An Australian family trying to live a little greener
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Energy Around The Home Workshop – Kiama
This is another workshop I’d have loved to attend, but unfortunately I can’t make it. It would be really useful, given our current efforts to [reduce our high electricity consumption](http://green-change.com/2008/11/14/reducing-electricity-consumption/)! – Date: **Saturday 22 November 2008** – Time: **9:30am – 12:30pm** – Venue: **Girl Guide Cottage, Hindmarsh Park, Kiama** ([map](http://maps.google.com/maps/mm?ie=UTF8&hl=en&ll=-34.668886,150.853647&spn=0.003521,0.004528&t=h&z=18)) Learn which parts of your…
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Backyard Chook Keeping Workshop – Wollongong
This is one workshop I would really like to attend, but unfortunately we’ve got something else on that day! If you go, I’d love it if you could leave a comment below and let us know how it went. – Date: **Saturday 22 November 2008** – Time: **10:00am – 3:00pm** Learn how you can keep…
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Solar Hot Water Information Night – Gerringong
I’m really looking forward to the solar hot water information night on Friday. I’m hoping to find out whether it is possible to retrofit some kind of solar heating (or at least boosting) to my off-peak electric hot water system. It’s in good condition and it seems wasteful (and expensive!) to get rid of it…
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Chicken Ark Plans
Links to free chicken ark plans, commercial plans, and numerous sources of inspiration for your own chicken ark designs.
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Reducing Electricity Consumption
After figuring out our [baseline electricity consumption](http://green-change.com/2008/11/07/baseline-water-and-electricity-usage/), we were mortified to see how much electricity we use. I had honestly thought our usage was about half of that amount. So, where are we wasting electricity? We have over 30 50 watt halogen downlights throughout the house. They use a lot of electricity, and we’re pretty…
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Chicken Quest
We have three silkies at the moment, just about to come into lay. They’re named Seraphina, Luciana and Ro (yep, we’re big Barbie movie fans around here!). We had a rooster named Molly as well (I know, my defense is that you can’t tell their gender as day-old chicks!), but we had to get rid…
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Glengarry Cottage Gala Day
On Saturday, I took our two youngest girls to the Glengarry Cottage Gala Day. They had talks and tours running throughout the day on stuff like permaculture gardening, composting, worm farming, etc. There were also some stalls, selling/displaying things like compost bins, worm farms, bags of compost, seedlings, etc. Sustainable Illawarra had a stall there…
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Upcoming Illawarra Seedsavers Meeting
I just found out about this on the weekend, and am hoping to get there. Seedsavers groups are a great way to get organic, locally-adapted vegetable plants, as well as to meet like-minded people. Illawarra Seedsavers Network: “Preserve The Future Of Our Food” – swapping seeds and planting material – sharing gardening and seed saving…
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Baseline Water and Electricity Usage
Two of the most obvious things to look at when trying to live more sustainably are your usage of electricity and water. We had to record these in the first Super Challenge survey to set a baseline starting point, and I was actually pretty shocked at how much of each we use. For the past…