I’ve long had the feeling that more and more people are getting into things like growing their own food, keeping chickens, and living sustainably. But then my own interest in these areas has been growing over the past few years too, so I wasn’t sure if it was just that I was paying more attention [...]

While putting together notes for my talks over the weekend, I noticed something interesting. The amount of electricity we saved each day by converting 10 halogen downlights to CFLs (4 kWh) is about equal to the amount of electricity we are generating each day (on average) since installing a 1 kW grid-connect solar power system.

The [...]

If you want to reduce your energy bills, you need to know what it is in your house that’s using all the electricity. An Efergy energy meter is a great way to do that.

The Efergy meter is installed inside your electricity meter box, and transmits real-time energy usage information to a display panel inside your [...]

The NSW Government has been trialling their Fridge Buyback Scheme in Sydney for a while now, and starting next month the scheme will be broadened to include the Illawarra. At this stage it will only encompass the Wollongong and Shellharbour Council areas, but hopefully it will extend to Kiama in the near future.

The scheme aims [...]

After figuring out our baseline electricity consumption, 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 slack about [...]

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 quarter, [...]