Staying warm

We moved into the Newtown Cottage in Winter. Sydney winters are mild and usually pretty nice during the day, but the heat drops away quite quickly once the sun goes down, and the days are short. Because of the mild weather, a lot of Australian houses are not well insulated or well designed to retain heat during winter.

The Newtown Cottage has a number of good features - it is double brick and it is not open plan, but it has a number of things which work against it :

• it doesn't receive any direct sunlight in winter on any aspect of the house
• while the main living areas are individual rooms there are no doors between them
• there is no insulation in the roof
• there are gaps in the floorboards which are exposed directly to the outside weather
• the doors and windows are not well sealed which cause a lot of drafts
• there is no double glazing
• there's no inbuilt heating, which means heating is dependent on electric heaters.

Most of these aspects can't be addressed without significant capital outlay, so on the face of it you would think we'd be up for high heating costs, electricity bills and carbon emissions (most of Australia's power is sourced from coal, which is one of the worst sources of carbon emissions). But it ain't necessarily so. We've been getting a few ideas from the ABC TV show - Carbon Cops, but most are affirmations of what we'd already done. Here's some steps we took.

Making the switch to green power: We decided to go with Country Energy for our supply of power. The NSW energy market got deregulated some years ago, thanks to my old boss Fred. As a result there is a supposedly competitive market for green power. What we actually found in practice was that information on who was the cheapest and best provider of green power is sporadic, and in some cases biased and misleading. At the time of doing our research, Country Energy was the cheapest provider who also received a blue chip rating on their service and carbon rating. Interestingly enough, when we rang Country Energy they didn't seem to realise this or that they could provide in our area. We pushed ahead and for the measly sum of $4.40 per week now have a clear conscience. The interesting thing about how they do this is they buy offsets against the average household's usage, rather than what we actually use. In theory this means if we get our energy use down, we could actually be carbon negative (making up for other people). This topic might be worthy of a separate blog, I might come back to this.

Reduce the drafts: Draft reducing tape (the double sided foamy tape stuff) is available at most hardware stores for about $5-10. You put the tape around the door jams and window frames to eliminate any drafts. This is sticky stuff and sticks everywhere other than were you want it to do, so be careful with it. Also give the surface area a light clean to make sure it sticks - wiping it with your finger was enough for me.

Get a door snake: $5 from any hardware or junk shop. The cold air can no longer get in (see photos 1 & 2 - that's a huge gap!).

Only heat the room you're in: Normally you'd just shut the door, but in this house there are no doors. What we did was buy a self suspended hanging rail (under $15 in most hardware stores - see picture). These things are great, you can put them up and down in under 10 seconds and they don't leave any marks. From there you can make some quick curtains (find someone with a sewing fetish - Gem made ours in a few hours with $20 in calico) and hang them up. We've put them on both doors in and out of our lounge room. So for under $50 we've been able to contain most of our heat (it was freezing before we put these in - all the heat was blowing into the other rooms) and cut down our power bills. One of the other things that's interesting is that you can see whether you've got any drafts once the curtains are up because they blow around - you can then track down open windows etc. (see photos)

Put some curtains in: We had wooden blinds which helped with some of the cold escaping out the windows but didn't allow any light in. We've put in some cheap roman blinds, but these haven't been very effective as they're thin and we don't have any pelmets. Suggestions appreciated on this one.

Blankets, wheat bags and water bottles: Fan heaters are terrible things - they chew a lot of power, make the air stale and put you to sleep. Wheatbags are a great little invention - you put them in the microwave for 2 minutes and they'll keep you warm for an hour. Hot waterbottles are about the same effectiveness... actually this laptop I'm using is doing a pretty good job... why do these things generate so much heat even when they're running off batteries? (see photo 3)

Comments please. Other ideas and experiences?