Fridging good
Hello readers,
Winter has set in well and truly for Motueka, however not quite as bad as what our friends and family have been experiencing in Christchurch of late - what with all that recent snowfall and all. We didn't have any snow here during the recent storms, but we did experience quite heavy rain fall and relatively cool temperatures. The hills beyond us however are snow capped which makes for a beautiful view.
The heatpump has been going flat tack, and so has the oil column heater in the corridor to take the chill away. The electricity bill turned up this month for less than $300 however, which isn't too bad for this house with no underfloor insulation and little ceiling insulation. I expect this will likely increase in the next month however.
House Design
We are pretty busy with reading up on architecture and pattern language and how to design our future home. The aim is to work out how to build a not-so-big-house that will be both a cozy home and affordable. We want to live debt free, principally so that any new improvements can be financed directly from what would have otherwise gone to the bank as interest. We don't know if what we want is possible, but we are at least going to attempt it.
There is certainly much to be said about building a smaller (perhaps scalable) house. One has to consider increasing the utilisation of space with consideration to efficiency of usage. You can start to get an appreciation of this when you look at how motor homes and yachts are designed - there is a lot that can be done in a smaller space if you allow yourself to think a little differently. As the kids get older, we may start scaling the house by putting on more rooms as necessary - but the real crux of the design is to ensure that there is a good vision of how the extensions will be done in the future and where they will go, so that the first stage of the house can be designed with those elements in mind. This has to be done correctly or we risk the house looking like a bunch of ad-hoc buildings.
Fridge/Freezer
Of late our upright fridge-freezer has been giving us issues. The fridge compartment stopped working, so we had to put everything on the back porch. Being winter this wasn't a bad thing as the average temperatures were <10 degC, most of the time <5 degC overnight. However this wasn't always ideal and we did have things go bad on us. The freezer also decided to make a terrible "fan scraping" noise (probably the frost free fan) and was also struggling a bit to keep things frozen. It was a bit of a "old-dunga" of a fridge which we were given by one of the local villagers here to use when we first arrived - however I think it may be time for it to RIP.
However I have for some time been intending to convert a chest freezer into a fridge, and idea originally inspired by this article:
http://mtbest.net/chest_fridge.html
The chest freezer contains the cold in a cavity (compared to an upright fridge/freezer where the cold escapes whenever you open the door), and is better insulated because the temperatures are typically colder. I managed to find on TradeMe (local equivalent of eBay) an old Haier chest freezer which came with a bottom drawer which they say was a "soft freezer" ... or "not so cold freezer". Of course I always wanted a drawer fridge so this looked like it would do a good job - for $250 delivered (from Blenheim, 2 hours away), it was a score! It didn't bother me too much that it had a dismal energy rating of 399 kWh/year as I wasn't going to run it as cold.
I purchased a temperature controller and put it into an old metal box I had lying around. I got a short extension lead and cut it in half so I could plug the system into the wall on one end, and the freezer can be plugged into the socket which is controlled by the temperature controller - nice an easy! no modification required to the freezer. You can see the black wire below which is the temperature probe that is put in the freezer compartment.
To give some contrast to this, the previous upright fridge/freezer used to draw 1000-1200 watt hours per day. So we are looking at a 3-4x reduction in power usage, potentially higher. The guy who originally inspired me was getting down to 100 watt hours per day (which is super impressive), however he is only running it as a fridge, not a fridge/freezer as I am doing.
Here is the setup as I have it:
The ideal freezer is of course -18 to -20 degC, so more testing will be required to see if we do need those temperatures or not. I was considering getting another smaller chest freezer for that purpose, and using this solely as a fridge with a crisper drawer.
Other news
In other news ... check out this parsnip which was picked from the community gardens this morning, and made into soup for lunch :)
There have also been many many Mandarins and Feijoas to pick from our garden, we have been doing baskets full like these almost weekly. Would seem to be the season for it.
Katie has decided to try her hand at weaving baskets from Willow branches because we have a tree on-site. This is the result of her first project which I thought was pretty amazing from raw materials into useful-ish.
That's all for now folks.
Thanks to those of you who are encouraging me to write, it's nice to know that people are actually reading this stuff.
