Full of inspiring green homes, sustainable design information and tips on eco-friendly materials and products, Sanctuary is a must-have for making your home as green as possible.

For your chance to win a subscription to Sanctuary for yourself or for a friend, just email us at renew@ata.org.au with “Sanctuary giveaway” in the subject line, and tell us the name of one of the designers participating in the ATA’s Melbourne “speed date a sustainable designer” event on 19 February. Entries close at 5pm on Monday 6 February.

Congratulations to Tim of Alexandra, VIC and Robert of Castle Cove, NSW who were the lucky winners of Derek Wrigley’s latest book Making Your Home Sustainable: a guide to retrofitting in our last giveaway.

The Alternative Technology Association (ATA) would like to invite you to Speed Date A Sustainable Designer.

Speed Date a Sustainable Designer brings together Australia’s leading architects and building designers in the one spot so that you can meet and discuss your plans in a relaxed “no obligations” environment.

The first Speed Date A Sustainable Designer event was held as part of Victoria’s 2010 State of Design Festival and was a great success. At this event we arranged 90 “dates” between homeowners and 10 sustainable architects and designers. Watch the short YouTube video overview. Over 500 homeowners applied to be part of that first event, so make sure you register quickly!

With the support of bankmecu the ATA is conducting speed dating events in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane in 2012.

Bring your sketches, plans and photographs for critique and advice, on your tablet, laptop or good old hard copies! The designers will offer solutions, ideas and alternative viewpoints. All “dates” are 10 minutes in length.

For more information go to the website: sdsd.ata.org.au

Earthships are made entirely from recycled materials, are built to suit the climate and look very striking on the landscape. Built in any part of the world they can provide solar power, catch rainwater, provide contained sewage treatment and sustainable food production.

When: February 17th, 18th, 19th

Where: Village Roadshow Theatrette 
at the State Library of Victoria

Tickets: Cost $500 per person, with 15 Student discount tickets available at $300 each. Visit www.earthship.com/australia

Limited seating is available so advance purchase is recommended.

Attendees achieve credit toward the Australian Earthship Biotecture Academy.

Program

Friday February 17th
 from 10am – 12pm History of Earthships discussion/presentation on how and why they evolved.

2pm – 5pm Solar/Thermal dynamics: discussion/presentation on how the Earthships heat and cool themselves and how this is integrated with the structure and climate.

Saturday February 18th 
from 10am – 12pm Custom Earthships: discussion/presentation on custom Earthships and how to design them.

2pm – 5pm Earthship Systems: discussion/presentation on specific details of the Earthship Systems independent power, water, sewage and food production.

Sunday February 19th 
10am – 12:30pm Earthship Disaster Relief projects around the world discussion/presentation on how Earthships have evolved with these projects.

1pm – 3pm Types of Earthships – discussion/presentation on the various types of Earthships and how to get started on your own

Led by Michael Reynolds with guest appearance and presentation by Martin Freney, PhD Candidate School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Design University of Adelaide. Martin Freney will present scientific data to substantiate Earthship performance.

East Coast tour

Shorter presentations will be held along the east coast including Northern Rivers February 23, Gold Coast February 24 and Sunshine Coast February 25.

For further details, go to the Earthship website.

ReNew is a proud media partner of the Melbourne Earthship Biotecture Seminar

I live in Brisbane and had a 4560 watt solar PV system installed late October 2011 on a roof facing north/north-west. It consists of 24 x 190w, Trina TSM – 190DC01A panels with a SPH 50 5000 watt inverter.

As an aside, the panels were placed landscape covering nearly the whole north/north-west roof. The purpose of this was two-fold, generating as much power as possible for the area and reducing the heat radiated from the roof into the ceiling cavity, with the panels acting like a safari roof. Since the panels have been installed the temperature difference between rooflines, when the sun is directly overhead is about 7°C, being  38°C for the roof under the panels and 43°C for the exposed roof.

