Woodville Park Electrified Cottage 2025

Woodville Park Electrified Cottage

Back in the mid 80’s my wife and I were drawn to this area of the city due to its proximity to everything we needed: work, beaches and the airport! We decided to buy a three-bedroom 1912 cottage, the standard home available in the area at that time. Once we moved in, we quickly learned that the house was not exactly performing in the extremes of the Australian climate. It was unexpectedly cold in winter and after a few days of hot summer weather we found the home struggled to cool down.
To combat this, we realised we would have to make changes! We decided to tackle the problem of heating in winter by removing the fireplaces due to asthma issues, so we had to find another way of heating the home more efficiently. We tested a few options such electric driven oil column heaters and then moved to an electric radiating system in the ceiling. We found that both options were very power hungry and were driving up bills. We also installed evaporative air-conditioning at this time to provide some relief in summer, especially in dry heat. Eventually we moved to reverse cycle air-conditioning as this addressed both our heating and cooling issues. We found that heating bills could be halved. Cooling energy was only slightly increased yet more thermally comfortable.
Initially the home had an electric hot-water system with a heating element which was incredibly power hungry, making up for about a third of our energy consumption. We now have a high-performance heat pump that runs very efficiently. We were also early adopters of solar and we have continued to grow our system to generate more energy due to increasing family size and having the roof space to allow this due to building a large pergola.