Winter has set in well and truly for Motueka, however not quite as bad as what our friends and family have been experiencing in Christchurch of late - what with all that recent snowfall and all. We didn't have any snow here during the recent storms, but we did experience quite heavy rain fall and relatively cool temperatures. The hills beyond us however are snow capped which makes for a beautiful view.
The heatpump has been going flat tack, and so has the oil column heater in the corridor to take the chill away. The electricity bill turned up this month for less than $300 however, which isn't too bad for this house with no underfloor insulation and little ceiling insulation. I expect this will likely increase in the next month however.
House Design
We are pretty busy with reading up on architecture and pattern language and how to design our future home. The aim is to work out how to build a not-so-big-house that will be both a cozy home and affordable. We want to live debt free, principally so that any new improvements can be financed directly from what would have otherwise gone to the bank as interest. We don't know if what we want is possible, but we are at least going to attempt it.
There is certainly much to be said about building a smaller (perhaps scalable) house. One has to consider increasing the utilisation of space with consideration to efficiency of usage. You can start to get an appreciation of this when you look at how motor homes and yachts are designed - there is a lot that can be done in a smaller space if you allow yourself to think a little differently. As the kids get older, we may start scaling the house by putting on more rooms as necessary - but the real crux of the design is to ensure that there is a good vision of how the extensions will be done in the future and where they will go, so that the first stage of the house can be designed with those elements in mind. This has to be done correctly or we risk the house looking like a bunch of ad-hoc buildings.
Fridge/Freezer
Of late our upright fridge-freezer has been giving us issues. The fridge compartment stopped working, so we had to put everything on the back porch. Being winter this wasn't a bad thing as the average temperatures were <10 degC, most of the time <5 degC overnight. However this wasn't always ideal and we did have things go bad on us. The freezer also decided to make a terrible "fan scraping" noise (probably the frost free fan) and was also struggling a bit to keep things frozen. It was a bit of a "old-dunga" of a fridge which we were given by one of the local villagers here to use when we first arrived - however I think it may be time for it to RIP.
However I have for some time been intending to convert a chest freezer into a fridge, and idea originally inspired by this article:
http://mtbest.net/chest_fridge.html
The chest freezer contains the cold in a cavity (compared to an upright fridge/freezer where the cold escapes whenever you open the door), and is better insulated because the temperatures are typically colder. I managed to find on TradeMe (local equivalent of eBay) an old Haier chest freezer which came with a bottom drawer which they say was a "soft freezer" ... or "not so cold freezer". Of course I always wanted a drawer fridge so this looked like it would do a good job - for $250 delivered (from Blenheim, 2 hours away), it was a score! It didn't bother me too much that it had a dismal energy rating of 399 kWh/year as I wasn't going to run it as cold.
I purchased a temperature controller and put it into an old metal box I had lying around. I got a short extension lead and cut it in half so I could plug the system into the wall on one end, and the freezer can be plugged into the socket which is controlled by the temperature controller - nice an easy! no modification required to the freezer. You can see the black wire below which is the temperature probe that is put in the freezer compartment.
The idea here is to reduce the electricity requirements for freezer and fridge as we will be on solar power. This reduces the system design requirements and/or increasing the run time of the batteries.
So what's the verdict?
I'm pretty impressed. We we playing around with the settings for a bit but in general it looks like running this system at -12 to -15 degC seems to create a good enough freezer in the top compartment, and somewhere in the 2-5 degC in the drawer compartment which we are using as a fridge. Brilliant! We have a new chest fridge-freezer, yaye! Note a Fisher and Paykel drawer fridge is about $2800 new, so being able to get similar functionality at a fraction of the cost is pretty good - of course it is bigger and has more bling, but that doesn't matter to us.
This setup seems to be drawing on average ~300 watt hours per day (equivalent to 109 kwh/year) which is about 2-3x better than most Gram fridges or fridge-freezers (Gram makes super efficient upright fridges and fridge freezer). The picture below shows the reading at about 45 hours of running from the start. I anticipate as things start to settle and come into equilibrium, the system here will likely draw less again.