Temperatures were measured in the ceiling cavity using an infrared thermometer, when the room temperature is below 26°C. Vents are still to be placed in the gable ends of the ceiling cavity to aid cross ventilation. So hopefully the house should be a bit cooler in the afternoons and evenings. So far this (mild) summer, we have not needed to use fans in what is usually an extremely hot room.

Uncertain output

Unfortunately I do not seem to be achieving the maximum benefit: output so far is averaging 20kWh per day. Output starts from as early as 5am and stops around 6pm. The problem is from around 9.30am to 3pm the output does not change significantly, staying in the mid 3000s.

Other systems I am familiar with have a definite peak as the sun moves overhead. One observation is that on overcast days, when there’s a sunny break in the cloud, output will jump between high 4000s to early 5000s for a few seconds, then down to as low as a few hundred before rising to mid 3000s. Returning to mid to high 2000s once the sun is again blocked by cloud cover.

The idea behind Fix It is for skilled volunteers to guide the public through their own repair tasks in a social atmosphere, at the same time diverting waste and helping to build skills . Fix It events could fit many forms: work drinks, a BBQ, a school club, workshops, a skills auction, a stall at the farmer’s market. Fix It involves free, fun events that create as well as repair.

Info for Volunteer Fixers

The Fix It Sustainable Living Festival event needs Fixers from 10.45 am to 3.45 pm on Sunday, 19 Feb. There will be one orientation meeting beforehand around 1 Feb. The Eco Centre is looking for Fixers in the zones of Stitches (textiles), Switches (lamp repair & rejuvenation), and Splinters (woodworking with handtools). Hopefully volunteers can bring along tools to use, the centre will try to help with a small amount of materials to fix/upcycle & common tools.

Interested Fixers, please email the following info to april@ecocentre.com

a. 1-3 sentences of bio for the public. Who are you? What is your passion?

b. What skills would you like to share?

c. What are your favourite fixing/making resources in Melbourne?

d. Would you like an A4 pinboard space to display your business/contact info or project of choice?

e. What extras would you like the Eco Centre to provide for your work? Electricity, scrap fabric/wood, sockets, etc?

ReNew subscriber Jeffrey Miller of New South Wales was the winner of the Schott Solar prize in early December. He can look forward to the installation of a 1.5kW grid-interactive solar power system valued at $10,000. He thought it was ‘wicked’.

All new magazine subscribers and ATA members now go into the draw to win a $5000 term deposit from bankmecu.

On Friday, December 30 the Woodford Folk Festival will hold a forum about Building Back Green. The focus is on participation, deliberation, collaboration, transformation, with disaster-impacted communities providing extraordinary opportunities for socially innovative and ecologically resilient rebuilding. Stakeholder-inclusive deliberation liberates creativity and the potential inherent in community renewal.
Deliberation can reconcile top down other-organising ‘command and control’, with peer to peer self-organising, connectedness and collaboration.

With Mara Bun (Green Cross Aus), Frankie Maclennan (Dept of Sust & Environ, VIC), Jim Varghese (Former Dir. Premiers Dept, QLD), Daryl Taylor (Kinglake Ranges Community Resilience Committee), Nic Hunter (Community Engagement Consultant) and Maryella Hatfield (Film-maker ‘The Future Makers’).

Visit the Woodford Folk Festival GREEN house on Friday, December 30 at 4.30pm

For more tips on which tanks suits fire, cyclone and flood prone areas see Reliable Rainwater Supply: Top Tips for all Conditions in ReNew 118

A rainwater tank can play a vital role in defending your home if there is a fire, providing a quickly accessible water source for the authorities as well as essential storage if the power goes out and fresh water if there is a service disruption.

Colin Nash, Chairman of the RHAA, believes that it is vital to have your rainwater tank prepared and ready to not only harvest the summer rains, but to help defend your home if the situation arises.

“Preparing your rainwater tank in a manner which can assist the authorities and provide water when all else fails should be on top of the to-do list, before summer really sets in”, says Mr Nash.

Tips for homeowners in bushfire zones:

• Ensure there is always water in your tank, even if it involves purchasing water. Victoria’s CFA recommends having an additional water supply of at least 10,000 litres available that is independent of the reticulated water supply and mains power supply.

