Strawbale House

Project Better Place is planning on bringing electric cars and a charging network to Australia by  2012.

In a deal unveiled in Melbourne, international company Better Place plans to team up with AGL Energy and Macquarie Capital Group to set up a network of “charging spots” and “battery exchange stations” to power electric vehicles in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.

Shai Agassi, chief executive officer of Better Place, said he hoped Australia would prove that electric cars can work anywhere and that the technology to support electric cars is available now.

Better Place plans to set-up a network of charging spots, to top up batteries, that would be located in places where cars park, including home garages, shopping centres and office car parks.

Additionally, on the outskirts of city centres and on freeways, “battery switching stations” would be built for trips longer than 161 kilometres.

Mr Agassi said Better Place wants to to build the infrastructure first, while the company was dealing with car manufacturers to produce the battery-run cars.

“You can’t sell cell phones before you have the towers,” he said.

Thanks to Jess at Sustainable Suburbia for blogging this and linking to the article in The Age news paper.

Andrew, our architect, finished the preliminary drawings a few days ago and as part of that has performed a preliminary energy assessment. The outcome was better than both Rosalba and I expected.

In Andrew’s own words: “It doesn’t get much better than 10 stars!”

To clarify, in Australia, houses are rated according their nergy needs for cooling and heating on a scale from 1 to 10. 1 being “bloody atrocious” and 10 being “as good as it gets”.

Also to put the preliminary energy rating of 10 into perspective, most brick veneer homes currently built in Australia achieve a rating of somewhere between 4.5 to 5.

So, as you might imagine we are quite chuffed about this extraordinary good result, even being preliminary only.

The next thing we are doing now is to speak to an accredited installer of solar panels (photovoltaic) to perform an assessment of our energy needs. Shane from Alternative Energy Solutions is going to meet with us soon to help us with that.

I’ll keep you posted on the outcome of that assessment.

Some time ago I came across an article about Freecylce and how it aims to keep good stuff out of landfill. Freecycle basically are a large number of mailing lists where people can advertise stuff for free that they no longer need.

One of Freecycle’s main rules is that anything that you advertise needs to be free. My first thought at the time was: “Great, I can now get all this stuff for free. This is going to save me buckets of money.”

I have quickly come to realise though that Freecycle really is not about saving money or getting stuff for free, it’s about finding a new home for stuff that is still good / working so that you don’t put it in the rubbish where it ends up in landfill.

Of course I have found a few things that I thought were pretty neat but what has actually given me more satisfaction is when I have been able to give away some stuff  that we had no use for any longer.

One example is a laundry trolley that is still working but was just surplus to our household as we already have another laundry trolley. I advertised that trolley and found a new home for it within one afternoon. The lady that came and picked it up really appreciates the trolley and makes good use of it now.

To check out if Freecycle is available in your area go to: http://www.freecycle.org/group and look through the areas already covered by a Freecycle group.

If you have stuff, that is still good but that are not using anymore and its kind of in your way, please consider joining Freecycle and advertising your item.

As most of you are probably aware our current economy is driven by constant growth and that the success of any commercial venture is always measured by continued growth of sales, earnings, and market share. Since I have realised this myself quite a few years back I have always wondered how such continued growth can be sustained, not just in an environmental perspective.

I have recently come across this site called “The Story of Stuff” which kind of explained how the current economy works and that we can’t keep on expecting relentless, continuing growth.

The site features a 20 minute movie where Annie Leonard explains how our economy currently works and how this needs to be changed to enable a sustainable economy which in turn even helps the environment.

One scary fact that I always suspected but thought was a bit of a conspiracy theory is that world economies have been deliberately set-up for more and more consumerism in order to keep the earnings of the big corporations growing.

I do highly recomend taking 20 minutes to watch the movie on the “The Story of Stuff” website to anyone interested in sustainabilty.

Also, please share your thoughts on what Annie Leonard presents in the movie in the comments section of this article. I’d also like to hear about any ideas this movie might have inspired.

For ourselves, Rosalba and I are most likely to move our superannuation money into an super account that invests more into sustainable companies. We are currently looking at Australian Ethical Supperannuation as we believe that ethical investment includes investment into companies with sustainable practices.

So again, please share your thoughts in the comments section. Remeber every civilised and intelligent comment until the end of August 2008 goes in the draw to win the Book of House Plans.

With our decision not to connect our future home to the electricity grid I have started thinking about ways of making the most of the electricity that we will collect with our solar panels. Unfortunately I currently have a number of computers that that are acting as various servers and are therefore constantly on which is obviously consuming a bit of electrical.

Also I do believe in building in redundancy where ever you can, especially with computers and hard drive storage. Over the years I have had too many hard drives fail to trust a single hard drive with my data. So until recently I had a large computer acting as a file server utilising 4 hard drives in a redundant set-up (RAID 5 for those that are interested). This computer was using 80W on average or 0.35A when switched on.

As this computer has started to fail (video card is no longer working) a few weeks ago, I had to decide what to do about fixing it. There where a number of options that went through my head with the seemingly easiest being to just replace the video card. Due to the age of the computer I haven’t been able to find a fitting video card.

While trying to decide how to progress I realised that it was the right time to look at less energy intensive options that still give me all the functionality I wanted. There are a number of network attached external hard drive (also known as NAS) available with most of the cheaper units only providing a single hard drive.

