GREEN DREAMS
Home living tips that will save your bank balance and the planet, writes CATHERINE MASTERS
How about using your electric car battery to power your house? Sam Archer, the technical director for the New Zealand Green Building Council, says electric car batteries are the way of the future, not just on the roads but also in the home.
Archer says energy is the big thing at the moment on the green home front. Here are his top five developments which are either happening now or are just on the horizon.
Battery power
The new Nissan Leaf electric car allows you to use the battery to charge and back up your home, says Archer.
“You don’t even need solar panels — you could just have your car hooked up to the house and then, in the event of a power cut, the car would power the house.”
This is the only electric car in New Zealand currently capable of doing this, but Archer says other manufacturers are looking at the technology.
“Nissan are claiming the car would power a typical house for three days in the event of a power cut,” says Archer.
Appliances which talk to both the internet and the energy grid
When appliances talk to each other (the Internet of Things) you get the potential for them to shut down briefly at times of peak demand and save power.
“Your fridge or your heat pump might turn off briefly or turn down. If it’s a freezer then nothing will happen to your food. It will just turn off for 5 or 10 minutes and that will be fine.
“There are appliances that have been specifically designed to talk to both the internet and the electricity grid.”
Archer says we will probably increasingly see all kinds of appliances connected up to the grid.
Community power sharing
This is also known as a ‘distributed grid’. “This is where if you’ve got battery storage or PD (partial discharge), or other kind of electricity generation on site you could sell to people locally.
“There are various companies in New Zealand and abroad that are developing systems where, instead of entering a contract with a Meridian (energy company), you are effectively buying and selling power around your community.
“That’s definitely emerging as an interesting new technology. You’re not having to pay a Meridian to send your electricity from Auckland to Dunedin, you’re able to say, ‘well, I’ve got some excess now, I can sell it to my local school during the middle of the day.’”
Home indoor air quality monitoring
There’s an increasing awareness around health and wellbeing concerning chemicals in the home and off gassing (where a chemical gives off a sometimes harmful gas) and around sleeping with high carbon dioxide levels in the home.
A number of companies around the world, including one in New Zealand, are developing cheap sensors you can have in your home to tell whether your indoor air quality is good or not and what to do about it.
You might think this would be for countries more polluted than ours but we need the technology, too, says Archer.
“We have very high moisture levels and we have often high carbon dioxide levels in homes. The evidence is people don’t know how to insulate their homes properly so it’s an increasing understanding of how to make your home healthier.”
Double glazing
Okay, this is not a new technology but the Green Building Council is seeing more double glazing being put in homes and also more retrofitting of homes.
Archer says this is a good trend but we have a way to go. In the United Kingdom around 85 per cent of homes are double glazed, but “we’d be nowhere near that in New Zealand”.
He is also seeing central heating gaining in popularity. This is greener in terms of health and wellbeing though not in terms of energy use, but the tradeoff is worth it, he says. “We know that some of the big health problems in New Zealand are coming from cold bedrooms, and it’s typically bedrooms that are not heated here. We would probably argue it’s energy that should be used because homes in New Zealand are too cold.”