A Present made from Broken Glass

Norah turned 1 the other day and as a belated response to a suggestion from her Mum, I made her a present out of broken glass. A bottle, with a hole drilled very carefully into it, an LED shoved inside, filled with broken glass, then capped. Voila! Night-light for Norah and Mabel!

Tracking Utilities

Although I'd love to spend hours on end setting up Arduinos to monitor everything at home, lately I've felt that my time has been better spent re-watching The West Wing. But I do check the meters every so often, and I thought I may as well publish the results so the whole world can watch the impact 46 Ross St is having.

These graphs are coming from the Google Docs that I use to track these things...

Water Use

First of all, data from our bills. You can clearly see when we bought the house - October 2009. Before that there were 8 students living here. Since then there have been generally 6 or 7 people (admittedly two of those people are very little) but still, a pretty amazing reduction in water use. We put a tank in October last year - just for watering the garden at the moment. It may have had some impact but it's hard to tell.

The following is water use as logged monthly by reading the meter - I will keep this updated.

Gas Use

Now to natural gas - which runs our hot water (storage type system) and one cooktop. You can see that the bill readings went whacko for a couple of billing cycles - I think they misread the meter as the mistake seemed to correct itself.

Electricity

Now onto my favourite... however it's just got complicated with the addition of our solar panels. We haven't received a bill yet, but it's looking like we're going to generate about as much electricity as we've consumed, which means our next bill should include a cheque!

Here are the bills so far...

And this one shows readings from the new import/export meter. Will be interesting to see whether import or export wins in the long term. (Import is the electricity we use from the grid when there is no sunshine. Export is the excess electricity we export to the grid during the day when we are generating more than we use).

Beyond Zero Emissions Article - Brisbane Line

I wrote this article for 'The Brisbane Line' at the request of the Brisbane Institute, after they heard about Beyond Zero Emissions and the fact that Engineers Without Borders at UQ were organising a forum which I presented the plan at.

Hope you enjoy it!

By the way - I'm presenting the plan again in a few weeks - details here.

Live Output Up and Running

Finally have our new installation streaming to pvoutput.org. The below should be live data being updated every five minutes during the day. Click on the below graph to see the interactive version on pvoutput.org

Finally!

After a false start last year when we realised that we should get a new roof before we put solar panels on it (the old roof was about 90 years old), and after months of delays this year as bad weather and time-underestimating slowed down our new roof, we FINALLY have solar panels on our roof - 3kW worth.

Rob and Russ at Local Power were our chosen provider as they have the best bits, most reliable record and, let's face it, they're our mates.

In the next week or two I hope to get their electricity production streaming online at pvoutput.org - stay tuned!

Home Energy Demand

Back in Brizzy

As usual, while life carries on as usual in Brisbane, my blog lies ignored as I only really seem to update it if I happen to be in another country. That probably won't be happening for the time being, so I thought I'd put some effort telling my loyal blog followers what has been happening for us in Briz Vegas. Nepal is now but a distant memory...

A New Job

I guess the biggest development in terms of how I spend my time is that after two fantastic months 'off' keeping busy with various things, I am now working for the man - but I'm pretty excited about the role. I'm an 'Energy Specialist' - spending my time reducing energy usage in large commercial buildings. I'm learning about heaps of energy efficiency, renewable energy and smart grid technologies, getting back in touch with a few thermodynamic principles that I haven't looked at since university and learning to navigate the systems and politics of a huge US multinational company. An added bonus is that it's located at Cannon Hill, close to where Di works so we can ride our bikes to school together!

A New Cause

One of the things I'm most excited about is a group I've been doing some volunteer work for - Beyond Zero Emissions (BZE). A not for profit, consisting of mostly volunteers in relevent professions has put together the first part of the Zero Carbon Australia plan to take Australia's economy to zero carbon emissions within ten years using technologies that are already commercially available. Amazingly ambitious but surp

risingly achievable and such a welcome change from the depressing political and media debate. In contrast, BZE has simply says, "What does the scientific consensus say we should do?" and works out how to do it.

So my contribution is presenting this Zero Carbon Australia plan to whoever will listen. So far it's been friends/family, an Engineers Without Borders group and my local TEAR group, but I have a few more lined up with a Rotary Club, at the UQ Engineering Department, at a sustainability festival in Toowoomba and at the Ecosciences Centre at Griffith University.

I'm sick of people's skepticism about climate chang

e and skepticism about whether we can do anything about it. Humanity is innovative and resilient and we can sort it out.

Engineers Without Borders

I'm still involved with KAPEG back in Nepal - encouraging and assisting them as they continue with the wooden LED desk lamps. I'm also working on a low cost, cell-phone connected wind turbine data logger which will be handy to monitor test installations of wind turbines in remote locations in Nepal. I've also been presenting to a few audiences on our experiences in Nepal and getting involved in the local EWB chapter activities.

The photo below shows my colleagues from KAPEG selling wooden lamps at markets in Kathmandu.

That's a snippet of life here in Brizzy, without talking much about the fun of being back here, and some home projects (eg new roof, solar panels - and an energy monitoring system I'm building to match it). I'll try to post some more nerd stuff once I get something working!