Meredith Gee's electric home and car

We rent (like a lot of people!) and we're fortunate to have a new, well-electrified home. We time our appliances for our free hour (10pm) - set dishwasher, washing machine, dryer and were considering how to manually switch our hot water tank on and off. We use our heat pump for the coldest/hottest times but use the timer for best impact, and use our blinds/curtains, airflow etc when we can.

We were spending so much money on petrol so we considered our car next. We bought a secondhand Nissan Leaf when we got sick of paying so much for the daycare and  supermarket run around. We were paying around $300 per month. Ours is a 2020 model so it has decent battery/range for what we use it for. We time the charging for our free hour (and then a bit more) and just use a 'trickle' charge (with a special adaptor). It just comes out the bottom of our garage door because our single garage is more of a storage room and doesn't fit our car! 

We use our Leaf for most of our driving and we have a Subaru Outback for when we need to divide and conquer (two kids!). I've done a bit of a road trip around Southland and found charging easy and stress free with a small amount of forward planning/knowledge of charger locations required. 

Making the switch was very easy, but the biggest change is that you need to plug the car in at night. It's quiet, zippy and fits everything we need. It's so fast to accelerate compared to the equivalent small petrol car and it's so cheap, too. We’re saving hundreds every month on petrol. 

Our lawn mower and whipper snipper are also electric. They’re pretty good but we should've gotten the bigger lawnmower to cope with all that grass in spring.