Jeanette and Harry’s terrace in North Carlton

1 Oct

Harry and Jeanette purchased their home in North Carlton in 1990. Originally a bakery, it was converted to a house in the 1970’s and by 2019, it needed some major repairs. Harry is strongly motivated by reducing his carbon footprint and took the first step to drive up their efficiency along with the major repairs.

Harry shared his electrification story with Electrify Yarra.

What’s your electrification story?

Our first step was to do the easy things - go room by room to replace the lights with LED’s. But, this was in the early days of LEDs when they cost $30 each! I suppose you could call me an early adopter. So, we had to be frugal - it took a couple of years to work through the house!

The big step was when we had the major work done. The roof had to be replaced, and we decided to remove the fireplace chimney. We re-insulated and put as many solar panels on the roof as we could fit - 17 panels. At the same time we got rid of the gas heater, installed two split systems for heating and cooling, and double-glazed windows at the front of the house.

We also removed skylights which were losing a lot of heat from the house, and replaced them with LED lights powered by solar that look exactly like skylights.

In January 2021 we installed a heat pump hot water system and in March the same year we installed an electric cooker.

It was a great day when we cut off the gas.
Through our retailer, we had it cut off at the mains - they came and dug up the road. Nobody is going to connect gas back to this house!
Our next big step was to add a battery in March 2022.

Finally, after 15 years of living happily without a car, mostly using bikes and car share, our circumstances changed and we needed one. We found a second-hand EV and it has worked out well - it’s cheap to run and maintain and it’s a rocket ship! We charge it using the public chargers at the Collingwood library.

Why are you electrifying?

I'm really aware that compared to most people on the planet, my carbon footprint is enormous. Sometimes you see the way the world is going, and as technology came on the scene, we took advantage of it.
But it’s not just the ethical side - we save real money. Our highest annual energy cost before the changes was $2,102. Last year it was $186.
We changed suppliers and signed up for Amber Wholesale - this gives us a dynamic, not fixed, feed-in tariff and the 13 kW/h Tesla battery makes it possible to sell our excess energy at a higher rate. On our best day so far we earned $64, on the worst we paid $9.74.
We set it up to reserve the last 20% of battery capacity and Amber’s modelling takes care of the rest.

Hurdles and lessons along the way?

We had quite a few - patience and persistence are necessary. There are headwinds!

While we were doing the major building works, our builder was very focused on fixing the cause of the repairs - making it water tight. He was great, but I had to take on looking into the efficiency aspects.
If I had known more about the health impact of gas back then I would have done things in a different sequence and removed the inside gas heater and cooker earlier.
The payback on a battery is quite long, but I take enormous satisfaction knowing we are doing our bit to make coal uneconomic!
Our kitchen setup means we have a narrow space for the oven and cooktop, we switched to electric but were not able to get an induction cooking. Hopefully there will be more options in the future.
We had a number of product issues - we are on our third solar inverter after the first two had moisture issues, and the battery did not work and had to be replaced three months after we had it installed.