Home energy and water efficiency

From ACT GreenGuide

While there are a lot of things you can do to make your home more energy- and water-efficient some of them can be quite costly so below is a list of things you can do even if you are a poor, temporary tenant.

Contents 1 Electrickery 2 Water & the garden 3 Insulation 4 Invisible Waste 5 Air conditioners start bushfires

Electrickery

First up, ACTEW, our local electricity provider, offers customers the option of using electricity produced by sustainable means, including small hydroelectric plants, solar panels, and landfill gas from Canberra’s tip. You pay extra for the “privilege” of contributing to more environmentally-sound energy sources. Contact Green Choice on 1800 447 336, or just buy a pedal-powered television.

• Use fluorescent light bulbs (which now come in a warm colour so no blue dead looking people), and remember to turn the lights off when you’re not using them.
• Keep the seal on your fridge clean.
• Instead of electric blankets, use hot water bottles for your bed or another human being (who puts out 60 - 75 watts of heat and is much more cuddly). And don’t forget, each degree you turn up the heating will cost you 10% more on your bills.

Water & the garden

• Get an AAA-size showerhead
• Get flow restrictors for your taps (more useful in place like the kitchen where you do rinsing rather than for your bath.)
• Don’t run taps when it is not necessary, and fix leaking taps
• Stay in the shower only as long as you need to
• Reuse the water from your shower/bath/washing machine
• Water plants in the early morning or in the evening so the water does not evaporate as fast
• Make sure your soil is well composted and mulched. That way it will hold water better.
• Plant natives in your garden, preferably local species
• Only use your washing machine when there is a full load. Wash in cold water. If there is a choice get a front loading machine.
• Hang your clothes out to dry (clothes dryers are very energy intensive).
• If you don’t have a dual-flush toilet, maybe don’t flush for those ‘little’ toilet trips or put half a brick in the cistern to use less water in each flush
• Wash your car on the lawn (using a biodegradable detergent)

Insulation

• Insulate the pipes of your hot water heating system and when going away for three days or more turn it off.
• Carpets on the ground to help insulate especially in living rooms.
• Make sure your doors and windows are well sealed (if not you can seal quite easily with special sealing strips which you can get from hardware shops). Sealing gaps around doors - windows and eaves improves efficiency of heating and cooling and reduce entry points for embers.
• Put snakes on the doors to prevent drafts
• Buy or make curtains which cover the whole window reaching all the way to the ground. Use them - close during the day in summer (especially those facing east and west) and open up during the night, in winter open in the day

(especially those facing north) and close in the evening.

• Make pelmets, a board or even piece of cardboard to sit above the window to help maintain desired temperature.
• In winter take the flyscreens off your windows — they stop 20% of the suns radiant energy getting in.
• In summer, to try to stop this radiant energy from hitting the window you could hang a screen from the eaves

of your roof.

• Put thermal mass in your house to help reduce temperature fluctuation (especially effective for heating a room with north facing windows). You can use water (a fish tank) or even a pile of bricks sitting somewhere it’s struck

by winter sunlight.

• Wear more clothes when it’s cold, and when it’s hot...well, maybe you could get to know your housemates better!

Some of these products are available at a discounted price through the ANU Food Co-op’s Cool Communities Program, which also offers more in-depth workshops on energy and water efficiency Any queries contact HEAT, your free and independent Home Energy Advice Team 6260 6165 PO Box 3142 Manuka ACT 2603 http://www.heat.net.au

Invisible Waste

But a lot of the resources that you use aren’t used in your house, and not all the waste you create leaves down the drain or in the rubbish truck. A lot of the waste and resource use come from the factories that made your products, the power station that burned coal for your electricity, and other sources far from your home. Thinking about energy efficiency in your house, you have to think about what you use in your house, and cut down on that, or try to use second-hand or recycled products, and minimise wasteful products. And, as with household energy efficiency, this will save you money!

Air conditioners start bushfires

2002 was Australia’s hottest year on record. Unusually high temperatures, low rainfall and high evaporation combined to make the worst fire season in at least 30 years. About 500 homes in the ACT were destroyed by fire in January 2000 and parts of the ANU, such as the Stromlo campus, were razed.

So, how can we avoid bushfires like those? There are several factors that influence your risk of experiencing a bushfire. The biggest is other people. 80% of fires are human-made controlled burns that get out of control, sparks from cars, cigarette butts, and arson. So one thing you might want to work on is making sure that you and your neighbours practise good fire safety.

The next thing to worry about is where you live - if your house is on the edge of the city in close contact with the bush, then you are at increased risk of bushfires. You might want to think again about whether a city really should be expanding into bushland.

Another risk factor is the weather. The worst fires are caused by extreme weather conditions: several dry years in a row, hot days, and dry northern winds. Hazard reduction burning and firebreaks don’t prevent those nasty ones.

Where does air conditioning fit into all of this? Well, guess what one of the one of the biggest users of electricity in your house is... and burning all that coal for electricity is contributing to the greenhouse effect. Australia’s increasingly hot and dry weather fits the predictions for climate change from greenhouse gasses. CSIRO predicts about twice as many very high and extreme fire danger days each year from greenhouse effect stuff. Most fire damage occurs in those high fire danger days.

So, every time you turn on the air conditioner in the summer, you are helping to create exactly the sort of weather that will cause more bushfires.

The lucky thing is that energy-efficient, ecologically sensitive houses are also fire-safe ones. For example

• Sealing gaps around doors - windows and eaves improves efficiency of heating and also reduces entry points for embers.
• Reducing the use of artificial finishes - such as plastics and paints - decreases the flammability of your house’s surfaces. Natural materials such as stone, rock, earth and even timber can be less prone to fire damage, and are often less toxic and less polluting to manufacture.
• Retaining water onsite with rainwater tanks and washing-water recycling reduces your scheme water usage and provides you with water to use in fire prevention.

But wait, how about this for an idea: what about chopping all the bush down so there are no more bushfires? Well, we need trees to live, for the wood that your house was built from, to stop erosion in our water catchments and salinity in our farmland, and for dozens of other reasons.

In fact, the best thing is to leave as many trees standing as possible. The trees that are at least risk of bushfires are old trees. Old forests have few small plants and higher moisture contents. Regrowth forests that appear after extensive logging, full of scrubby undergrowth and flammable wattles, burn like tinder. Chopping down forests all the time just means that you are eventually replacing them with more fire prone forests, and making a lot of Australian wildlife homeless in the process.

For stacks more home energy efficiency advice, contact HEAT, your free and independent Home Energy Advice Team 6260 6165 PO Box 3142 Manuka ACT 2603 www.heat.net.au