Dr Laura Ryan has been a guinea pig for how to go off the grid for water, sewerage and power in a small terrace in a heritage conservation area in Sydney’s inner west.
She nearly succeeded, except for “one real bummer” that cut her energy production by half.
Ryan installed ultra-efficient solar panels on the roof of a small rear extension, but Inner West Council refused to approve solar on the street-facing roof, citing heritage reasons. Limiting placement of the photovoltaic (PV) panels “kills my energy dream for my off-grid home,” she said.
That should now change. Mayor Darcy Byrne has labelled as too tough the
long-standing restrictions on street-facing solar panels in heritage areas.
Byrne said the council was looking at making it easier for home owners to install street-facing solar panels. Proposals to ease the conflict between solar power and heritage preservation would be made public in early 2025.
Rules vary between councils. The City of Sydney prefers solar panels on rear roofs over street-facing panels because roofscapes in conservation areas were important to the area’s character, but it reviews applications for the latter on a case by case basis.
The list of paid experts Ryan consulted reads like the home renovators’ version of the 12 days of Christmas: 15 water specialists, 10 solar experts, seven architects, three sustainability experts, two lawyers, and one project manager.
Nearly everyone said she was trying to do the impossible, particularly as she wanted her Newtown home on 104 square metres to be comfortable, stylish and affordable.
She also wanted to inspire others seeking to live off the grid in the city, so she kept looking for people who could “make the ImPossible House [the name of her home] possible.”
She rejected a grey water treatment plant estimated to cost $200,000 that would have also turned her courtyard into a reservoir. “Wow, talk about failing the brief. It took a year … chewed up fees, and was completely unworkable and wrong.”
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After this disaster, Ryan was demoralised. She said: “I was thinking, ‘I am going to start an engineering degree, how am I going to get this sorted?’ I started enrolling in all these courses, off -grid, and talking to women who live in earth ships in California. Every single day, I was harassing people on Instagram who had lived off-grid.”
She finally found a water engineer nearby. “I went literally around the globe to find an expert on the same road.”
Ryan, whose home featured on the latest series of Grand Designs hosted by Anthony Burke on ABC, said she wanted the home to be a “blueprint for everybody around the world to be able to build and live sustainably.”
Creating a sustainable home wasn’t only about installing solar or saving water. Every small step helped, something she learned sharing houses in Canberra’s winters where she would do “real tight-arse stuff” like stuffing polystyrene in cracks in floors to improve insulation and cut bills.
On her website, the quantitative analyst has documented everything she has done, how she did it and what it cost, sources of advice and tradespeople she found valuable and reliable.
She estimates the total build was about $1 million, but she will put exact figures online at https://theimpossiblehouse.com.au/soon.
“The goal was to put everything up there and be as transparent as possible.”
Taking her home off the grid, included:
- Adding a prefabricated second floor to cut waste and delays;
- Installing an incinerating toilet, called Cinderella, that produces a cup of ash each week;
- Using a custom diversion to use grey water in the garden, and harvest rain water. Water is stored in tanks, and purple taps are used for grey water;
- Choosing paints, wallpapers, fabrics and other materials that don’t produce volatile organic compounds (VOCs), including a paint from Graphenstone Australia that sequestered carbon;
- Recycling, including buying a second hand staircase; and
- Installing high-capacity rooftop solar to maximise yield from the small area.
Caroline Pidcock, an architect and sustainability expert, said in a climate emergency, a few PV panels on a tin were more important than perceived heritage. “Go through all of Europe, and you will see buildings much older than this with PV.”
Byrne claimed the Inner West was Australia’s most sustainable council,
“100 per cent powered by renewable energy and 100 per cent divested from fossil fuels”.
Ryan, an adjunct associate professor at UTS and the head of research and development at Ardea Investment Management, recently published research on how investors can better evaluate the impact of climate change on bond yields.
She said she always wanted to minimise her impact on the planet. Even at school in Canberra, she worried about burning of Amazon forests.
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