Hami Hill Sustainable Home 2019

Hami Hill Sustainable Home

One of WA’s most popular and iconic eco retrofit projects is back with a heady mix of exciting talks, tours and demos on all aspects of transforming your home to make it more sustainable, productive and beautiful.

Take a tour of the house with Chris Ferreira himself or learn from one of our expert speakers about sustainable living topics such as passive house design, the magic of mushrooms, eco gadgets + gizmos, and much more!

Plus learn about the planned ‘inspired infill’ showcasing how clever design will integrate 4 homes and 40 trees on the one lot.
A must for anyone looking to lift the environmental outcomes for their home and landscape!

WORKSHOPS:
9am – Sustainable Garden Design
Presented by Simon Pauley from Sustainable Outdoors

10am – The Magic of Mushrooms
Hear how mushrooms – of all types, shapes and sizes – are set to revolutionise the 21st Century

11am – Planning your own ‘Inspired Infill’
Learn from the experts the first steps to create a truly sustainable and exciting development on your own property

12pm – The passive House
Learn the secrets of creating ten star on your property from two of the states leading designer builders

1pm – Eco Gagdgets & Gizmos
Our industry expert will show you how to save water, power and money through the latest technologies

2pm – Building better Buildings
The team from ’The Passive Hive’ will show you tips for creating a beautiful and energy efficient home

3pm – Beautiful Bounty of Bees

Tickets: $18pp – hamihillhome.eventbrite.com.au or tickets at the door on the day

This event is funded in part by The City of Cockburn

Native Ark will be joining us on the day with a fundraising morning tea for purchase.

The Hami Hill Sustainable Home – a ‘Wastewise’ success story
Since 2011 – and the beginning of the Hamilton Hill Sustainable Home Challenge – reducing waste has been a major theme of the project and we developed and have successfully implemented a suite of strategies and components to slash waste through reuse, recycling and a reduction in consumption.

Here are the major highlights……

Say NO to the major Knockdown! It seems all the rage in WA to take a perfectly good older home, flatten it, cart the tangled mess off to the tip and replace it with a brand new home and a whole suite of associated new products. We decided instead to ditch the idea and not the house, build on what we had and develop an eco-retrofit. In doing so, we saved over 38 tonnes of old cement tiles, bricks, structural timbers and wood flooring from ending up part of the ‘landfill legacy’. This helped us save over 10 tonnes of CO2 and over a thousand dollars in tipping fees!

Greenwaste grab! Since the commencement of the challenge we have reduced ‘greenwaste’ leaving the property by 80%. The combination of 8 ravenous chooks, a wonderful mulching machine and a slow and steady compost heap has made this simple success and has, over the last 7 years, helped deliver us over 3500 eggs (greens help make great eggs!), 10m3 of composted material for the soil and saved over 25 tonnes of ‘greenwaste’ from landfill

Revel in reuse. To date we have reused 1m3 of concrete in landscaping, 15 old cooking pots and containers for planters, 2.5m3 of wood in building and landscaping, 4m2 Colorbond for raised veggie beds, 1/2m3 of scrap metal in artworks and over 700,000L of ‘wastewater’ in the garden!

E Goods Good news! We made a commitment to source, where ever possible, recycled or refurbished products for our home and to date we have been able to source 4 refurbished laptops, 1 up-cycled washing machine, dryer, fridge and DVD player, 1 second hand sofa, 2 sofa chairs and over 100 articles of clothes and shoes! Saving us thousands of dollars, close to 2 tonnes of CO2 in production and saved all of these products from landfill.

Up-cycled and recycled. We have, where-ever possible, tried to source products with a recycled component. This has been a big success and from 5m2 of plastic Linka-board (for raised veggie beds), 40m2 of eco decking (made from plastic and sawdust) and 250m2 of WeatherTec weatherboards (MDF sawdust), 1 bed (converted into a planter complete with a trellis) and 1 pallet sofa we have been able to show there are plenty of sustainable products with recycled components out there to purchase.

The Hami Hill Sustainable Home is a living example of what can be done to slash waste and to find new homes, uses and themes for what we might typically look to throw away!

We wanted to show you how an ordinary bloke could transform an ordinary house into an inspiring sustainable home using nine key strategies. Chris explains:

1. Create a clever house and garden – we transformed our home so that it doesn’t guzzle water, leak nutrients, swelter in summer, shiver in winter and need an air conditioner to be comfortable (we symbolically dumped the old air con in the recycling skip at the start of the challenge!)

2. From Red to Black – we haven’t received a bill from Synergy in over 4 years

3. ‘Drought proof’ garden ready for summer – we slashed water use by 50% by installing rainwater tanks, waterwise gardens, greywater systems and other important water saving devices

4. Protect our rivers – we have turned our gutless sand into amazing and wonderful soil so it no longer ‘leaks’ water and nutrients into our waterways

5. Natural air conditioning – with carefully chosen trees and shrubs we have managed to keep out the summer heat but let in the winter warmth

6. From famine to food – we have created a wonderful food garden for the family including fruit trees, vegies, herbs and chooks

7. Green is Good  – we have received real estate opinion showing that our green improvements have increased the value of the property

8. Embrace the three R’s: reduce, reuse and recycle  – we recycled and up-cycled as many materials as we could in the house and in the garden.

9. Make the garden the real Play Station – we created an inspiring landscape that will drag the kids out from in front of the TV and into the garden

To date over 5000 people have toured through WA’s only living eco-retrofit home to find out more go to our website the Forever Project