He and his housemates have done a whole bunch of things to green their sharehouse, from collecting rainwater off the roof to getting about on bikes, from reusing washing machine water to putting flow restrictors in their taps. All of them are things they’ve done with more creativity than money. They had a downpipe which went nowhere, leaving water “just flying into the backyard randomly.” So they made the most of the opportunity, connecting up a big plastic barrel, which they use to water their veggie patch. The veggie patch also gets some of the water from the washing machine, thanks to some wheelie bins used to catch the rinse water, then wheeled out to the garden: “We end up getting pretty wet sometimes, but that’s OK.”
The garden doesn’t always get quite as much love as it deserves, but he says “it gets lots of water, which is the main thing. We love eating fresh vegetables from the garden. Especially in summer when we’ve got lots of nice tomatoes and herbs.”
“The landlord’s pretty relaxed and pretty happy for us to just do things, which is great,” Clancy explains. “We’ve also got water efficient showerheads. We just changed that over ourselves. The landlord didn’t care.”
But there’s more: “We’ve put flow restrictors on all the taps, which is really good for reducing the amount of water we use. And then in terms of draughts, we’ve used weather seal tape and taped up the area between the doorway and the door… And I’ve also got the idea to use bubble wrap to actually double glaze one of my windows, because my room is freezing.”
They haven’t got insulation, but Clancy says the landlord is open to it: “He did contact the estate agent when the federal government had the insulation scheme happening… Since the scheme’s been pulled he’s probably not so keen, but at least he was supportive.”
And how hard has making all these changes been? “Generally pretty easy,” says Clancy, “in terms of replacing light globes and showerheads and things like that. The more tricky things have been the slightly technical things, like the door seals or some of the things to insulate the room.”
Clancy says he does all this because of he cares about the household’s greenhouse gas emissions and water use, “which is obviously really important to the whole house”. It also very conveniently saves them money. “I think the thing which we’ve realised is that there’s lots of stuff which you can do which is really low cost and doesn’t take much effort, and has a really big impact in terms of how much resources you do use and how much money you can save. That’s been a big thing for me.”