I was interviewed on Monday by a researcher from the University of Wollongong about my experiences with installing solar hot water at our old house. They’re looking into why people choose solar, how they choose the system and supplier, what their experience has been, etc.

Sitting in on the interview was an interesting guy from CSIRO [...]

There has been a bit of a storm in a teacup lately in the Australian press, claiming that all those people who “bought into the hype” and installed solar panels on their homes will now have to pay tax on the income they receive for any electricity generated.

Of course it’s very easy for the media [...]

I finally got the chance to set up my chest freezer as a fridge a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been testing it out so I could write up this post.

You may recall I mentioned that we had an old fridge/freezer running in our garage as a second fridge. With three young kids in [...]

The Australian government is waffling on the issue of a nationalised renewable energy feed-in tariff for homes. Recent announcements seem to indicate that they’ll favour a net tariff, which is very much inferior to the gross feed-in tariff the solar industry is calling for.

A gross feed-in tariff (where the energy-producing household is paid for all [...]

Have you considered switching to green power?

Are you overwhelmed by the choices?

There are dozens of green energy suppliers, offering all sorts of plans and options. Some suppliers are ‘greener’ than others, and prices vary widely, so how do you choose who to go with?

Enter the EasySwitch web site.

You simply enter your postcode, and they show [...]

I just read an interesting article in ReNew Magazine Issue 104 about the guerrilla solar movement and one individual’s experiments with his unapproved DIY grid-connect solar panels.

It’s not as dangerous as it sounds. Solar guerrillas use commercial mains power inverters which meet the relevant international standards to feed their electricity into the grid. You plug [...]

When shopping for whitegoods and appliances, the energy star ratings can be a useful guide to judge the relative energy efficiency of different makes and models.

Be careful, though, because the stars can be misleading if you’re not comparing like-for-like.

For example, this week we were looking at chest freezers (we want to be able to buy [...]