Three things we didn't mention

There were three things we didn't mention when they came around for the one-year-and-four-months inspection. It should have been the one-year inspection, but it was a little late. We did mention several issues, and one was addressed quickly, when the electrician came shortly afterwards and quickly switched the sensor light in the pantry, then drilled a hole in the cover for the light in the under-floor storage so we can use that. Most of the other issues took a couple of months, and we're still waiting for others.

One of the things we didn't mention was the lights above the kitchen sink. They shine down in a perfect direction, but unfortunately the sink below them is about 20 cm too far forward, so the front of our kitchen top is not adequately illuminated. At the time, we had to put the lights in that position to fit the shelves in the cupboards above the sink, which cleverly can be pulled down and allow the space to be used. I suppose it's possible we could do something about their angle. It would be quite easy to fit a lens, if we had one.

Another thing we didn't mention was the trip-wire functionality of anything plugged into the power sockets at the top of our staircases. This is a design issue that we can't do a lot about now.

The other thing is the width of the wardrobes. This is another design issue, and it would also cause some upheaval to fix it now. Wardrobes need to be an adequate width to ward the robes inside them, so that the doors will shut properly and not hit the jackets and shirts hanging on their hangers, even if the doors slide rather than open outwards. I think the problem is that the architect was doing his usual calculation from the centre of the pillars in the wall to the centre of the pillars of the wardrobe door frames, forgetting that there is an extra 60 mm of insulation on the inside of our walls. I worry that the solution to this design problem may have been to remove the insulation.

This problem manifests itself most in broken buttons on the cuffs of my jackets. The first time this happened, it seemed like one of those bits of wear and tear that just seems to happen to things. When a bit of broken button dropped off another suit, it struck me as a little strange. Then when I saw the button that had been replaced on the first sleeve broken again, I realised there was some systematic problem here. It can take over a year to realise some of these problems.

Carbon accountancy

In Energy cost, energy use and carbon I wrote that the new house emits about half the carbon of our old house. At first sight this doesn't seem so impressive, but it's important to note that the whole of the new house stays warm throughout the winter and relatively cool through the summer, while the old house was literally freezing in many places for some of the winter, and although cooler than a lot of other modern buildings, was not coping with the record temperatures of the decade we lived there.

Having noted this, I should still re-emphasise that we were only using twice the energy in the old house, so while the efficiency of our new house may be many times better, the actual carbon emissions have only halved. This is an example of the Jevons paradox, and the old adage: a little energy efficiency is a dangerous thing. We would probably emit a lot less carbon if we lived in a tent, but I'm not sure whether I'd still have a job and a family. 

Also I should note that the calculation of our carbon emissions did not consider the electricity we produce, which may substantially change the equation.

The electricity we use from the grid was probably turned from burnt fossil fuel, with all the inefficiency involved in the burning process and the turning of turbines and generators. Then it's been stepped up, sent hundreds of kilometres and stepped down again, wasting little energy on the way, but more in the stepping processes, and then some more in the wires on the way to your house. So by the time you get one kWh to your electrical appliances, you've used something like 2.7 kWh of fossil fuel. Each kilowatt hour of domesticated electricity is going to release around half a kg of carbon dioxide, and its equivalents, into the atmosphere. 

But what about the electricity from our solar panels. That's green isn't it? Not completely green, but perhaps a lighter shade of grey. 

It's relatively straightforward to get a figure for the electricity we buy over the grid, making assumptions about the overall energy picture in Japan. Of course the exact carbon cost of electricity varies around the country, from region to region and even from house to house depending on whether you're next door to the stepping-down station, or up a valley at the end of a few kilometres of cable. Nagano prefecture has a lot of hydroelectric power, but most is owned by Tokyo Electric rather than Chubu Electric, which supplies our electricity.

