The True Cost

The environment is probably one of the hottest topics AFTER the financial crisis.

But even though we working about the environment and talk about it endlessly, as a country we still do not DO as much as we talk.

Australian's still have a fascination and desire for their own house on their own block of land. The fastest growing areas in New South Wales are in the outer suburbs and are dominated by the McMansions.

A McMansion often denotes a home with a larger footprint than a median home, an
indistinct architectural style similar to others nearby, and is often located in
a newer, larger subdivision or replaces an existing, smaller structure in an older neighborhood. Wiki

It's this very specific push for McMansions on their own blocks which is actually costing the country more both economically and environmentally.

A new study suggests that per 1000 new homes the government actually indirectly subsidises the houses by $85Million dollars more than similar dwellings in a medium density area closer to the CBD.

Yes that's 85 Million dollars.

But that's really only the indirect costs and does not take into count the millions, no billions that these massive houses in outer suburbs will indirectly and directly cost over the the next 50 years.

Australia is in the midst of many crisis's, water we know about, but the energy crisis will soon be here too.

These huge houses costs a bomb energy wise because in the main they are not built to be energy efficient. They use air conditioning for cooling, they are not designed for the Australian Climate (even though their builders would disagree) and they are made to the lowest common cost.

This all sums up to their need for significant power for heating, cooling, lighting and living. Yes you can reduce the energy consumption by using energy efficient appliances and light fittings, but it's far harder to retrofit a McMansion to have overhanging eaves to prevent direct sun in summer, or improve natural air flow etc.

I think as a society we have to seriously look at our environmental foot print and the government needs to discourage the outer suburb McMansion, OR find ways to significantly reduce the impact through shared co generation power plants for each new sub division, public Transport, better environmental building standards etc.

I think though that since public transport costs billions and realistically we are unlikely to stop McMansions we need to concentrate on other ways to reduce the impact.

Saving Money in Technology Costs in Business

One of the larger costs of setting up a business is technology, by technology I mean computers, software, telephones, faxes and printers etc.

Computers and software can run to thousands and thousands of dollars and you can sometimes STILL not be sure that you are not getting ripped off.

In keeping our capital expenditure down and saving money we follow a few simple rules:

Software

We do not use Microsoft Office, instead we use Open Office which is a free MS Office equivalent from Sun microsystems.

It will still open and manage all the normal office files like Excel, Word and PowerPoint and it;s free.

Download Open Office Now!

Where we do need support for software or there is simply no equivalent we use the real thing, things like Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop etc there is simply no equivalent in our business and it's simply a tool of the trade.

Hardware

As a general rule we buy Desk top PCs (minus screens) on ebay for about 20% of the price of RRP. We do however store all our networked data on a series of external USB hard drives rather than on local hard drives on the machine.

We do however buy good quality computer monitors for our staff.

So a full desktop computer with high quality screen sets us back about $400 in total, and if one of the PCs does fail we can replace it within 24 hours with another PC and all of the data is on the network rather than the pc itself.

With notebook computers though we buy new and we buy the best available within the budget because notebook computers are subject to far much more breakages than desktop PCs.

The trick with a computer is not so much the speed but the memory. These days anything less than 2gb of RAM is insufficient to run most business applications.

Faxing

Although we do have a fax machine in the office we actually tend to use virtual faxes and virtual fax numbers.

So when a customer sends us a fax it is emailed as a PDF document. This means we reduce the cost of having a dedicated fax line and even if we are not in the office we can still get faxes.

We also send faxes electronically too just like sending an email.

We use http://www.ozefax.com as our virtual telco provider and we have found them excellent to deal with!

So there we have a few simple tips on saving money with technology!

Suggested eMail Newsletter The Coolhunter

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