly half as much energy this quarter as our home has consumed. On average, the array produced 4.20kWh per day since the start of January while we consumed 8.40kWh per day. Just a coincidence - but a nice neat 50% figure nonetheless. Got me musing about the possibility of doubling the capacity and going off-grid.

On average, we exported 1.84kWh per day to the grid, which is just under half of the energy produced by the panels. Doing the sums, we must have imported just over 6kWh a day from the grid to meet our household demands.

The new fridge has been pretty steady at just under 1.5kWh per day, or 18% of our total needs. And the energy-guzzling computer my employer provided has been kept in check with an average daily consumption of 0.38kWh, or around 4% of our total. It has taken some very aggressive energy saving measures to achieve that, but I'm reasonably happy with that result.

Just one more factoid to close out the post. This week our PV array crossed the 1MWh line for total energy produced.

Earth Hour? Try Earth Lifestyle

2009-03-29T08:35:00.002+10:00

Awareness is the first step, I suppose, towards effecting a change in behaviour. So I probably should keep my inclination to pooh-pooh the whole "Earth Hour" thing in check.

Suffice to say: the amount of energy saved by switching off lights for one hour a year is going to make no noticable difference to the Earth or our continued existence on it, and giving people the idea that caring for the Earth requires us to give up electric light could backfire badly.

I pretty much ignored Earth Hour last night. Continued playing chess with my daughter, listening to some music. Our household energy meter said we were using around 200W total power - though admittedly the meter is rather inaccurate at those low levels.

My point? Conserving energy needs to be a core value that drives behaviour each and every day, not a once-a-year stunt.

Thorium links

2009-03-01T15:35:00.003+10:00

Here are a few links to video presentations about the promise of thorium-fuelled nuclear reactors. There's a bit of duplication but each has some unique aspects and they differ in style.

Joe Bonometti and Kirk Sorensen (Google Tech Talk via YouTube)
David LeBlanc (Google Tech Talk via YouTube)
Robert Hargraves (WMV video)

Oh, and look! Jim Hansen (a leading climate scientist from NASA) advocates the development of thorium reactor technologies in an open letter to his new President, Mr Obama.

What if the energy/climate crisis was solved?

2009-03-01T13:55:00.007+10:00

The reality of Peak Oil is pretty much indisputable as far as I'm concerned. If we can't find an equivalent alternative energy source in a big hurry, there's no escaping that the world is going to change dramatically. That's the underlying premise of the Transition movement.

But what if we do come up with an alternative energy source? One which doesn't change the climate, which won't be as destructive to the landscape as coal mining, which doesn't require practically eternal waste management to avoid poisoning the biosphere, which is affordable and practical, and which can scale up fast enough to address the twin crises of Peak Oil and Global Warming?

It's an incredibly tall order. But I'm becoming increasingly hopeful about the possibility of one particular technology, which I've written about before: the thorium-fuelled molten salt fission reactor.

Environmentally-conscious people have an almost instinctive reaction against anything "nuclear", and I understand that. On the basis of long-lived radioactive waste alone I also agree with it, in respect to the current fleet of uranium-fuelled reactors. But the fact is that thorium-based reactors have been designed and even tested which don't suffer from any of the major drawbacks of uranium-based systems.

Features include:
- Abundant, stable, safe raw fuel (100% usable ore vs 0.7% usable from uranium)
- Passive reactor safety (cannot overheat, not pressurised, no complicated mechanical control system)
- Proliferation-resistant (in particular it produces no plutonium)
- Produces very small amounts of relatively short-lived waste (~300 years, certainly manageable)
- Can burn high-level waste from other reactors
- Simple enough to mass-produce in a factory and deliver on a truck
- Electricity probably cheaper than today's coal-based prices

It sounds so good, why wouldn't it have been done before? Well it actually was done before in the 60's and 70's, but the US at the time was more interested in creating plutonium for their weapons program. Hence the molten-salt reactor research program was shut down. Research has now restarted in eight or so countries, including the US, India, France and Japan. Incidentally, Australia has the world's largest reserves of thorium, followed by India.

There is a fairly real prospect of this kind of mass-produced, cheap, safe (enough) reactor technology being available within 15 or 20 years, with known fuel reserves sufficient to power humanity for several millennia.