The performance of each region's power company can be found here and here here at the department of environment's site. Chubu electric (which supplies power to Nagano) produced 518 grammes per kWh sold in 2011, and 473 g/kWh in 2009, when the nuclear power stations were running. Tokyo electric, with the help of the hydroelectric power stations they run in Nagano, produced 464 g/kWh in 2011 and 375 in 2009. They  had more nuclear power stations to switch off, as you may have heard. There improved carbon performance is possibly due to more urban consumers living within shorter cable lengths.

We also have to estimate the carbon emitted from the electricity we use from our own solar panels, which amounts to something like 10% of what we generate and 30% of what we use.

Our solar panels were made in China. They may be leading the green revolution on many fronts, most of which are invisible to a western media usually not even trying to understand what's happening behind the Great Wall, but they still use a fair bit of coal, so most of the electricity used to make the panels is from dirty fossil fuels. They make shoes for everyone, but walk barefoot.

The estimate here at EDF Energy, based on a 25-year life time of the panels, is that each kWh of solar electricity produces 72 grammes of carbon. This is around one seventh of the grid electricity, so as the site says, it's low carbon, not zero carbon. Nuclear power is similarly encumbered with carbon costs in the extraction, purification and transportation of radioactive materials, and windmills also need to be made out of something other than air. There's no such thing as a carbon free lunch.

Of course the estimate of kg carbon per kilowatt hour of solar power depends very much on the insolation, in other words how much sunshine you get. We perhaps get twice the sunlight to somewhere like Glasgow, so our 25 years are going to produce twice the electricity for the same embedded carbon costs, and our carbon per kWh would be half of theirs. We're also closer to China, so transportation costs are a little less, but they're still using those dirty coal power stations. Conservative estimate: 50 grammes of carbon per kWh.

So our consumption of electricity, both from the grid and from our own panels emits something like 2.7 tonnes of carbon per year.

Next, how do we account for the electricity we supply to the grid in calculating our carbon emissions?

In the simplest terms, we sell a little under 12,000 kWh to the grid per year. So instead of 12,000 kWh of fossil fuels being generated, at 500 g CO2/kWh, we're generating solar electricity at 50 g CO2/kWh. This is a saving of about 5.4 tonnes of CO2 per year. So we're in carbon credit.

This is simple, but almost certainly wrong. This assumes that the moment the electricity hits our meter it's going to be used by hungry consumers. In fact there is over ten metres of cable before it even gets to the next house, and the chances are that they'll be away at work while we're generously generating their power. Ten metres may not sound far, but my ballpark estimate inside the house was that we lose 1% of electricity every 5 metres.

In the worst-case estimate, the electricity from our panels is not going to make any difference at all. Chubu electric employees are not going to be sitting at the controls of their gas-fired power stations, looking at the weather forecast and turning down the volume because my house is putting out a couple of extra kilowatts.

We can perhaps split the difference and say that half of our solar electricity is going to be of use to someone, so the amount of dirty power is reduced by 6,000 kWh per annum, and we're saving 2.7 tonnes. This balances out the 2.7 tonnes we produce, so we're carbon neutral.

If you're interested in carbon, Sunearthtools.com's may be useful.

Talking to the taxman

Spent most of yesterday going back and forth getting documents for the tax office. At work the other day, I had to fill in some forms about tax, and among the documents they had asked for was something about mortgage rebates. I'd got a postcard from the bank a few days earlier showing how much I'd borrowed and how much I still owed, with the words shomeisho, beloved of bean counters, at the top. When I showed the postcard to the kind and long-suffering lady who deals with these things, she asked where the other form was. The one the tax office should have sent me.

When it comes to tax I'm deeply ambivalent. Not only in the literal sense of the word: that I have both a strong feeling that tax should be paid and a strong preference not to pay it myself. In the more widely used sense of the word, I really don't want to have to worry about it. I don't want to spend my time thinking about ways to avoid or reduce it, and I don't want to spend hours digging through documents and filling out forms. Take a slice of my money and I don't mind--it's just little bits of paper and bits of metal. But please don't take away my precious time.

Especially when it's a rainy day in November.

On my first visit to the tax office, I innocently asked whether they had my form, and it transpired that I had not applied for tax relief on my mortgage. On this journey I had taken as many documents as I thought I'd need. I had not brought enough. A kind young man gave me an envelope with a long list of items to check.