Here is the setup as I have it:
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| The temperature controller. You can adjust many parameters in it like temperature setting, hysteresis, cooling or heating, time delay switching and temperature limits. |
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| This is the chest freezer setup with the controller perched on to at the moment. I will be getting some magnets to attach to the bottom of the case so it will stick to the top cover and not slide off. |
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| The contents of our fridge. Although smaller than what we were used to, it is perfectly fine for our requirements. |
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| The freezer compartment (which is actually bigger than the fridge). The extra size might be handy if we have to put some chickens, pig or a goat in there. |
The ideal freezer is of course -18 to -20 degC, so more testing will be required to see if we do need those temperatures or not. I was considering getting another smaller chest freezer for that purpose, and using this solely as a fridge with a crisper drawer.
Other news
In other news ... check out this parsnip which was picked from the community gardens this morning, and made into soup for lunch :)
There have also been many many Mandarins and Feijoas to pick from our garden, we have been doing baskets full like these almost weekly. Would seem to be the season for it.
Katie has decided to try her hand at weaving baskets from Willow branches because we have a tree on-site. This is the result of her first project which I thought was pretty amazing from raw materials into useful-ish.
That's all for now folks.
Thanks to those of you who are encouraging me to write, it's nice to know that people are actually reading this stuff.
I definitely enjoy your writing, please do keep it up! :-)
ReplyDeleteI think we in New Zealand have become terrible at utilising our space well - we are spoiled by large houses. I've become aware through living in a smallish apartment for the last two years that simply thinking things through in advance makes a huge difference in ease of living. Very keen to hear more about your house design as you work through that. :-)
Love that basket!
ReplyDeleteI keep my veg box outside on my balcony in winter. Some of it actually keeps much better than it would in the fridge, even though the temperatures tend to be a bit warmer.
After being in central Europe for almost a year, I've had a real wake-up call about how inefficient NZ homes are. If I ever build another house in NZ it simply must be done with thick brick walls and a minimum of double glazing on the windows. It's a shame NZ's building codes have only started catching up in the last few years. Still, better late than never.
ReplyDeleteThanks Rosa, yes I'll probably be writing more on house design concepts later on. Thanks for the encourage ment :)
ReplyDeleteSarah, yes Katie is into her experiments with sand box storage, larders highly humid environments for storing veges, fruits etc fresh for longer. I'm really trying to get her to blog about it as well - but alas she hasn't yet :)
Gavin, yea the codes are getting better - but they do have to pander to the pocket of joe public unfortunately. If they make the standards too stringent they will be public outcry which won't help much either. But I think people really should be educated on how to treasure things that last well longer and will service them better over that time - rather than just to always optimize on today's costs. Every dollar saved in heating today is 2 dollars saved sometime in the future when heating bills double - in other words, people need to learn to hedge themselves against the evils of inflation. :)
Hi Hemon, your drawer fridge looks interesting! I've never seen on like that before.
ReplyDeleteMy chest fridge conversion project is detailed here:
http://green-change.com/2009/05/23/chest-fridge-conversion/
I used a 210L chest freezer, and it used about 200-300 Wh/day (very similar to what you're seeing). Incidentally, I have the same plug-in power meter as you :-). I like the project box you mounted the controller in - it looks very neat and tidy. I need to do something like that.
Our mandarins are just starting to come in, as are the oranges. They're edible, but not at their sweetest just yet. Another few weeks and they'll be perfect.
Hi Darren, thanks for posting your comment - certainly interesting to see your efforts along the same lines. I found this Haier chest freezer completely by fluke, I too didn't know they existed. They usually go for $500 2nd hand, but this one went for $150 as it had some dents in the top of it - I'm not complaining :)
DeleteIt's certainly a great idea and easy enough to do affordably.
Hmmm, this sounds a bit like our original tiny-house plan, which somehow didn't happen. Now we have resorted to a whole 100m2. I think the original idea was 70. And our debt free plan somehow mophed into an ordinary mortgage like everybody else.
ReplyDeleteAre you going to have your shed in the living room too? I have found that it isn't much good for welding, because all the smoke from the flux lingers about, and probably doesn't do much good for our formal lounge suite, maybe not a problem for your MIG. Wood shavings are hard to vacuum out of the carpet too. But it is great to step straight from eating dinner into ones shed without getting cold.
Yes, I was meaning to talk to you about that. It's a pity you didn't realise your small house plan - it would have been good to see how you went abouts it. What kind of house was it?