So what if that came to pass?

Well... it would help. But it wouldn't be sufficient to solve the problems of over-population, destruction of ecosystems, resource depletion and so on. In some ways it could actually make them worse, by providing humanity with the means to continue on with its awful business as usual.

So even if we did solve the energy problem there'd still be plenty of reason to keep working on sustainability in general. That's probably the way I'll be approaching the Transition work - it's absolutely vital if we don't find a new energy source, and it's still hugely worthwhile even if we do.

Transition

2009-03-01T13:26:00.002+10:00

I've had a link for the Transition Culture website in the sidebar over there for ages, and for the Sunshine Coast Energy Action Centre, too. In case you've never clicked on them, I ought to mention that the Transition movement is all about preparing communities for a decreasing availability of oil. It originated in the UK but has started to spread around the globe. SEAC is at its heart a Transition initiative for the Sunshine Coast... but being about an hour's drive away from me it seemed rather contrary to the point for me to try and get involved in the wonderful work I hear they're doing up there.

It's beyond me to start something like that in my own area. And it's especially challenging here because Brisbane is nothing like the kind of conglomerate town and village structure of the UK and even the Sunshine Coast. It's one enormous sprawl, with a big central city council. Not on the scale of somewhere like Los Angeles, but still big enough.

So I've been watching and waiting to see how a Transition initiative might get off the ground in Brisbane, and finally it has started to happen. I had the pleasure this morning of meeting with some of those involved in the early stages of a Brisbane transition "hub", which will play a role in fostering, supporting and connecting transition groups all around the city. (That's my paraphrase, not actually endorsed by anybody.)

Not surprisingly, this group has been brought into existence through the work of people who are already recognised for their efforts along parallel lines - people from FoodConnect (a local CSA cooperative) and the actively green communities based in some of Brisbane's inner suburbs. Links have been established with SEAC and, it seems, with a similar group based in Sydney.

At this stage there's a lot of "networking" going on, literally finding out who's doing what around the city and joining the dots. Apparently there's a very handy permaculture gardener who lives in Bald Hills but tills the soil down in Morningside. I'm hoping to make their acquaintance in the near future.

This is all very welcome as far as I'm concerned. The quiet on this blog has reflected the lull in my life with regards this kind of community engagement. Hopefully the opportunity I've been waiting for has arrived.

How does my garden grow?

2009-01-31T21:40:00.002+10:00

Beans have gone mad. Tendrils in all directions, nasty when you get one caught on your neck. They're covered in tough little hairs which are angled back down the stem, so it slips easily forward but is highly abrasive going backwards. But there's trouble brewing here... one of the six plants, one on the end, is dying. Either it's diseased or something destroyed its roots - every leaf on it is wilting and the stalk is turning yellow. Rather like what happened to some of our capsicum plants last year.

Passionfruit are good. At least the birds seem to think so. Damn birds have eaten the best of them. I've taken to picking at the first hint of a purple blush and then letting them ripen in the kitchen. Dozens of fruit on the vine and still more flowering and setting.

Basil is huge, but insisting on going to seed. Also afflicted with the wrinkly leaf syndrome that the hibiscus display, but it doesn't seem to kill the plant and the leaves still taste great. Oh but the small green grasshoppers all over it might be a problem.

Parsley has gone into recession. It was enormous, don't know what happened but it's died back to about a third its earlier size. Most of the stalks and leaves look healthy... so hopefully it'll stick around.

Chillies... ah, the chillies. With the kids in the house we don't get to use chilli a lot. Had the opportunity the other night to try one of ours fresh for the first time. Oh my dog. Honestly the hottest little pepper I've ever eaten. Great flavour. Looking forward to using those more. The bush hasn't grown much but it's still fruiting well.

Rosemary and chives doing great. Marjoram gone mad and stringy, needs a prune. Sage looks like lace, thanks again to the little grasshoppers. Chickory exploded into seed (not that we care much). Spring onions have not grown noticeably in months... they just sit there looking healthy but too few to harvest.

Pumpkin (we think). Something that volunteered from scraps in the chook pen. It started life at an opportune time, when the chooks were not able to be confined to their coop. Grew enough to poke a runner out the opposite side of the pen into the yard. Then I renovated the hutch and shut the chooks in for a couple of days. Every leaf inside the coop and even a flower or two was eaten back to the stem. No worries, the bits outside the pen are thriving and have just flowered.

