Out of the blue, our electricity retailer replaced our electricity meter with a smart digital meter, enabling billing based on time-of-day usage. So would our Tesla Powerwalls enable us to optimise, to benefit both our billing and the grid?
On Sustainable House Day – Sunday October 17th 2021, 10am to 4pm – come and visit Christie Walk. This unique urban community of 27 dwellings includes apartments, standalone strawbale houses, and townhouses. Sustainable design features include: passive solar design photovoltaic … Continued
2021 – Battery options modelling In September 2020 we installed our first battery at Sturt Apartments, Christie Walk. You can read the story of our modelling, battery choices and lessons learned in Episode 7 – Battery storage – Tesla PowerWall 2 … Continued
2020 – Battery options modelling In the middle of all that work on evacuated tubes, we learned that change was imminent in the SA Government Home Battery Scheme. To qualify for the maximum $6k subsidy, applications had to be lodged … Continued
Adventures with an environment-conscious inner-urban community 2020 This was the crisis year for so many people – bushfires, COVID, job losses – and it also happened to be the year of our most adventurous emissions-reduction planning, carrying out 2 major … Continued
Adventures with an environment-conscious inner-urban community 2016 to 2019 – Carbon Neutral Adelaide Since 2016 we’d had regular contact with the Carbon Neutral Adelaide team, culminating in our carbon emission inventory for the 2017 year. I’d also attended the Carbon … Continued
2019 For years we’d been tossing around options for increasing our solar performance without losing our high feed-in tariff (56c/kWh) for the 4.8kW PVs that were installed when the Christie Walk community built the Sturt Apartments in 2006. But by … Continued
Adventures with an environment-conscious inner-urban community May 2018 We started investigating the retrofit option for our hot water system: installing solar collectors as boosters to our existing heat pump hot water. One company stood out as a solid option: RunOnSun, … Continued
Adventures with an environment-conscious inner-urban community November 2017 I received an email inviting me to a meeting with the Carbon Neutral Adelaide team. They were scoping out a number of sites for selection as a possible “Carbon Neutral Showcase Site” … Continued
Adventures with an environment-conscious inner-urban community April 2016 Our apartment building (Sturt Apartments at Christie Walk) was nearly ten years old. It was time to start thinking about sustainability upgrades to reduce our carbon footprint. Lighting was an easy place … Continued