After an 18-month experiment in a futuristic house packed with high-tech gadgets and its own powerplant, a Sydney family is looking forward to moving into a century-old weatherboard cottage in the Blue Mountains.
Clare Joyce, Michael Adams and their daughter Ava lived in the Newington home, with the support of utility company Ausgrid and the state government’s climate change fund, to test out dozens of energy-saving devices.
Their every move was monitored by household electronics, from boiling a kettle to driving their plug-in electric car to the shops. The data will be used to help design energy policy.
”It’s been a wonderful, interesting experience really, and we’ll remember it for the rest of our lives,” Ms Joyce said.
Not quite everything went to plan and some of the power saving and monitoring devices sucked up more electricity than expected. The home’s gas fuel cell also broke down for three weeks during winter, blowing the home’s energy budget for three weeks.
”It’s fair to say that the energy consumption of the house was a bit higher than we thought it would be,” an Ausgrid energy efficiency expert, Paul Myors, said. ”A lot of the real-time monitoring that we had in the home … in itself had non-trivial energy requirements.”
The house also functions as a miniature power station, pumping out an average of 32 kilowatt hours a day - much more than the family could use, even though they often worked from home.
A gas fuel cell generated most of the electricity, with a solar-powered pergola in the garden chipping in a few extra kilowatts.
The family also had the use of a plug-in electric car from Mitsubishi - before it was commercially available in Australia. The vehicle recharged in the garage from the home’s energy supply and could travel about 100 kilometres before needing more power.
”It’s incredibly silent, you just feel like you’re rolling along,” Ms Joyce said. ”We’ve actually had a few close calls in car parks, where people were relying on their sense of hearing to know we were there … Now when I get back into a normal car, the smell of petrol drives me up the wall.”
They move out tomorrow and, on January 31, the search begins for another family to live in the home rent-free for a year.