Mystery marrow. More volunteers, this time from the compost which we used in pots to try and grow tomatoes and petunias. They have similar leaves and flowers to pumpkin but don't seem to want to take over the world like pumpkins do. Whatever, they're looking great. As are a couple of tomato bushes which managed to peek up around the marrow.

And finally, we have planted some citrus trees. Lemon, mandarin and orange, up the back between the shed and the chooks. Little fellas still, will have to wait a number of years for anything from them.

What chicks want

2009-01-31T21:19:00.003+10:00

While I'm on the subject of chickens... In the past six months I've learned some things about chook psychology.

During the day time, chooks seem to like resting on the ground, especially in the dirt, but they want a good long view at ground level - presumably so they can see any potential dangers coming. Ideal spots include hedges and low shrubs. Cool, loose dirt or leaf litter provide comfort, interest and sometimes a hidden snack.

At night it's a different story. Chooks want to climb as high as they can get and will go to extraordinary lengths to find a good perch. I guess the logic is that when it's dark they can't see things coming to eat them, so they might as well just try and get out of the way. Chickens aren't smart at the best of times but once the sun goes down their brain really switches off. They'll flap and squark like crazy if you pick 'em up while sleeping, but they'll go right back to sleep wherever you put 'em down. If they haven't been eaten everything must be OK. Funniest thing is when their head slips out from under their wing and hangs down limp below the level of their feet.

All of that is useful when you're thinking about building a home for chickens. This day/night dichotomy is why I'm trusting a four-foot-high wire fence to keep out chickens which even with clipped wings made it up onto a six-foot fence to sleep. Fingers crossed.

All things chicken

2009-01-31T20:45:00.003+10:00

1. About a week ago, our oldest chicken started laying. Lovely Henny Penny has been producing an egg each day. They're not magical or anything. They don't even taste any different to the free-range eggs we've been buying from the shops for ages now. But they're as fresh as they come and there's something special about food which comes from your own back yard.

2. Not sure if I've mentioned this (and too lazy to check) but we are back up to five chickens now. We bought two new hatchlings a few weeks back. Just to be clear, these are chooks six and seven, having "lost" one young chick and given away a rooster. We're trying to be more hands-on with this pair than we were with our second lot, hoping to foster the kind of pet-like relationship we have with Henny Penny as opposed to the touch-me-and-I'll-scream-bloody-murder attitude that Steggles and Nighttime have sadly adopted.

3. I haven't finished renovating the laundry yet. But I have raised the roof and added a second level to the chickens' hutch. Much to my frustration, the chooks wanted nothing to do with the hutch that I'd poured so much time and effort into - other than to use it as a stepping stone every evening to aid them getting up on to the top of the fence where they'd sleep for the night. (And in the morning they wouldn't jump back into the coop, no they'd be down into the yard and shut safely out of the coop where their water is.)

Now the roof of the hutch is at the same height as the fence, the second level is completely open on two sides (one long and one short) with the other long side closed off with a piece of shadecloth; they cannot jump up onto the fence any more and they have a nice big perch running the length of the hutch about 1.5m off the ground. Not only do they sleep on the perch and stay confined in the coop, but with the lower half of the hutch now open at the top they come in through the side door and jump up. And Henny Penny obligingly chose the nesting boxes as a good place to lay her eggs.

4. Much as we enjoy having our pets sharing our space, especially when the three older chooks do cute things like sit on the doorstep in the morning waiting for somebody to bring them something to eat, having chicken shit all over the outdoor bbq area is something we're not willing to live with. So this arvo I purchased more wire and some garden stakes and erected a no-frills 4-foot fence to exclude the chooks from our entertaining space. I used the large square-mesh wire because it's cheaper, uses less material, does the job and is ideal for climbing plants. Thinking of growing some peas. Bet the damn chooks eat 'em. Have yet to construct the gate.

5. Free-range chooks are spoilt for choice. With all those nice bugs and seeds and leaves to eat, they can turn their beaks up at lousy kitchen scraps. Sigh. There are some things they do enjoy: bread crusts and watermelon skins are the favourites so far. Most everything else gets left to rot. I've got fussy kids, fussy worms and now fussy chooks. At least the compost bin can't spit anything back out at me.