DeleteDespite the many advantages you list for having a shed in the house, for me I think the MIG and kids probably won't mix too well. I think the shed will be a separate 10m2 something a short distance from the house.
Hi Hemon,
ReplyDeleteRead your blog with interest, we have been down your path and I thought I might share some of our observations with you
We looked at originally building a relatively modest 180sq mtr house to Eco standards. The initial quotes scared us so we started looking at a smaller place such as you are doing.
1: When we looked at 120sq mtrs we based our calcs on an avg cost to build a house. This worked out at approx. $1300 sq mtr or $156,000 for a 120 mtr house. However we found that we had done a miscalculation. $1300 per sq mtr is an average cost, building an eco house would seem to cost more. Double glazing, wool bats, Eco paint, solar passive tiling not to mention solar panelling (which we actively looked at) put the costs way higher. So building a 120 Sq mtr house grew to around $185 to $195K which was very sobering.
This didn’t include any council costs, land costs etc
2: The second thing was that a 120 Sq mtr house was actually far too small for myself, wife and children. We actually looked at a place of around that size and we realised very very quickly that there was no way we could bring up the kids, have privacy etc in 120sq mtr house. I really wanted to build even though it was a very small size. My partner got quite upset because of the size and what she saw would be the impact on the family. This led to some ‘interesting’ discussions.
So in theory a 120 Sq mtr house looked good but the actual figures (for us anyway) were very alarming
• Land $180 K
• House $190 K
• Water Tanks, Grey Water system $22K
• Council costs $10K
• Architectural costs (estimated here as I cannot remember the exact cost) $10K
• Contingency $40K
• Total Approx costs $452K
When you extrapolate this across to a very modest sized house of 170 Sq mtrs we came out well over $500,000 – Very scary stuff indeed!!!
Our Solution
Well after a lot of soul searching and discussion we have gone for a more traditional approach, we are now looking at an 80 yr old house in the Horowhenua (near Otaki), its an average but solid 180 Sq mtr site on a plain old quarter acre section and it looks like we can get all of this (House + Land) for $280 K – yeh ha!!.
Nothing Eco about it – Yet!!
The plan now is that over the next 5-10 yrs we will gradually upgrade this house to a more Eco std. We will do this room by room and as budget allows.
Key Lessons (so far)
1: So one key lesson was that dreams can cost – a lot!!.
2: The other key lesson (For me) was ‘a happy wife equals a happy life’
3: And the third key lesson was that we have had to compromise – I guess life’s like that!!
Any way good luck with your plans and I really hope that you achieve your dreams. We look forward to following your updates as your journey continues
Cheers
Ivan
Hi Ivan,
DeleteThanks for your comments. Certainly there are no free lunches when it comes down to building a house and it certainly all adds up. Those figures you posted there all seem around the similar ballparks except the land value we're looking at is nearly double! ... so this means everything else had to be scaled back. :( Such is the case if you are one of the first ones in - premium lots go first to fund the rest of the development. Our house will thus have to be limited to somewhere in the 100K region and services (offgrid power, black/grey waste, and water systems) will account for a further 50-80K (which might be overkill). This really translates into a 80-100m2 home - initially. Most architects will tell us we are dreaming - but after staying in a 30m2 sleepout for a year, I'm sure even a 50m2 house would seem like a mansion :)
The whole reason behind the staging of the house build is so that we don't have to go to the bank to borrow money - the idea would be to live frugally for a few years with the intention of trading off some comfort space for future earnings to be spent on the land itself, rather than servicing a mortgage. Although we are questioning how much space we really require to be comfortable, and what priority should be given to what space. We are leaning more towards bedrooms being cosy and functional, but living and kitchen areas to be generous and well positioned.
We know families who have spent 5 years in a house bus travelling around the country - it was a life adventure for them. In a similar way we are treating this as our big adventure and are willing to make the trade offs necessary. For comparison, we used to live in 250m2 house in Christchurch which was spacious indeed ... even our garage was bigger than our stipulated sleepout temporary home.
All parties do have to be "on-board" - it will stress relationships otherwise. However the equation of life does include challenges, but sometimes it takes a bit of hardship to garner a true appreciation and understanding of one's passions. We figure the best way to achieve our dream is to just go out and do it.
I wish you all the best on your journey too, keep in touch :)