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Tad Hendry spruiks the benefits of good design and renewable energy.
By Catherine Watson
SOME people knit for a hobby. Tad Hendry likes to design and build houses. He’s built four “forever” houses.
“It’s a very expensive hobby, but I learnt a lot because I was able to experiment on my own places, then live in them. I’d think ‘Well that worked, or it didn’t.’”
Now living with his wife Karen in the fourth, known as Dune 1, located within The Cape ecovillage, he says this is the encapsulation of everything he has learned along the way.
The north-facing, highly insulated, double-glazed home features 14kW of solar panels and battery storage and runs on minimal power.
"Everyone's stressed about the cost of living. One thing we don’t worry about? Power or petrol bills. It costs us about $10 a week to power our home and EV".
Karen drives up to 600 kilometres a week in their EV, powered almost entirely by rooftop solar. "Why pay for petrol shipped halfway around the world when we can power our car from the sun on our roof?"
Tad features in “Great Energy”, a new series of bite-sized films about four homeowners who reveal how to create comfortable, healthy, affordable homes and reduce or even eliminate power and petrol bills.
“I can say categorically this is our forever house. It’s got all the things that we wanted in it to sustain us.
“It’s got all the things that we wanted in it to sustain us.
"Every room in the house except for a bathroom upstairs and a bathroom downstairs has northerly light. So when we get up in the morning, we lift up the curtains and the sun beams in instead of turning the light on.
“We look out on a little walking track, and there's lots of greenery there. Biophilia is a very important aspect of everybody's life.”
Tad spent his early working life as a builder before pivoting to design as he became increasingly interested in energy-efficient homes.
In his 20s he had the opportunity to travel and went to areas with different climatic conditions and and saw the houses that they built for those conditions.
The light bulb moment for his was in Kashmir. On a high plateau it’s freezing in winter and can be very hot in summer. He saw how the houses were built with very thick walls and how brick and stone walls, in combination with glass panels and air vents, are used to heat and cool the houses.
When he returned to Australia, he was struck by the lack of response to climate differences.
“We build the same houses in Tasmania as we do in Queensland. Instead of making our houses work with the climatic conditions, we go, ‘Oh, I like the look of that one’ and get it off the rack, and then you go, ‘Well, let's plug in the air conditioning and the heating’.
“The cookie cutter designs in the housing estates these days are designed for maximum profitability for the investors. They have these houses that take up the whole blocks that are energy pigs, and even though they have a star rating, I can quite comfortably say that they're not built to the standard that they claim on their energy rating.
I went, "Wow, that's just a simple thing. Why can't we do that?"
"That stayed with me for, for a long time, and then I started doing research about energy efficient housing. I've been lucky in my journey to come across some, some real leaders in that arena.
In the Green Energy series, builder Troy Harris of Harris Builds says Australians often focus on the purchase price of a home rather than what it costs to live in.
Troy’s formula? North-facing design, quality insulation, airtight construction, double glazing, efficient electric appliances, rooftop solar, batteries and electric vehicles.
"A better-built home might cost a bit more upfront, but it pays you back every year. Save energy, make money! Plus, healthier homes mean healthier people. You can’t put a price on that."
The “Great Energy” series was produced by The New Joneses with support from Momentum Energy, owned by Hydro Tasmania, the largest generator of renewable energy in Australia.