Too much to say

2009-01-04T14:36:00.003+10:00

Ironically, it's been quiet here because there's too much to talk about. Or maybe it's because there's been too much talk about.

Since I started doing this the world's attention has been brought quite sharply to bear on most of the issues that concern me. There's so much high profile discussion and activity going on that my little blog seems rather superfluous. Which is great!

I just want to highlight a couple of local bits of good news.

1. Brisbane folk are now habitually conservative with their water. We managed to meet the 140L/person/day target under extreme restrictions and even now that the dams are heading towards 50% capacity we're still sitting well under the 170L revised target. I just read my water meter for the first time in 201 days, and our total household usage over that period averaged only 194L per day - actually less than the previous six months when we were watching like a hawk.

2. Politics is (generally) swinging in the right direction for sustainable civilisation. The election of Obama is of course globally significant, but even here at home we've seen the Traveston Dam project put on hold, willingness to regulate agriculture in order to protect the Great Barrier Reef, plans for floating desalination plants shelved, proactive measures from government to promote energy efficiency and GHG reductions, community gardens... heaps of stuff.

3. The combination of environmental/sustainability concerns and the economic crisis is driving a swing away from "consumerism". I so hate being thought of as a "consumer". I want to be a "contributor". But anyway, it seems that I'm far from alone in my back yard garden tinkering, chook raising, material recycling and "waste not, want not" attitude. Newspaper articles are even using words like "frugality" in a positive lifestyle sense!

So here's hoping that 2009 continues in this trend. There will certainly be bad news this year (I predict a sudden resurgence in the price of oil at some stage, going even higher than the peaks of last year) but there is also an atmosphere of hope. As I heard it said on a BBC radio interview yesterday, a crisis is an opportunity for change.

Cool! Stats

2008-12-12T12:18:00.002+10:00

Past 11 days... average consumption 6.55 kWh/day, of which 1.36 was used by the new fridge. 32% of our consumption was supplied directly from our solar panels (just over 2 kWh/day) while another 2.64kWh was exported to the grid each day.

As a result of the low consumption and strong sunlight, we are now in negative territory for energy costs over the past 102 days (not counting the fixed service fees). The credit for our exported energy will exceed the charge for imported energy by about $2.

We've also had heaps of rain, so the tanks have been full almost constantly for the past six weeks or so.

More garden photos

2008-12-05T19:08:00.003+10:00

This rain and warmth is amazing for plant growth.

Too much effort to embed images in here when you can click and see them all over at my gallery.

Some of them you'd have seen before but there are new ones:
- beans growing beautifully and just today poking out of the cage
- pots where we planted tomatoes and got some volunteer cucumbers or something
- passionfruit vine from the neighbour's place going nuts on our chook pen
- first ever mangoes on a tree planted by a previous resident
- what we think is an avocado that I lopped off ages ago due to disease, regrowing
- tomato bush which "died" with some kind of wilt suddenly springing back to life

Quick stats

2008-12-01T07:07:00.003+10:00

It's been a great week on the electricity front. Household consumption was 6.86kWh/day. The new fridge has averaged 1.3kWh/day, about a 35% improvement over the old one.

Excluding fixed monthly service fees but including the solar feed-in tariff, our electricity costs for the past 91 days are, in total, $2.62. That's less than three cents a day.

Stats Update

2008-11-24T07:54:00.003+10:00

Initial figures from the meter attached to the fridge are good. Including the initial cooling effort required after turning it on for the first time, it's averaged about 1.4kWh per day over the past four days. I've reset the meter this morning to correspond with reading all the other meters so I'll be able to build up a better picture of it over time.

The other energy figures are also good. For the past 39 days:
- PV generation up to 4.62 kWh/day
- Household consumption down to 7.88 kWh/day
- Export up to 2.26 kWh/day

We've had more than enough rain recently so the tanks are still supplying water for laundry, toilet and gardening. Hot water system needed boosting one evening during the rainy period but is otherwise cracking along in the spring sunshine. Our recent rates notice showed us maintaining a significantly lower consumption than our neighbours and so I haven't bothered keeping a close eye on the water meter.

