We told the story of the building of our energy efficient retirement home in SHD 2025. In the 2026 episode we will reflect on the experience of living in our new house for nearly two years.
We installed roll-up mesh blinds around the veranda to protect us from the wind. This makes the veranda a lot more usable year round. The garden is growing and we have visiting birds and reptiles. Ponds are popular with birds and frogs. We added more raised vegetable gardens and protect them from the strong coastal wind with shade mesh.
The house design has been thoroughly tested and it works extremely well for our lifestyle. Visitors are always surprised by the open spacious feel of the house interior, as the exterior appearance is very low key. The carefully planned windows have proved their worth. We love the bush views through our east-facing windows, which are shaded by the veranda in summer. The large, north facing windows make a big difference to the house temperature in winter, it warms up with even the smallest amount of sunshine.
The solar panels with battery have outperformed our expectations. Following a severe bushfire our town lost power for 4 days. While most people were scrabbling for generators, we remained powered up by our solar system. As long as we used only one appliance at a time, we were able to run the air conditioning, dishwasher, induction cooktop and washing machine.
In summer there has been some extremely hot weather, but we run our A/C using only solar power. We use a small amount of grid power when it is cloudy, especially in winter.
The double glazed windows provide thermal performance but also they seal so well keeping out dust, water and noise.
The heat recovery ventilation unit we installed is not sufficiently powerful. It takes a long time to remove cooking smells from the open plan kitchen-living area. We are now running it at higher than recommended rates. We’d recommend going slightly oversized on the HRV to ensure sufficient airflow.
