Sustain Myself

A few weeks ago, we had our Cent-A-Meter delivered.

Wow.

The Cent-A-Meter is a small device for monitoring your real-time household power. You can see current usage, current cost, current emissions and then view the peaks or totals for the day, month or quarter. In other words, if you were interested in reducing the power consumption of your house, there is no better way of achieving this.

So, here are some things I have found out since owning the Cent-A-Meter;

1. Our kettle uses more power than our clothes dryer at around 1300W. (Which is 1/4 the power of a Postie Bike and costs ~40c an hour at 1kg of Greenhouse gas per hour.)
2. Our house has 1700W of Halogen downlights (soon to be replaced by LED alternatives)
3. Our big Plasma TV is not as bad as it looks (around 100W above standby – as much as 2 halogen down lights). It also uses a VERY small amount of power in standby (~20W.)
4. The 46CM floor fan is only about 70W.
5. Our innocent looking popcorn maker is 1200W.

Its really cool to see the effect of small things around your house.

My fish tank is the big killer, its an ongoing source of stress as its power consumption is huge. I am in the middle of replacing lights and pumps to reduce its footprint;

1. The lights over the tank are 1200W and run for 8hrs a day. About to be replaced with 300W LED’s.
2. The chiller (which cools the water down when the lights heat it up too much) costs about 1800W!!!! (The need for this will be almost non existent when the LED’s arrive as they generate zero heat.)
3. The pumps in the tank are about 120W – About to be replaced by high performance pumps to bring that down to about 30W.

To give you a disgusting figure of our quarterly power usage, our bills are around $800. This is mainly due to the tank. So once we replace all the bits with more efficient alternatives and get our solar in, it will bring us right back down to earth.

The Cent-A-Meter is such an awesome device and stupidly easy to install. The install instructions are included with it, you dont need to break or connect any wires, it uses a magnetic sensor that clips over your mains cable to sense the power running through it (Keep in mind that a licensed electrician is recommended by clipsal and I tend to agree if you are unfamiliar with the goings-on in a fuse box.) The install for me took around 3 mins from start to finish and we set the display up in the kitchen where we spend most of our time so we can keep a constant eye on it. The Cent-A-Meter set me back $190 delivered from eBay.

We also bought a ScanGauge for the car, I’ll write a post about that shortly too.

Our Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has just stated that he has changed the conditions of the $500m sustainable energy fund. Originally it was to be $500m over six years, starting in 2009, but he has now made the funds available immediately and for the next 18 months. This is awesome news as it means that the government is starting to act on being at the forefront of combating climate change. I have a feeling that a few countries are becoming competitive about the seriousness of their actions surrounding reducing their carbon footprint and that’s great. Even if they make these changes for the wrong reasons (i.e. being competitive)  that’s ok by me as its not as bad as not making any changes at all.

Victoria still has the worst bill of health in Australia, even though it has a few wind farms, this is mainly due to its use of Brown Coal. Hopefully these funds can help reduce Victoria’s carbon emissions.

Great step forward. This type of thing really excites me.

Rudd announces renewable energy funds

It seems that I keep going over the same discussion with people every few weeks. The discussion is the use of ‘clean coal’ technology. The Australian Government in its budget this year decided to put stupid amounts of money into ‘clean coal’ technology instead of spending it on already proven clean energy methods such as wind or solar. The thing is, that there is simply no such thing as ‘clean coal’. As long as we continue to burn coal, it will contribute nasties to the environment, why can people not see that? Burning anything is bad for the environment.

Clean coal is simply coal that has been washed and treated to reduce the level of impurities present.

Video source: treehugger

I recently bought a new book from Todae as I continue to believe that I will be able to build my own grid connected solar power on my roof without spending the stupidly large amounts asked by solar power companies. The book is great and is already teaching an absolute electricity novice all about what is required and how to go about doing it. Unfortunately, because I will be installing it myself, I will not be able to claim the $8000 government rebate as it only applies to certified installers. I will write a full review on the book here soon and I will also keep you all up to date with my progress.

Don’t believe the hype. ‘Clean Coal’ is an oxymoron.

For a long time now, the only financial benefit to installing solar panels in Australia was the reduced power bill. Well, it seems that now you can receive up to 60c per kilowatt for any excess power introduced.

One of the easiest and most cost effective installation techniques of solar panels is to plug them back into the grid. This eliminates the need for batteries to store the power and also allows you the use of the grids power if anything were to happen to your panels. Until now, you didnt get anything (except a credit) for supplying power to the grid. If you were to produce 110% of power from your panels, then you’d get nothing for that extra 10%. Now you get up to 60c a kilowatt.

Unfortunately, the eligibility of receiving this ‘payback’ for supplying power is a little bit of a grey area. It would appear that the lesser income earners will get more back than the higher income earners. That being said, even with the government’s (soon to be abolished) $8000 rebate for solar installation, the cheapest outlay for a small solar install is around $2000 on top of that rebate and even then you are lucky to be generating 25% of your power. So, the lower income earners are less likely to get solar panels to start with, especially if the rebate is removed.

Either way, I am hoping to get at least some panels installed next year to cover at least a small portion of my power consumption.

Households to be paid for solar power

We use a lot of power. We have lots of lights and devices as well as my fish tank which uses stupid amounts of power (1.2kW of lights alone). We have 50W down lights in every room (from the top of my head, a total of ~28). We have a big TV and entertainment devices (which we switch off at the wall every night). We use a lot of power.

Power Options

I have recently been looking into our alternative options for our power. Solar is at the top of my list but we need the cash to spend. With our power usage, to be totally covered by Solar, we’d initially be out of pocket about $22,000. While that seems like a lot, it means that we would have 0 power bills and 0 grid-based power consumption for over 20 years (and we spend more than $1000 annually now). Unfortunately, the NSW government likely to make changes to the maximum $8000 Solar rebate which would make that $22,000 figure increase substantially. Already the Victorian government has made changes to their Solar “incentive” which would mean that I’d get squat if I got this much Solar power in Victoria. Top work guys. In France, the government provides incentives to alternative energy manufacturers as well as lots of other changes towards renewable energy. Meanwhile, we continue to build brown coal power stations.

Renewable Google. Renewgle?

Google have spent a lot of time, money and effort making their own renewable energy sources for their offices and even going as far to present a $4 trillion energy plan to the US government. The have even provided a small power saving calculator and power saving tips. Strange URL and its targeted to the US (Australians don’t have thermostats). Is there anything Google can’t do?

Until Then

Until we go the Solar path (which will likely be sooner than later) we have decided to reduce our power consumption as much as possible. Sites like Neco and Todae have many power efficient products that I will be investing in over the next few months. LED down lights will take our 50W halogens and replace them with 9 or 11W varieties. We already don’t use our air conditioner, but we might have to in summer if we don’t put the DIY double glazing on the windows of our house. These are a few options available but we will continue to turn everything off at night. If we can reduce our usage sufficiently then the cost of Solar will be reduced as we wont need as many panels.

Slowly we are moving towards a non existent footprint.