Chillin'

2008-11-20T19:46:00.003+10:00

Remember how pleased I was when our old electric hot water system died last year? Well I have more wonderful news to share: the fridge, which at 2kWh/day accounts for almost a quarter of all energy used in our home, has also reached the end of the line. Hooray!

Its ability to actually cool things, let alone freeze them, has been deteriorating over time. I recently replaced the seal on the freezer to stop a quite noticeable cold air leak but it really made no difference. The appliance wizard (that's what he called himself) only took a couple of minutes to diagnose a failing compressor.

Decision time. Replacing the compressor would make it cold again, but cost about half of what we paid for the fridge a decade ago. It wouldn't improve the energy-efficiency of the design. It wouldn't fix the broken shelf mount or the cracked door hinge. And it wouldn't give us the extra freezer space Michelle desperately wanted. Maybe it's time for a replacement.

Had heard great things about the efficiency of chest freezers. Actually, the really interesting idea involves converting chest freezers to chest fridges. Good insulation and a lid that opens on the top instead of the side makes for minimal loss of "coolth". However, there's no way a chest fridge was going to be acceptable in our kitchen - space issues, access issues, etc - but maybe we could use a chest freezer in the laundry.

Had also seen a standalone fridge (no freezer compartment) at a school, with an energy star rating that quite impressed me. Maybe one of those for the kitchen. Time to do some research.

The most efficient chest freezers on the Aussie market, according to the official figures, are Denmark-made Vestfrost units - the same brand modified to be a fridge in the earlier link. They have one model which is about the size Michelle would like, 250L, that's rated at a quite frugal 237kWh/year. Would have been a candidate if they weren't so physically large and surprisingly expensive. And imported from the other side of the planet.

Mid-sized efficient freezer options beyond that are surprisingly limited. We quickly narrowed it down to two: a 160L Fisher & Paykel chest rated at 307kWh/year, or a 180L Westinghouse upright freezer rated at 297kWh/year. Westinghouse looks better for us other than being imported from China. So what about the fridge?

Given our simple criteria, there was no contest. Absolutely hands-down, the winner is a brand-new model from Electrolux. A 400L upright single-door fridge that uses just 250kWh/year and it's made here in Australia. This product has the highest energy efficiency score of all 3000 refrigeration units in the database, bar none (it'd score 8 stars, but the ratings only go to six). Price is middle-of-the-range: more than the Asian products and less than the European.

So that was the plan. The Electrolux fridge and the Westinghouse freezer. Combined rated total of 547kWh/year, which is just a smidge under 1.5kWh/day.

Er, hang on. I'm going to spend a couple thousand dollars on the most energy-efficient appliances I can find and still only cut my power consumption by 25%? Admittedly I'd have room for a bit more ice cream... but... only 25%? There's gotta be a better option.

Turns out there is, if I can live with just a single six-pack in the fridge at any one time. Another member of the new Electrolux range is a fairly conventional-looking bottom-mount fridge/freezer. 359L fridge space, 156 in the freezer (more than our old one), and a rated energy use of 428kWh/year. That's good enough for a five-star badge, and it's made right here down under.

So I saved myself a few hundred bucks and improved my energy reduction from 25% to over 40% (based on rated consumption of the new fridge vs actual consumption of the one I had). The fridge was delivered today. Now all I have to do is convince Michelle that going from 120L to 156L really is a significant improvement in freezer capacity and we didn't really need a separate freezer anyway.

Yeah. Wish me luck.

Welcome to my backyard

2008-11-15T21:07:00.003+10:00

Some pics for a change.

First up, my mostly-recycled chook pen... with a little addition on the near side which I'll get back to in a minute. The far end is the existing fence. Rear-left is a piece of lattice which some previous owner left lying around this place. Rear-right and the lower half of the front and front-left are rigid mesh fence pieces Mr S had in surplus. The gateway on the right used to be parts of Mr S's neighbour's verandah, while the gate frame itself is cut down from a wardrobe door which I hated. Underneath most of it are old hardwood sleepers which were somebody else's idea of garden borders. The only significant new material was the chicken wire to fill in the gaps above the fence panels and in the gate section.

The hutch doesn't look like much in this pic but by damn it was the hardest part of the job, and is also made from recycled materials. I'll post on it another day.

