Goodbye phone books

Phone books make great door stops.

They also contain lots of contact details for people I don't know and businesses I will never use. So recently we opted out of receiving any for the next five years.

Probably in five years time I will get myself an updated business & government directory (White Pages) and then cancel for another period. I doubt I will ever opt back in to the Yellow Pages.

Initial Time: Five minutes to go online and opt out. Go to https://www.directoryselect.com.au/action/home

Initial Cost: zero

Ongoing time or cost commitment: We do use our hard-copy phone books occasionally, and it generally takes a little longer to get the Yellow or White pages up on Tyson's phone than to flip open the book (or longer again if we have to fire up an actual computer) but its a few extra minutes a year. Updating the book every five years instead of every year would be enough to keep it useful.

Impact: Sensis, who print phone books for Australia, is 'proudly carbon neutral', encourages recycling and from what I could find prints within Australia, so it is doing its best. Nevertheless, millions of phone books are printed and delivered every year that are rarely or never used, and however you off-set it or recycle it, that is a lot of unnecessary paper. When the company changed from opt-out to opt-in for residential phone directories a couple of years back only 2% of suburban households requested to still receive books, suggesting a lot of people had little use for the ones they previously had delivered every year. I couldn't find a figure for how many books are currently printed but from various data about percentages in particular areas my estimate is around 15 million phone books in Australia each year. At 800-1000g each, that's approximately 13,500 tonnes of paper. If only 2% are actually wanted or used, that could be reduced to 270 tonnes. Even if I have wildly over estimated, it is still a lot of paper that could be avoided. And that is just the product itself - there are also factors like resources used to run the printing factories, wrap books in plastic, transport them and dispose of them at the end of each year.

(For those not in Australia: every household in this country until recently was supplied for free every year with paper phone directories - some years four fat volumes - as part of the main telephone provider's legal obligations to provide a directory service. White Pages books are alphabetical listings of all registered land-line phone numbers; Yellow Pages are commercial directories that businesses pay to be included in. In the four largest cities, which together account for over half the nation's population, the 'residential' volume is now opt-in, and the others have been stream-lined, but two volumes are generally still delivered)

Hand warmers and hot water bottle

When working from our home office I have committed to, wherever possible, warming myself rather than warming all the air around me.

The office is often the coldest room in the house and I have spent a lot of time there this winter. Besides wearing warm clothes (including ugg boots) and often wrapping myself in a blanket, I also started to put a hot water bottle under my feet at the desk. I am amazed at how successful this is at keeping me warm. One hot water bottle, wrapped in a towel, lasts a whole work day.

I also purchased hand warmers from our good friend Megan of Granny Funk Crochet.

Sometimes I will also warm a heat pack in the microwave and sit it in my lap for a while in the morning when it is most cold, or if I am working at night. With these aids, I virtually never turn a heater on for the office. I think better with cool air on my face, so these are both sustainability and productivity measures.

Initial Time: Boiling a full kettle for a hot water bottle takes about 5 minutes. Purchasing hand warmers involved some emails with Megan and a few days to wait for delivery.

Initial Cost: Extra hot water bottles purchased recently cost $12.95 each. They now have covers made out of cut up old jumpers, and I also wrap my office foot-warmer one in an old towel - no cost. Hand warmers were $30. Or you could sign up for one of the Granny Funk crochet classes and learn to make them yourself.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: Five minutes for the hot water bottle each time. A cost saving due to reducing the amount of energy used for heating (see below).

Impact: Boiling a full kettle of water (1.75L) when the temperature is 10°C uses approximately 661.5kJ of energy, or 0.184kWh ('units' in our system) - 184Wh, or about the same as leaving a 60 Watt light bulb on for three hours. (see my previous kettle post for the formulas). Microwaving a heat pack (wheat bag) uses around 42Wh to give warmth for about two hours.

When all attempts to warm myself with body heat, clothing and a hot water bottle fail, I use an electric oil-fin heater. This is a 1000W device, but as I would never run it flat out and it heats a confined space, the actual use is less than this. If I were to run it for nine hours of work day, it would use approximately 3.5kWh.

Using one boiled kettle instead of the oil fin heater for a day of warmth saves over 3kWh (units) a day, around 2.5kg of carbon dioxide every winter work day. 

Running the reverse cycle air-conditioner in our living area to warm enough house to reach the office is hard to measure, but the office is the far corner of the house from the aircon. A fairly conservative guess would be 5-6kWh per day to use the reverse cycle to heat the office, which is why we don't do that.

Loft bed

June was Month of the Loft Bed.

If children's excitement could be linked to a battery, we would have been running off-grid all month. 

Tyson built this bed using mostly recycled materials found on verge collection. We gathered up an almost-complete single and queen bed frame. Some of the timber was too deteriorated to use. Other bits were joined together to make stronger posts and the dents and damage marks puttied away.

