Looking at the stars

In a freshly-built housing estate in Portland you will find Peter Reefman's unassuming new home. Aside from the lack of lawn, the house appears little different to the other homes in the street. But while his neighbours fork out around $1600 annually on gas and electricity, Reefman will pay nothing, and actually pocket $800 from his small solar system.

Reefman, a Portland builder and convener of the Portland Sustainability Group, recently moved his family into a new 8.1 star house that he designed and built. To put that into perspective, the system goes up to 10 and Australia is moving towards a six-star requirement for new homes in the next few years.  The average Australian home is about 2 and 3 stars.

Yesterday was a milestone day for the Reefman family. Since moving in September they have used slightly more energy than they produced through their 1.4 kw solar system. But on Wednesday the house went officially zero carbon - it produced more energy than the family of four actually used.

This is because of a huge number efficiency measures built into the house and also the low-energy needs of every domestic appliance. Details of the house can be found here. But the biggest factor is the way the house is oriented on the block, taking full advantage of the sun. The house is heavily insulated, internally and externally, and has a strong emphasis on northerly windows and also has a cooling tower that takes out unwanted heat in summer.

Even if the Reefman home was not connected to solar, the heating and cooling costs are predicted to be between $10 and $20 a year. Although they moved in just after winter, the family have found they only need to heat the home every three or four nights. And each night they turn the heating on it costs them between 15 and 20 cents for the energy.

The house has all manner  of energy efficient features, including green switches that kill the phantom energy of microwaves and stereo systems, to an exceptionally efficient fridge and specially-chosen blinds that keep the heat from escaping during winter. But as we toured the house yesterday, three things stood out.

The first is the cost. Reefman has estimated that all of the efficiency measures cost $40,000 more than the average new house. Based on the power bill savings, he says that a family could gain that investment back within 16 years. But he points out that the housing obesity seen in Australia over recent decades - where houses have grown from an average of 18 square metres to 30 - costs each new home owner about $70,000 more.

Reefman is a custom builder and says the house cost him $420,000 to build, so $380,000 without all the energy saving measures. But Reefman believes that a big building company could build these houses for a bit under $300,000.

But it is not as simple as a building company taking the design and putting these new homes on housing estates. In Reefman's housing estate there are 106 blocks. He has calculated that only 40 can accommodate a house properly oriented to gain the efficiencies of his house. "This is typical of all estates, they just don't take solar orientation into account," he says.

Reefman did some analysis and reconfigured the estate. He found that with some changes to the alignment of the streets - going north-south - and slightly different shaped blocks - less deep and wider - only one block failed to have good solar orientation. These changes would mean the estate only lost six blocks.

And the last interesting feature was the highly efficient downlights. As this 2007 article by Royce Millar and Liz Minchin highlights, some of the biggest problems with new houses is their excessive lighting. Halogen downlights go through huge amounts of energy. They also get very hot and ceiling insulation needs to be removed from around them. This further reduces the efficiency of the home.

Here is a video of Peter Reefman talking about the new generation of downlights. At this stage they are $80 a pop, which is ridiculously expensive. But as he explains, there is hope for the future.