• Attach fire brigade fittings (which you can purchase from your local tank dealer) to your tank and ensure fire brigade access to your property and rainwater tank – the average fire brigade tanker requires 4m x 4m clearance and a large turning circle.

• Make sure you have either a petrol or diesel pump for pumping water during an emergency. E.g. electricity supply fails or service disruption.

• Install first flush water diverters to avoid contamination of rainwater with ash and soot.

• To protect your home from ember attack, fire plugs should be installed on downpipes to allow for pumping of rainwater into gutters.

Please visit www.rainwaterharvesting.asn.au for more information.

www.cleantechnica.com

There’s quite a few environmental news sites around, but many of them lack technical knowledge, and so the reporting can be less than accurate (and is sometimes just nonsensical!).

Cleantechnica is one of a number of blog style websites run by Important Media—as they put it, they are “a decentralized, niche blog network, dedicated to covering those issues which are important to our collective and individual well-being, from humanity’s survival to human happiness.”

Of course, one of those areas is technological innovation in greener and more sustainable technologies. The latest renewable energy developments such as more efficient, cheaper solar panels, policy decisions that promote and advance renewables, transportation technology and many others are covered by the huge number of posts on the site.

But Cleantechnica is just one of a network of like-minded websites. These include the personal transport site Gas2.org, greenbuildingelements.com, ecopreneurist.com which deals with more environmentally benign products and business ideas, eatdrinkbetter.com, which covers food and how it relates in our current world, greenlivingideas.com and a number of other sites, all dealing with sustainability, social issues and similar. There’s enough material in these sites to keep you reading forever!

www.ala.org.au

ALA stands for the Atlas of Living Australia. As you might expect from the name, this site is a repository of information regarding the species of flora and fauna across Australia.

The great thing about this site is that you can simply enter your location into the search system and it will show you all the species in your area. The results are categorised into types and you can select individual species and learn more about them and see where they occur in your area.

You can also search on larger regions such as by state, and the results are given in categorised ‘tile’ format, with the name and a thumbnail image of each species.

Species maps can also be created, where you select the region you want to look at and add species you want displayed. Once the map is displayed, the colours can be customised so that maps with more than one species are easy to interpret.

There’s plenty more to explore in this site, including complete natural history collections and where you can go to see them (such as local museums and the like).

There’s themes and case studies on particular species and they have even developed a Citizen Science web application to help naturalist groups and researchers collect species observation information from volunteers.

If you want to know what critters and plants you are sharing your part of the planet with then this is a great place to start. Everyone interested in Australia’s wildlife should have this site bookmarked!

What is the difference in efficiency between a six by 260 watt panel monocrystalline system and a 15 (or maybe 16) panel thin film system? I can only fit the thin film on the east-facing roof. The monocrystalline system will fit on either the east or west roof but installers prefer to put it on the west-facing roof. There is no possibility of installing on the north-facing roof—there’s no room for either system.

I am interested in which system will produce the most electricity and any other pros and cons there might be.
Chaye Oliver

Panels really should face north, but if you can’t do this, try and get all panels facing the one direction. However, this depends on the array configuration and the type of inverter used.

Don’t worry about efficiency of the panels, this isn’t the issue really, all it determines is the physical size of a panel for its rated output—a 60 watt crystalline panel will have a smaller size than a 60 watt thin film because the thin film is less efficient, but they both are still rated at 60 watts. However, thin film panels are less prone to reduced power output as they heat up (known as the temperature coefficient) and so generally, given two equivalently rated arrays, the thin film array will produce more energy over the course of a year as it performs better when hot (the usual condition for panels in Australia). Some crystalline panels have improved considerably in this way in the last couple of years, but you need to look at the specs for each panel. The coefficient is given as a figure of percentage per °C above 25°C, the smaller this figure, the better. For instance, a panel with a temp coefficient of -0.5% per °C running at 60°C will actually put out 0.5 x (60-25) or 17.5% less power than its rating.
Lance Turner