Please read this first...

If you want to know what I'm on about in the shortest time then please read the introductory first post and my current action plan. Comments are very welcome. And if you like this blog, please tell a friend. Thanks!

Friday 12 December 2008

Cool! Stats

Past 11 days... average consumption 6.55 kWh/day, of which 1.36 was used by the new fridge. 32% of our consumption was supplied directly from our solar panels (just over 2 kWh/day) while another 2.64kWh was exported to the grid each day.

As a result of the low consumption and strong sunlight, we are now in negative territory for energy costs over the past 102 days (not counting the fixed service fees). The credit for our exported energy will exceed the charge for imported energy by about $2.

We've also had heaps of rain, so the tanks have been full almost constantly for the past six weeks or so.

Friday 5 December 2008

More garden photos

This rain and warmth is amazing for plant growth.

Too much effort to embed images in here when you can click and see them all over at my gallery.

Some of them you'd have seen before but there are new ones:
- beans growing beautifully and just today poking out of the cage
- pots where we planted tomatoes and got some volunteer cucumbers or something
- passionfruit vine from the neighbour's place going nuts on our chook pen
- first ever mangoes on a tree planted by a previous resident
- what we think is an avocado that I lopped off ages ago due to disease, regrowing
- tomato bush which "died" with some kind of wilt suddenly springing back to life

Monday 1 December 2008

Quick stats

It's been a great week on the electricity front. Household consumption was 6.86kWh/day. The new fridge has averaged 1.3kWh/day, about a 35% improvement over the old one.

Excluding fixed monthly service fees but including the solar feed-in tariff, our electricity costs for the past 91 days are, in total, $2.62. That's less than three cents a day.