Abdallah House - Redesigning a Home

There was a real buzz at the Seymour Library last Tuesday night, where 110 people packed the usually quiet space, to hear David Holmgren’s presentation “Food, Resilience and Retrofitting our Suburbs”. The night began with banter between locals Peter Lockyer and Richard Telford focussed on retrofitting projects of the built environment, including Abdallah House and three other properties, all within a kilometre of the library. The common thread was in considering the solar aspect, and modifying the existing resources and infrastructure of the sites to increase self-reliance. David introduced ‘Aussie Street’, a compelling story from the 'new suburbs' of the 1950s and their evolution through the decades. People in the audience could relate to the made-up characters that live in the street, and the drama of their lives. Each of the four properties illustrated various realistic approaches to suburban living, and adaption to changing times. As affluence and energy use dram

Globally recognised ecological thinker, David Holmgren, has identified the Seymour township as a potential key model for regional community-based ecological renewal. Holmgren, permaculture co-originator, believes Seymour has the ideal community and infrastructure mix to become a leading adapter of retrofitting the built environment, private open space, household form and lifestyle, to become more sustainable. 'Seymour has the classic suburban pattern of small houses on larger blocks, many of them solar oriented, that has mostly been lost to infill and redevelopment in Melbourne' says Holmgren. 'This makes it ideal for owner and occupier initiated retrofits. Local case study Abdallah House , active community groups, local government centre on the train line, affordability and the river all contribute to Seymour’s potential. At the southern end of the Mitchell Shire, new suburban housing patterns present different opportunities and retrofit challenges more typical of ou

Apply self-regulation and accept feedback   Almost 5 years to the day after I wrote the piece on the 'Super Fridge', it has been my most popular post by far. The fridge recently died, which was very disappointing, even though I knew that this was an experiment. I had optimistically anticipated that the super fridge may last longer than a similar quality normal fridge because it was under less load. I was wrong about that. Thought it would be good to do a bit of a review on how it performed and what the learnings were from it. You can see the original post here - read over it now, if you haven't already. Drawers were wearing out the mounts and were difficult to open. I estimated that the daily energy use of the original 'super fridge' was 165Wh per day. This was based on settings of turning on at 3ºC and off at 7ºC. I changed that later to on at 2ºC and off at 5ºC, so the use could be assumed to be a bit higher than 165Wh p/d - but I didn't measure t