Right down there in front of the home for chooks is the home for my Jericho beans. Six little sprouts now have a chook-proof, well-nourished, sunny spot with lots of opportunity to climb. You can see in the previous pic the passionfruit vine which has its roots in the neighbour's yard. I'm enjoying that for now but will probably cut it back later on to make a bit more room for the beans. More recycled fence panel, a bit of the wood panel from that hated wardrobe door and even some old White Pages went into the construction of this bit. I confess to buying the compost from the hardware megastore today, but at least it's organic.

And finally, some proof that my back yard is actually capable of supporting some kind of useful plant life: our herb garden. Featured are basil, parsley, chives, chillis, rosemary, sage, marjoram, chickory, spring onions and - if you zoom in and look really carefully - a solitary coriander leaf. Yeah, the garden hasn't yet proved it can support coriander. We have some oregano on stand-by to take its place.

Living History

2008-11-05T19:48:00.004+10:00

No, this is not a post about American politics, as historic as this day might be. It's about Aussie back yards.

When I was as young as my son is now - four years old - I lived in a tiny little outback town called Jericho, west of Rockhampton. We were only there for two and a half years but that experience of country life had a big influence on me.

I have some very clear memories of that time, like getting my first bike and the first day I rode it without training wheels. I recall going for a day out in the bush, catching yabbies (crayfish) from the creek and cooking them up for lunch. I remember visiting a property where two huge bulldozers were dragging an enormous chain between them, making one hell of a mess as they tore down the eucalypt forest, clearing it to become grazing land.

Just down the street from us lived another family whose children were too old for me to play with, but Mrs Bonham and my mother became good friends and I spent quite a bit of time playing around the Bonham house and yard. The yard had one particularly distinguishing feature: a thriving green bean vine growing on a free-standing trellis. This so impressed my younger brother and I that we came to gigglingly refer to Mum's friend as "Mrs Bean-Bonham". (Gosh four-year-olds think they're funny.)

We were free to pick and eat the beans as we wished. Sometimes we'd be given big bags of them to take home. Formed in my earliest years, that simple memory epitomises the notion of a bountiful garden. In the past 18 months of mucking about in my own back yard I haven't really come close to recreating that ideal.

But just recently, something special has happened.

The friendship my mother formed has been a lasting one, and from time to time she and Mrs Bonham will exchange a phone call or find an opportunity to meet if travel plans are favourable. In one of their recent conversations, Mum happened to mention that I've been playing about with veges and the like. And this past weekend, Mum handed me a padded envelope which was postmarked in Jericho.

Mrs Bonham's beans have been growing in her garden for nearly 30 years since I used to pick them as a boy. Inside the envelope was a paper-thin, dried out husk of a bean, its green flesh now turned creamy pale, itself acting as a natural envelope for the seeds contained within. Six seeds: richly dark, almost black, except for a bright white protruding ridge running about half way around the centre line.

Joshua (4), Caitlin (7) and the neighbour's boy (7) helped me to plant them. Each pressed two seeds into the moist potting mix and I put the covered tray outside where it will catch the morning sun. Three days later, a living piece of my own childhood is forming roots and shoots which - if I don't manage to kill 'em - will bring that remembered bounty back into reality for me and my kids to enjoy.

Yes, I'm getting all sentimental about bloody beans. I've talked for ages about growing some beans in the back yard. But it's just so special to me that these aren't something which came in a packet from a shop. These beans are living connections for me, to community, to my own history, and to the natural providence of the Earth independent from modern industrial society.

Mrs Bean-Bonham, thank you so much for your gift. Wish me luck as I try to grow these seeds and get the vines scaling up the side of the chicken coup. I'll keep you posted.

Alexander F Mayer

2008-10-27T08:54:00.004+10:00

This is not a topic I ever thought I'd be posting about on this blog. To be frank, it's a bit of a stretch to call it relevant, though I'll do my best. Mostly I'm choosing to post this because it's freaking awesome and also because if it turns out to be correct I'd like to go on the public record as having been among the first to acknowledge it.

Alexander F Mayer is what most people would call a serious geek. Way geekier even than myself. I'm not entirely sure of his background and qualifications but he's not a recognised authority amongst his peers in his field of study. Most of them would probably call him a crackpot, or worse.