I went back home again, picked up what extra documents I could, and then some, and prepared myself for a journey to the city hall for a document proving my residence, then back to the tax office, with an option of having to go up the hill to the local legal affairs bureau in case the deeds I had to my house were not good enough. Often documents will only be accepted if they have been issued within three months.

When I got back to the tax office, another man began to process my papers. There was a bit of discussion about when exactly we moved in. They will give ten years of tax relief, so this becomes an important issue. We actually moved in on 22nd December, 2012, so our tax relief began in that year, and we received tax relief for the remaining week of it, even though our loan didn't start until 10th January 2014, so the tax relief was zero. I had some memory of deciding our official moving date, and wondered whether I had registered the actual change of address in January 2014. It turns out I'd registered our move in December. There may have been a good reason for doing this, but it was probably just my determination that I wanted to move within that year. In the event, it cost a year of tax relief.

Also he asked where the deeds for the land were. It turns out that if you buy land, then build on it within two years, your loan on the land is also eligible for tax rebate. We bought the land in November, 2010, two years and one month before we moved in. This is another cost of our delayed building.

He also asked about Eco points. Yes, we did get Eco points, and no, I don't have the documents for them, I have a huge drawer full of documents pertaining to the house and cannot bring all of them. I probably should put all the documents relating to money together. Anyway, I had to go back home again and get the document showing how many Eco points there were. I pointed out that we didn't actually get the Eco points, but they all went to the builders. He wanted some proof for this too.  

He kindly suggested I could come back Monday, but no, I have work on Monday, so I'd be back later. 

He also asked me to bring my bank book. This was a good sign since it meant they were likely to be paying me something!

A couple of hours later, he'd put all the data in, and was talking me through the printed-out form showing how everything was calculated. The lower amount of the cost of the house and the remaining unpaid loan was used for the rebate calculation, so in the end the eco points didn't make any difference. 

Filing returns is not compulsory in Japan, except for earnings over 200,000 yen. Ambivalence is fine as long as you know you're not breaking the law. I have had an issue with some money I get for translation work for the city's art gallery. This is less than I need to declare for my income tax, so for the past couple of years I haven't declared and have been leaving my tax returns to the place I work. The last time I did file, the difference was only a thousand yen, which didn't seem worth the hours I had put in. But the city notices that the amount they paid me is not on my income tax, which they base city tax on, and insist that I declare it to them.  

So, in the process of filing my tax returns, the translation work went back in, along with an estimate of the expenses to earn that. I think that put me into a higher tax bracket. Anyway, as he was going through each step of the calculation, I was beginning to wonder whether the punch-line would be that the tax I had already paid was almost the same as what I should pay, and they would be paying the difference of 53 yen. 

In fact, I will get about 200,000 yen back, which should be arriving in my bank soon, so the day was not completely wasted. That was for last year, and a similar amount may come back for this year, and will not be taken out of my salary each month for the next seven years. Not bad for a day's work, and at the same time how terrible to think of it in those terms.

Energy cost, energy use and carbon emissions

While looking through the Nedo data, I decided to look at energy use for our old house. We used electricity, gas and paraffin. The electricity came from the mains. The gas was in tanks out the back, which would be replaced every month or two, usually before they ran out. Our house was not connected to town gas, and in fact it may be more sensible in an earthquake-prone country to deliver tanks to houses rather than pipe inflammable gas around. I used to fill 18 litre tanks of paraffin at petrol stations or hardware shops, and drive or sometimes cycle them home, remembering the Russian proverb: chop your own wood and it will warm you twice.

The paraffin heated the bath water year round, and was used in fan heaters in the winter. The gas heated the shower, the stove and the geyser that supplied hot water to the kitchen sink. We also used electricity for a kotatsu table heater and an electric carpet. And we had a futon heater that blew hot air between the sheets, which we have to consider part of our heating cost.  

This is what the energy costs were. I think we were away for part of February.