The sides from the queen bed were added to the single bed. Some additional new timber was also needed.

 

Tyson worked away at it for weeks, with some help and tool-loaning from his dad. As after five dry months it rained here nearly all of May, we re-purposed the carport (our only covered outdoor area) as a workspace.

Finally the bed moved inside, heralded with unbounded joy by its new occupant. 

And by her small accomplice, who learned to climb the ladder in about ten seconds flat.

This is a step for sustainable living on account of the recycled materials, but also as a way to use our existing space. It can be easy to see an overcrowded room and think it needs to be bigger. Or to anticipate two children big enough for their own big beds (not quite yet but coming soon) and assume they need two rooms. 

The loft bed has transformed a fairly ordinary room into a fantastic play space, with the under-bed area great for cubbies (with their own light!) and the increased floor space inviting more play in general. The lower bed (also an old verge-collection find) is not physically attached to the loft bed, to allow maximum flexibility as needs change. The ladder can also be easily moved, including going over the end if necessary.

Initial Time: Oh well. Lets just say a lot. Tyson has been full-time home dad the past few months and this was his main project, in between parenting, for weeks. Plus there were months of dreaming, thinking, planning, carefully watching the verge, bringing materials home, hiding a single bed frame under another single bed for six months while waiting for more, sketches, measurements...

Initial Cost: $200 for timber and assorted things like sand paper, screws, wood putty, etc. Especially for The Ladder (which is arguably the best bit of it all).

Ongoing time or cost commitment: Zero. While we could possibly have picked up a second-hand loft bed for around $200 on Gumtree etc, new beds like this cost $800-$1200, so it was a considerable saving.

Impact: Two beds saved from land fill, and equivalent timber, factory overheads, chemicals, transport etc saved from being made into a bed for us. The timber we bought was plantation pine, while many manufactured beds use rainforest timbers. One modest size bedroom has been made to feel bigger. And the joy... 

I'm also posting about it because I'm so darn proud of Tyson's efforts. And because Eva wants photos on the blog to show the bed to her beloved kindy teacher.

PS: I've added an extra photo of our boy playing in the winter sun to last month's post. For those of you in it for the photos.

Winterise the house

Winter starts tomorrow (although it was cold enough for winter here today). Although our energy-saving efforts have been more directed towards passive cooling in summer, we do a few things to reduce our energy use for heating in winter too. Like wearing warm clothes and ugg boots at home.

That's sheepskin boots all furry on the inside, for those in other parts of the world

May has been the month to roll up the summer shades all around the house. We get so used to them that it has taken several goes, as we kept noticing one or two more we've forgotten. We added even more shades this summer - a big one along the southwest wall (Eva's bedroom) and a much improved one on the eaveless northeast bathroom window. 

Eva & Tyson building the new shade last November

As a result of all our passive cooling efforts, we only turned the airconditioner on for four hours all summer (half of that on the morning when it was already 39°C at 9am).

For winter we lay down an extra carpet to more than double the covered floor space in the living area. This gets morning winter sun and is a lovely place to play. 

We don't have a dryer. We line-dry our clothes outside any day we can, and use an indoor clothes rack on wet days. This gets sat where sun comes inside, or in the bathroom with a pedestal fan blowing on it. 

Our hot water system has its outdoor pipe insulated so that we don't lose so much heat into the cold winter air. I try to use the tap closest to the hot water system (laundry tap) when running warm water for things like wipes, to reduce how much water and gas is wasted getting just a bit of warm for what I need.

When I am working from home, I wear ugg boots and wrap in a blanket rather than having a heater in the office.   

Eva pretending to be me at work - note the full-body blanket wrap, my characteristic work attire

Perth has a mild winter, but can have comparatively cold nights. We often open all the windows during the day to get warm midday air inside. On really nice days, we put the bathroom and kitchen extractor fans on to draw in the warm outdoor air.

Around sunset, we close all the windows and blinds, especially if the oven is on, so we can trap daytime and cooking heat in the house overnight. We pull the heat barrier curtain to separate the laundry from the living spaces we are trying to keep warm. We have weather sealed the front door to keep drafts out. On really cold evenings we sometimes run a heater for a couple of hours after dark. Very occasionally. When its the reverse-cycle air-conditioner we set it to 19°C.

The children take a heat-pack or hot water bottle to bed on cold nights, as well as wearing warm jarmies and socks and having good thick covers. We don't have any heating running overnight.

I've written about most of these measures before, and a lot of them are pretty basic common sense. I recognise that in some colder climates, these measures would not be enough to keep you warm - but they might be a good start. I also acknowledge that I prefer a cooler house, and some of our friends do come to evening events at our home with coats to wear inside. They are quite happy with that arrangement.