What makes him postworthy is his rather persuasive and potentially revolutionary theory about the nature of the universe - and I mean the whole universe, from the smallest particle through to the largest supergalactic cluster and the complete extent of time. The theory is published as a digitally signed PDF at www.sensibleuniverse.org, but most people I know wouldn't enjoy reading something that, um, geeky. (If you do - I would really love to hear from you!)

The fundamental idea in Mayer's cosmology is that the conventional understanding of time is as misguided as the ancient belief that the Earth was flat. We are accustomed to thinking that the universe as a whole experiences time just as we do, and that we can represent a history of the entire universe using a single timeline. This naturally leads people to ponder how the universe started and how it might eventually come to an end. If it started in a "Big Bang", then what came before that? And if it started small and is growing larger, what lies beyond the edge of it?

Without going into too much detail, I will say merely that Mayer's universe has no beginning, no end, and no edges. Just as you can travel forever in one direction around the surface of the Earth (a full circle brings you back to your original position) you can imagine a straight path through space in any direction leading you eventually back to the exact point you started from. And just as for every point on the Earth there is a place at the precisely opposite side of the globe, for every point in space there is a precisely opposite place in the universe through which you would pass if you could follow that straight line in any direction for a very, very long time.

Now to make this relevant to my blog.

Black holes, says Mayer, are actually the "in" end of a tunnel through spacetime (ie a wormhole) which leads to the opposite side of the universe. And at that end one finds a "white hole" spewing forth raw energy and fundamental particles. Dead star goes in, elemental ingredients come out. That means 100% recycling of material and energy, occurring everywhere in the universe, for all eternity. Can't get much more sustainable than that.

Beyond the physics, Mayer's publication concludes with some fascinating comments on the interaction between science, philosophy, society and even religion. If the universe really is as he describes, then human psychology might have some adjusting to do. Instead of a one-way trip from bang to bust, the universe continually recreates itself. Theoretically, our descendants could inhabit Mayer's universe forever. If only we can avoid destroying this one little part of it in the meantime.

Stats Update

2008-10-18T13:34:00.003+10:00

In the past 45 days...
Our solar panels have produced 187kWh of electricity (4.16/day).
87kWh of that has been exported to the grid (1.93/day), while 100kWh has been used immediately in our home (2.22/day).
We have consumed an additional 279kWh from the grid (6.2/day).
Total consumption is therefore 279+100=379kWh (8.42/day).
We have also used the electric booster for our hot water occasionally: 10.9kWh total (0.24/day).

Scaled up to 3 months, our bill (should AGL ever get around to sending us one) would look like this...
Tariff 11: 558kWh @ 16.29c = $90.90
Tariff 33: 22kWh @ 9.78c = $2.16
Solar export tariff: 174kWh @ 44c = $76.56 credit
Total: $16.50

Well, except that there's a monthly service fee of $6.26 for tariff 11 and the minimum monthly cost on tariff 33 is $4.36. So that brings it up to $37.48. I'd actually save $9.50 per bill if I switched my hot water booster to tariff 11... but there's a $50 charge for the swapover, which means a 15 month payback time.

Bottom line: at this point in time our 1kW array is producing just under half of our home's total energy needs, though only about half of that is produced when we actually need it. Thanks to the government's feed-in tariff, that misalignment of supply and demand has a very positive impact on our electricity bills. The energy we export is valued at 80% of the energy we import. The additional amount we produce and consume locally is effectively worth another $33 or so that doesn't appear on the bill.

The meter goes backwards

2008-07-30T21:24:00.003+10:00

It's been a long time coming but we finally have a 1KW photovoltaic array on our roof. Too much detail to post via iPhone keyboard... but I watched our meter turning the other way this arvo. Way cool.

Heeeere, chook chook chooky!

2008-06-17T16:44:00.003+10:00

We want chickens.
Chickens need somewhere safe to live and lay their eggs.
I avoid buying new materials.
I pretty much refuse to use concrete.
I use hand-powered tools whenever it's an option.
There was some junk lying around the yard and the shed.
My mate (Mr S) had some even cooler junk in his yard.
We're not stuck-up about the appearance of our garden.
It's a work in progress.
I'll post some pics once I complete the walls.