Can you imagine a ‘passive home’ with zero power bills and solar earning $2,000 per year from a high-tech solar battery system?
In Melbourne a Ringwood North property is achieving this carbon neutral living using state-of-the-art design and technology designed in Europe.
With solar installation, a large storage battery and an electric car charging station, the off-grid home will run 24 hours a day — even during a week-long blackout.
A special heat recovery ventilator regulates climate control all year round. The home therefore uses around 2-3 kWh of daily energy rather than a typical 20-30 kWh.
Large price tag expected to drop in future
All this expertise comes at a price. The five-bedroom home in Williams Road is selling for somewhere between $2.15 and $2.35 million.
Designed and built by passive home specialist Arvio, the house is a sign of things to come. Some of its European features have never been used in Australian homes before.
“One day houses will be built this way all the time,” says Arvio manager and vendor Paul Wilson. Its 9.5 Star Energy Rating is close to the “holy grail” of 10 Stars, he adds.
Solar earning home among our super-tech properties
Controlled from a single app on a smartphone, the luxury home in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs is one of Australia’s most energy efficient properties.
It combines cutting-edge German Passivhaus principles with eco materials and super-efficient solar energy storage batteries.
Unaffordable to most of us now, this technology could soon be the new normal. According to Hoskins director John Hoskins, the cutting-edge approach could be common in five to ten years’ time.
Meanwhile, a 10 Star Energy Rating home in Victoria’s Cape Paterson recently hit the market at just $499,000. Residents of the four-bed home also enjoyed zero power bills from its clever design.
Zero electricity bills with a sonnenFlat plan
Australian consumers are also enjoying zero electricity bills using the German sonnenFlat energy sharing system.
Users connect to the plan via their sonnen home storage batteries. Then they trade solar-generated electricity among themselves using the German manufacturer’s sonnenFlat technology known as a Virtual Power Plant.
Households pay just $30-40 per month for power management on the sonnenFlat plan, but pay no electricity bills.
A group of 12 homes in the Sydney suburb of Kurnell is the first outside Europe to trial the sonnenFlat plan.