Don't let the cold stop you jumping on the trampoline (fully rugged of course)

Initial Time: half hour to take up the summer shades; five minutes laying the winter carpet down

Initial Cost: zero

Ongoing time or cost commitment: five or ten minutes a day opening and closing blinds etc; ten minutes per washing load pegging it out. As our winterising measures save energy, they also save us money.

Impact: We barely use heating in winter. We maybe turn a heater on 10-15 days in the year, and then only for an hour or two. If we were to run our 2.5kW reverse-cycle airconditioner as a heater for 1-2 hours every night through winter (still a lot less than many people in Perth), we would use approximately 230kWhrs of energy (230 'units'). If we turn it on only 15 times, we use approximately 37.5kWhrs. That is a saving of about 158kg of carbon dioxide.

A reasonably efficient clothes dryer uses around 3.5kWhrs per load. A pedestal fan can run for 20 hours before it reaches 1kWhr, but usually about twelve hours is enough to dry a washing load. Even at 20 hours, that's a saving of around 2kg of carbon dioxide per washing load.

[In WA at present, each kWhr of electricity uses 0.82kg of carbon dioxide, down from 0.992 four years ago. NSW & Qld levels are about the same; Vic is much higher (heavy reliance on brown coal), SA is lower (lots of wind farms); Tas is nominal (mostly hydropower)]

For blog readers in the northern hemisphere about to step into summer (bless you, I don't know who you are but apparently lots of you are reading this blog!): here's a bunch of posts about passive cooling measures: recommitting for summer; various temporary measures; pelmets; shading; more shading; shading again; grapevines for shading; shed vents and more shading; heat barrier curtain; bits & pieces;

Grapes in a rental garden

Grapevines are wonderful. They provide good shade in summer, drop their leaves to allow sun in winter, don't need much water or loving care, and best of all: they grow grapes!

But in a rental garden, are they possible?

We started with a cutting in a pot. As it turns out we have been in the same rental house nearly seven years, but while our lovely vine was getting established in his pot, we could have relocated with him if we needed to. In the photo below he's been settling in for about six months.

By Mr Vine's second summer he needed something to grow up, and we helped him with bits of makeshift trellis in the raised garden bed - mostly recycled items heading for bulk waste, like a rusted clothes drying rack. 

 

But what I really wanted was for the vine to provide shade for the front of the house.

Our lounge heats up not just from direct summer sun, but from reflected heat off sunny bricks. So the challenge was to build a trellis so the grapevine could grow over the garden entrance as far as the roof, without putting up any permanent fixtures.

The main support was a branch salvaged when trimming the gum tree. The trellis comprises two lengths of thick wire, each with loops twisted into them, one lying along the gutter and one connecting the gutter to the gum tree support. Loops between the two wires are connected with pieces of clothesline.

Our vine has now spent two summers growing up the trellis and I am thrilled with this addition to our garden, and to our passive cooling measures for the living area. Grapevines need firm pruning but its not an excessive task. Thus far, only pruning a couple of times a year, the vine has been easy to keep away from the tiles and causes no problems along the roof line.

We know the vine has been through the bottom of the pot for years now. If we need to we can dig it out to remove it when we leave (but why would any landlord want it gone?). Hopefully it can be left to bless future residents.

The grapes are delicious, although they come ripe each year exactly when we are away on our summer holiday. Eva spent the weeks before we left this year telling all our friends to come and eat our grapes while we were away and we were delighted that one good friend did just that, so the harvest was not wasted.

Initial Time: well now... Putting a grape cutting in a pot took about five minutes. Building the trellis took me about five minutes (erecting the gum tree support post) and Tyson about an hour (twisting wires). Growing a grapevine has taken five years so far. We got edible grapes from the fourth summer.

Initial Cost: Zero. We were given our cutting by friends.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: Zero cost. We water with recycled bath, shower or washing machine water through summer, top up the soil with home-grown compost and mulch with leaves off other plants around the garden. Pruning takes about half an hour two or three times a year. As its in a well-mulched pot, there are hardly any weeds.

Impact: Our bricks are shaded a little more of the day and reflect less heat in our lounge window and front door. I don't know if the temperature is actually much cooler but I feel cooler to have a green space rather than the glare of a brick driveway when I look out the window. As it takes so long to be cold enough for leaves to fall here, I have actually cut most of the leaves off to let autumn sun through. And we get to eat home-grown grapes! Which is cool, and also saves a bit on  food miles/ pesticides/ packaging/ etc.

This picture was taken last July - not much sign of leaves dropping off despite it being the middle of winter! Last year we had only one week between the last leaf falling and the first spring shoots emerging. Ah Perth. Not really a climate of four seasons.