Carbon Credit Collector Weblog

How time flies. How the slowly winding down clock results in a spike of energy at the end. Actually that shouldn’t at all be a surprise to any students who’ve ever faced a deadline. We thought for our last dispatch it would be best to let the photos do the talking as a way of making up for the verbiage of our last effort.

In the kitchen

Our fridge made a lot of ice. Here’s some of it, removed from its former lodging so that our fridge can better work at its real job of cooling food.
What you don’t see:

• The fridge is now tilted back, hopefully avoiding future almost-closed-but-not-quite-oh-no-the-ice-cream situations.
• Our reusable shopping bags. We’ve actually been remembering to use them!

Note the shrink wrap glazing you can’t really see (particularly the glazing in the other rooms) and the new taps we installed to replace the old ones that had a tendency to leak hot water. The parsley plant has since been saved from a wilting death and planted outside. We have started washing and then re-using our plastic bags, and if you look closely you can see a couple of bags being dried upside down on the window sill.
What you don’t see

• Food scraps bin

Above is a selection of pulses, legumes/non-meat/grains/vegetarian stuff, bought in bulk from Bin Inn.

We also wanted to include a photo of how we put the two apple trees on our property to use. Actually we used up all the apples on our trees, so some of the apples in this photo are bought, but really we wanted to show off that machine in the left of the photo. You have to see it in action to believe it. With one hand-crank-driven action it’ll peel, slice and core an apple in a few seconds. Also note the power meter from the watchtower making a cameo appearance.
We manage to avoid buying a lot of food by growing it or making it ourselves from bulk ingredients. Featured in this photo are beans, cherry tomatoes, corn, home made bread (50/50 wholemeal in fact), bottle pears, bottled apples, walnuts, two courgettes, a marrow and a capsicum. All the produce is from the garden.
What you don’t see:

• Potatoes, pumpkin, kumara, spinach, silver beet, cauliflower, beetroot, lettuce, celery, carrots

Wrapping things up

In the first week of the Eco-My-Flat competition we investigated the state of our two hot water cylinders, and came to the conclusion that they could certainly benefit from being insulated. One was built in 1955; the other had no label but it could have even been earlier (1940s?). We contacted our landlords, and in the weekend they very kindly came and wrapped them with a layer of pink batts covered with aluminum sheeting. Here’s one cylinder all cosied up.
I’d also like to apologise for how bad the puns in the headings are getting.

Shrink-wrap glazing is all well and good for the windows that you can actually mount it on. But we’ve got a multitude of windows in configurations that shrink-wrap couldn’t be mounted on, such as this area, where the windows stretch too close to the floor for it to adhere properly at the bottom using double-sided tape. What you see here is our solution. That’s bubble-wrap. Acquired in a roll that’s 30cm wide and then cut into strips and joined together. Also acts as cheap privacy glass.

A curtain call even

Here’s roughly 1/3 of the upstairs lounge window in before and after form. As you can see by their transparent nature, the original curtains weren’t that great in terms of heat loss prevention. We dug about in cupboards and found real curtains to replace them, and even thermal backing has been deployed now. Bonus effect: guests sleeping over upstairs will no longer be woken prematurely by the dawn.

Closing the gaps

We finally got around to putting the draught-tape we bought from the CEA to use. Here’s a before-and-after shot of our front door. It’s a big thing, yet somehow we never noticed just how bad the gaps around it were. It’s now sealed by the tape and the area doesn’t feel so… airy… when you walk past now.

So finally we’ve reached the end. It’s been a fun and interesting four weeks, and hopefully we’ll find we’ve gained from it come winter. So to summarise everything that we’ve done under the four topics that have been the focus of each of the four weeks:

Energy and heat:

We started off feeling confident in this area. After all, we had a heat pump! So obviously we were being economical. Then we found room for improvements.
We…

• Turned down the thermostats on water cylinders.
• Evaluated and broke down our power usage by running around with a power meter, so as to effectively reduce usage.
• Replaced many incandescents with eco-bulbs. (Current count: 19 eco bulbs, 9 incandescents. The incandescents are all in places that don’t get heavy use.)
• Discovered eco-bulbs that flicker while off.
• Shrink-wrapped some windows. (Five of the coldest and shadiest).
• Bubble-wrapped some others.
• De-iced, coil-checked and tilted the fridge.
• De-draughted a very draughty outside door.
• Mounted curtain backings and replaced useless curtains.
• Got the two water cylinders wrapped.
• Replaced taps that were dripping hot water.

Waste:

We…

• Continued composting (the existing compost bin was already doing a good job) and kitchen-scrapping.
• Started collecting paper and cardboard separately for recycling, and became more diligent about sorting out material for recycling.
• Started reusing plastic bags.

Transport:

• We made no particular change in transport, since all of us are frequent cyclists, and we share car rides frequently. We have two cars, but neither are used heavily.

Shopping:

• We’ve started to buy more local food.
• The only reason we haven’t planted more in the garden is that we’ve run out of space.
• We use reusable shopping bags (count this under Waste if you want).
• We’ve started making bread on a regular basis, and have spent many of the past weekends bottling apples from our trees.
• We haven’t had any fish.
• When we needed to buy more cutlery, crockery and other kitchen items we went garage saling. On bikes even (well, collectively in a car for the first two then we split up on pedals).