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…Some strata managers are even bundling different buildings together to get even greater reductions. For once, there are deals that aren’t too good to be true.
However, you do need to be careful. As an EC member who kept a close eye on our electricity accounts, I was surprised one day to hear from our retailer that they had had a request to hand us over to a different retailer (which they are obliged to comply with). It turned out that the managing agent had included us in a bulk deal without our knowledge. The new deal was likely better for buildings with higher consumption but it was not a better deal for us. While the c/kWh rate was marginally better, the daily supply charge was considerably higher. It took considerable effort to reverse.
What does this mean for our gas bbqs?
You can use bottled gas for a BBQ. Our site has a lot of trees so we always have more than enough wood for a communal wood-fired pizza oven and BBQ.
I can’t top that. I am not in NSW and we only have one unit in arrears out of more than 100.
I think I can guess where you live. If I am right, it all looks pretty nice from your website but your site wouldn’t be airing the dirty laundry. Over a decade ago, I came across the website of this large strata property when searching for examples with common property solar installations. When people where I am talk about what additional communal facilities we might like to have but which might meet with some resistance, I mention the cemetery.
If you do get rid of a designated drying area, I think you will find it much harder to enforce any policy the building might have about drying washing on balconies (not that I have any problem with people drying clothes on balconies). As people try to be more energy efficient and reduce costs, you might find demand for open air drying goes up, not down.
I would be reluctant to lose an air-drying facility unless there was a replacement somewhere else. You mention the cost is $10,000 to reinstate the drying area. How many are in the building? If there are 100 units, that is only $100 each to retain what I expect is a useful facility.
On the other hand, roof space is a valuable asset these days. Perhaps owners would prefer to make it a recreational area with pizza oven, BBQ and seating or it could be covered in solar PV or it could accommodate solar hot water to pre-heat water to reduce costs for gas or electricity or it could have raised beds for a community veggie garden.
While I am unfamiliar with Victorian strata law, I am sure it would contain provisions for the class of resolution required for an owners corporation to change the use of an area of common property. It could be reasonable to informally poll owners to find out whether most owners value the provision of outdoor clothes drying and would like that reinstated after doing roof repairs or not. That could then inform what motion is put to a general meeting. The owners corporation certainly has to get on with fixing the roof. Whether the drying facilities are then reinstated or the area is put to some other purpose or nothing further is done is then a matter for the owners to decide.
I wonder if those USA statistics are transferable/relevant for Australia
Why wouldn’t they be? I can’t see any reason why a car with a particular energy source would be substantially more or less likely to catch fire in the US than in Australia.
I wonder if those USA statistics are transferable/relevant for Australia
Why wouldn’t they be? I can’t see any reason why a car with a particular energy source in the US would be substantially more or less likely to catch fire than in Australia.
Considered, maybe. I am not hearing any alarm bells from insurance companies…
Insurers have statistics. Fires per 100 thousand sales:
hybrid: 3275
petrol: 1530
electric: 25
http://www.autoinsuranceez.com/gas-vs-electric-car-fires/
“…most older buildings in Australia and NZ have not been built with the level of electrical infrastructure sufficient to support the additional load that EV charging creates…”
This is often asserted but it is unlikely to get generally true. A strata building is like the electricity grid in microcosm. Both are built with just sufficient capacity to handle the peak load. So long as EV charging is managed to avoid the few hours of a day that have the peak load, there is generally ample capacity all the rest of the time.
The first few EVs in a building are unlikely to cause any load problem.
Once there are appreciable numbers, a load management system will probably be needed. This could be done is a crude but adequate way with timers and relays. The more sophisticated way has a control box that monitors the total current into the building and calculates how much spare capacity there is. The control box tells each charging outlet (‘EVSE’) how much charge can be taken by each plugged in car. During the evening, that might be no current. As people stop cooking, each car could be told to take just 6 Amps. As the evening wears on and people turn off heaters and lights and go to bed, each car is told it can now take 8A , then 10A and so on. When the building demand hits its minimum in the early hours of the morning, and cars that had not driven far are charged already, the remaining cars can be told they can take (say) 32A. Under such a scheme, all cars would be guaranteed to get a substantial charge and mostly likely be charged to full.
Similarly, during the day, building load is likely to be low as many people are out and the cars that are home can probably get a quite fast charge and would at least trickle charge.
Also not in Victoria. However, I see no reason why committee members could not meet informally with little or no notice to quickly discuss that which might be complicated to communicate about by email. However, you can only make a decision at a meeting that is properly convened with whatever the required period of notice is in Victoria.
…I know that the ‘whole’ scientific community can be wrong…
Extremely improbable on this. As a philosophical position, science always concedes that something could come along tomorrow to disprove some position. However, it can also ascribe a level of confidence to such statements. What else would science have to have wrong for the fundametals of the modern understanding on climate change to be wrong? There is so much that routinely and consistently works and makes sense that would have to have been completely misunderstood for the fundamentals on climate change to also be wrong that it is just plain utterly implausible that it is wrong. The physics behind the way molecules like CO2 absorb infra-red radiation has been well documented for over a century and nothing has ever happened in a laboratory or in observations of nature to even hint that we might have got anything wrong about that.