By comparison, this is the energy use, converting the gas and paraffin to kilowatt hours. Although the winter use of gas, electricity and paraffin were roughly the same cost, the paraffin was packing a lot more energy. 

Here's the kg of carbon released. An 18 litre tank of paraffin will release 53 kg of CO2. This seems to be defying the conservation of mass, but what is happening is that the paraffin provides the C, while the two Os come out of the air. It's difficult to understand whether that is a lot, but over the year, as a family we emitted something like thirty times our own weight, 4.6 tonnes. It seems a lot. On a very rough and conservative estimate we're emitting about half as much carbon in the new house, which is obviously better, but still fifteen times our own body weights.

The calculation of kWh per cubic meter of gas and per litre of paraffin came from rekauk.com.

The kilogrammes of carbon is fairly straightforward for the fossil fuels as it's chemistry, although you need to add a little bit to the amount of carbon dioxide released in burning to account for how much was used in its production and delivery. For electricity it gets a bit more complicated as you have to work out where the electricity came from. A whole new post of carbon accountancy is needed to go into this. For now I used data from carbonindependent.org, which I hope gives a roughly accurate answer. 

Mainstream media talking about the energy revolution

Well, the Huffington Post anyway.

Five things you can do for clean energy without having to buy your own micro power station.

huffpost.com: "5 Ways To Support Clean Energy If Solar Power's Out Of Reach"

And there's a story in the Guardian about a Passivhaus in Oldham.

theguardian.com: "Actively cutting energy bills in Oldham – welcome to the 'Passivhauses'" This shows that local councils can pay a little extra building houses but save much more by not having to pay out benefits and hospital bills. We just need to show them the way to Oldham.

NEDO

It's time to tell the tale of Nedo. 

In all areas of commerce we are besieged by offers of things for free, and must beware of spending all our money in their pursuit. The world of house building is no exception, and various bits of free were dangled in front of us, from the "ecopoints" that were eventually not given to us so that our house came close to our budget, to the offer of free insulation that ended up going cold. The Nedo grant was the biggest and most exciting.

Nedo is the New Energy and Industrial Development Organisation. It was set up in 1980, spurred by the oil shocks of the previous decade, and has been developing new energy since. They have an English language website with very different content to the Japanese website, and the organisation seems to function differently domestically and on the international stage. Anyone familiar with Japanese industry will have seen how the local market is used as a test bed full of guinea pigs, where products can be developed to generate income from markets abroad.

Their motives are perhaps more in long-term profits for industry than savings for consumers, but they offered us a grant of 2.7 million yen, which at the time seemed not only a boost to our finances, but an endorsement of what we were doing. The grant never materialised, but it remains as an endorsement of our attempt to solve the energy problem in our own little way, so I'll post it here, framed in cyberspace. 

From memory, one criterion for the grant was for energy savings over and above the the next generation energy standards. The initial cost to make those savings had to be less than 100 yen per kWh saved per year. The grant was for up to one third of those costs. A kWh can cost anything from over 40 yen in peak electricity to under 10 yen in paraffin, so this means a payback in the order of ten years.

Our situation was particularly attractive to the company that applied for the grant. One reason was that our old house was really very old and our gas, electricity and heating oil bills set a very high bench mark against which the energy savings would be measured. The other attractive feature was the windows we were planning on using. Their eyes lit up when they saw the U-values, and they did not even blink at the cost. These were people who understood the balance between initial costs of energy efficiency and running costs of heating bills, and knew which way the balance tipped. 

The fact that the windows were being imported was not an issue since NEDO is an internationally-minded organisation, actively seeking collaborations with other countries and cutting-edge technology. 

The fact that we were not going to be buying our windows through the company that was applying for the grant also did not seem to be a problem, and they were happy to forge an invoice. Perhaps I should have read this as a warning of lack of accountability.

The part the company were interested in was a solar thermal system that supplied domestic hot water in the summer, and heating in the winter. I think practically speaking, the windows made their sums much easier, and contributed more to the energy savings than their system, but I'll write more about that later.