Nevertheless I found a model made by Western Digital (WD) called the “MyBook World Edition II” that was less than $500 and included two 500GB hard drives that can be set-up in a redundant manner. That by itself almost made my decision but what really pushed me over the line was that the box itself actually runs of 12V supplied by a power pack.

Measuring the energy consumption of my new “MyBook” has confirmed that when plugged into a 240V power socket the power consumption is only one fifth (16W) of the old computer and according to my measurement with the box turned of the power pack consuming 9w or nearly half, I am hoping that the MyBook would consume less than 10W plugged directly into 12V solar system.

Now the change of the computer to this external hard drive is only one step towards saving energy but it’s the first opportunity since we have made our decision to build our new home and included an off-grid solar installation. I am sure there will be changes that we will make over the next 2 years to help us save some more electricity and I am happy to keep you all posted on any further changes we are making.

I am also aware that this is probably quite a dry post for most of my normal readers and I promise there won’t be to many of these to come, but please do let me know if this post was actually interesting to at least some of you.

I have been thinking about making my own biodiesel for a while as I have heard and read about the process being quite simple and easily done your self. What is currently holding me back is that our current cars run on petrol instead of diesel.

Nevertheless our tractor runs on diesel so I may start with making smaller batches of biodiesel and see how I go. Next time when we turn over one of our cars we’ll go for a car with a diesel engine to make even more use of home made biodiesel.

From my reading so far, the process of making your own biodiesel from used cooking oils is not hard at all. Basically the process consists of the following steps:

1. Remove any large suspended solids by pouring the used cooking oil through a fly screen.
2. Warming up your batch of used cooking oil to about 60° Celsius.
3. Adding the correct quantities of Methanol and mixing it well into the used cooking oil.
4. Adding the correct quantities of caustic soda and mixing it in well, also.
5. Keep on gently stirring for a while and then let it rest for up to 48 hours to let the glycerine and small suspended solids settle to the bottom.
6. Your done … you can now use the oil at the top, above the glycerine and small suspended solids that have settled on the bottom, to run your diesel engine.

Of course I have left out some details in the above steps such as exact measures of the ingredients, but they vary anyway depending on the quality of the used cooking oil and will need to be determined for each batch of biodiesel you are making.

I have found that the book “Simple Biodiesel” by Robert Sharman provides an easy to understand quick introduction into making your own biodiesel. This book also contains some tips on where to get the ingredients necessary in Australia.

Some of you may be wondering why Rosalba and I are wanting to build our new home with straw bales. Following are my reasons:

Straw is a renewable resource that is mostly burned after harvesting. This releases huge amounts of green house gases that don’t need to be released. If all the straw where baled up and used for building homes, Australia could build tens of thousands of strawbale homes each year.

Straw bale walls are cheap energy wise. Straw bale walls have very low embodied energy, i.e. a lot less energy is used in the production, transportation an construction of a straw bale wall compared to a concrete wall, brick wall or even brick veneer type of wall.

Straw is an excellent insulator. During my Swiss army service I had the joy of sleeping in a hay stack one night. Even though it was getting below freezing point that night we were nice and warm due to the insulation provided by the hay. More scientifically, a rendered straw bale wall has almost 5 times the R-value of a brick veneer wall. A straw bale wall has over twice the minimum recommended R-value for the wall of a house in most parts of Australia. (The R-value is a measure of the resistance of a material to heat flow through it, so the higher the R-value the more insulating a material is.)

Straw bale houses are generally healthy homes. Generally no toxic fumes are released by a straw bale wall that has been rendered with a lime or earthen render.

Straw bale homes provide a feel of calm, safety and comfort due to the thickness of the walls. Deep window seats, and subtle curves can easily be included in straw bale walls due the felxibility of building with straw bales.

There are many more reasons to build with straw bales some of which can be found on the Ausbale website and on the Strawtec website.

Rosalba has found an article on the Earth Garden website showing different ways of creating footings for buildings. One method that has caught our eye is using recycled car tyres. Considering that there are millions of tyres each year that need to be disposed of, this may help a little bit.

The method described basically consists of digging a hole wide enough to take a tyre lying flat on it’s side. The hole needs to be dug deep enough to rest on a stable basis. Once the hole is dug, tyres are place in the hole so that they lay fat on top of each other and all the tyres are then fill with compacted dirt and rubble. According to the article on the Earth Garden site, such a footing will outlive cement footings for thousand of years.

I have just sent of an email to our architect to find out if this type of footing would be sensible for our house. Once I hear from the architect I will you know on this site.

Rosalba and I have met with Andrew form W D Architects yesterday afternoon.

Andrew was great and listened to all our dreams and wishes for our house and gave some great feedback on some of our ideas. For example we though we’d build the house using a steel frame but Andrew reckons that it will be cheaper more sustainable to build with timber, if possible with recycled timber even.

Rosalba would like a large walk in pantry in our new house, so we don’t have to go shopping every couple of days and Andrew came up with a really neat idea of keeping the pantry cooler than the rest of the house. Basically you bury a ventilation pipe underground that comes out in the pantry and the pantry having some ventilation in the roof, which will draw cool air through the pipe buried in the ground into the pantry and the air that has warmed up is vented out of the roof. This, coupled with the insulation provided by the strawbale walls, should keep the pantry at a nice cool temperature all the time.

Andrew reckon’s our budget is a bit tight but we should still be able to pull it of, especially if we provide some labour ourselves and save where we can.

As a bit of trivia: Andrew has designed the Australian Wildlife Hospital (as reported on Treehugger) which uses strawbale walls as well and is currently being finished.