It would be like saying that the fundamentals on the Theory of Evolution in biology are wrong. Possible in principle but as someone famously said “Nothing in biology makes any sense except in the light of evolution.” There are so many diverse lines of evidence that all consistently point the same way that Evolution is elevated to Theory, not mere hypothesis.
It would be like telling an engineer that everything we thought we understood about the way a suspension bridge stays up was wrong. It is possible but so unlikely that we can be comfortable about continuing to build bridges based on the consensus understanding.
The evidence on the fundamentals of climate change are as clear and confident as those examples. Of course we would all wish that it were not true but wishing doesn’t make the problem go away.
…Charging stations and electric cars aren’t going to save the world but we are led to believe it is a step in the right direction. It isn’t really…
Of course EVs will not save the world if they are the only emissions reduction measure we undertake. However, given that people are going to keep buying cars, making EVs is a lot better than continuing to make cars that burn fossil fuel. An electric car quickly repays the increased emissions required for its production and they only get cleaner as the electricity grid gets increasing proportions of renewable generation. An EV already produces lower emissions on our still coal-heavy grid and they get less polluting with every passing year. We are already past 36% renewables in the past year and should be past 80% by 2030. An ICE vehicle never gets less polluting.
With EVs, we also get other benefits. Aside from the reduction in global pollution, we can also greatly improve health in cities with reductions in local air pollution. They contribute to energy security. No longer would we need liquid fuels dependent on dodgy regimes half way around the world and long, expensive-to-defend supply lines. No longer would we need to get involved in wars to secure those liquid fuels coming from ever more remote and difficult to extract locations, with greater emissions for extraction, transport and processing before we even get to burn the stuff on our streets. Instead we can run our transport on energy generated in Australia from diverse, distributed sources, which is inherently more robust.
On top of that they are just much nicer cars to drive and much cheaper to operate.
This is hardly the place, in my opinion, to be debating well-established science with people who have their heads in the sand.
I thought long and hard before approving the original post…This became “the place” for these discussions when…
Fair enough! It seems to this retired scientist that a disproportionate number of the deniers, if they claim to have any particular expertise, are retired engineers or geologists (who should know better).
The following is a useful site for anyone encountering one of the denialist talking points: https://skepticalscience.com/argument.php The site lists just about every argument and gives first a one line response but then links to a longer article that explains at a lay-person’s level, which in turn links to more technical information and ultimately to the original scientific literature for anyone wanting to look into a question that far.
I also find myself fielding plenty of questions on EV charging in strata communities. Where I live, 6% of our units now have an EV that they charge where they normally park.
I’ll get back to not ‘ending the weekend’ now, towing my camper trailer with my electric car and using its handy vehicle-to-load facility at off-grid camping sites.
I live in Western Australia…Further it is very likely that electric cars will reach about 30% of city cars and no more…
Where I live, BEVs are already 20% of new car sales, more than double what they were a year ago and that was double from the year before. I have been driving electric since 2009 and exclusively electric since 2019. I would never go back to an ICE vehicle.
This is hardly the place, in my opinion, to be debating well-established science with people who have their heads in the sand. Aside from my interest in strata matters, I have spent a third of a century doing actual scientific research in leading research organisations, where you don’t get published unless your methods and results stand up to scrutiny. The onus is on the climate science deniers to explain how it would be possible for increased concentrations of CO2 and methane, which have been known to be greenhouse gases for over a century, to not be causing the clearly observed warming.
That climate change is happening is demonstrated by so many diverse lines of evidence that all consistently point in the same direction that it is utterly undeniable by anyone fully conversant with facts. We would all prefer that it was not happening or that human activities were not the cause. Denial however is unhelpful. Physics doesn’t care what any of us would prefer to be true!
If anyone actually had any credible evidence that showed that the science had somehow got it all wrong, then they would be in line for the next Nobel Prize. As someone who has worked in science research (as a biochemist, not in the climate area) for most of his adult life, I can assure you that a grand conspiracy among the world’s scientists is utterly implausible. There is nothing a scientist loves more than proving that other scientists are wrong about something. If that scientist has good evidence it gets accepted, but it had better be good. Showing that climate science is fundamentally wrong would need evidence of the same magnitude as showing that biological evolution didn’t happen or that we have completely misunderstood how electricity works.
When people feed you climate science denial arguments, you can be assured that they have all been thought of and thoroughly considered, taken into account and debunked decades ago. Think about the big money interests that stand to gain from encouraging you to deny reality. It’s not science.
The original post referred to the area first as a visitor parking spot and then as the ‘loading dock’. The allegedly aggressive person was reported to be claiming to be parked there to load a box that he did not want to have to carry down stairs.
If the building has an area for loading things, perhaps this suggests that the architects recognised that it was not safe or practical to take awkward objects to and from vehicles in the basement parking area. If this is correct, then perhaps any by-law should be couched in terms of reasonable use of the loading dock area with time limits so as to not impede others who might want to use the area for loading purposes.