IMAGINE not having to pay
an electricity bill – ever again.

Or a water bill for that matter.

At a time when oil prices are skyrocketing, this might seem too good to be true. But for one St Joseph couple, it is a daily reality.

Grahame and Andrea Reeves-Law have been living a life most people only dream about
for the last two-and-a-half years, in their environmentally-friendly "green" house.

Their home is run completely off solar energy. Eight 75-watt solar panels provide all the electricity they need. Their drinking water comes not from
the Barbados Water Authority's reservoirs, but from a 4 000-gallon tank which used to be an old sugar converter – even that has been recycled.

Everything from the toilets to the garbage
to the furniture are reflective of the couple's
motto – reduce, reuse and recycle.

Attraction for locals

Their home has become somewhat of an attraction for locals, tourists, and schoolchildren in particular. And it is the last they are trying to educate about the importance of conservation and protecting the environment.

"If you look at our energy bills
two-and-a-half years ago . . . . we were not very big energy users, we were always
very careful to conserve electricity. But I suppose
in today's terms, I guess they would've been about $120
to $130 a month. Now, there are no bills in our mailbox," said Grahame, 60,
an environmentalist
for 20 years.

He and his wife migrated to Barbados in 1995 from Britain. They weren't always environmentalists. In fact, Grahame worked for
a chemical company for
20 years which explains
his abhorrence of anything chemical today. Most of their household cleaning is done with hydrogen peroxide instead of harsh chemicals like bleach because the water is reused for irrigation.

They have also managed to cut the amount of garbage they send to the landfill by 80 per cent through their very organised recycling process. Waste in their household is separated into different areas: paper, glass, plastic, rubbish and organic matter like vegetable peelings.

"That is significant not only from the landfill point of view, but from the amount of fossil fuels they use to get [garbage] to the landfill," he said.

Grahame and his wife were pondering the idea
of a "green" house for quite sometime and when
the opportunity presented itself, they took it.

Love island

"We didn't know where or how we were going
to build it. At the time we were trying to decide whether we were going to live here or in Italy.
We had been to Barbados and loved the island. Andrea had very bad arthritis in her hands,
so we decided since Barbados has 30° Centigrade every day of the year, that was better than southern Italy," he explained.

Their house is not only easy on the environment, but the pockets as well. It only cost $250 000 and was built in just eight weeks.

It is an attractive 2 600 square-foot octagonal hardwood house sitting on a few acres of land which the couple is planning to further develop.

It works much like a calculator, says Grahame.

"The way I explain
it to the schoolchildren is that a calculator works off electricity from a battery and there is a little solar panel on the front of the calculator which recharges the battery. Our house
is the same thing, but
on a much larger scale."

A photovoltaic (PV) power control unit, a PV charge controller, an inverter and a number of large batteries store, control and convert the electricity from the solar panels (from DC to AC electricity) so it can be used in the house.

It might seem like a costly investment, but Grahame believes purchasing solar panels will only save money in the long run.

"What you're doing
is paying for your next, and I'm guessing here,
15 years of electricity. You're not paying for electricity every month. One would hope that banks and solar companies would say yes to giving solar loans because they would know you won't
be paying for electricity every month," he said.

Believe it or not, the water-saving toilets are the most popular features of the house. They are a hit with the children. The couple had them brought in by a local company and they are typical of those found on boats.

"There is no system.
If you look in the 'business-end' of the bowl you will see it has
a big-ball valve, there
is no S-bend so you don't use huge amounts of water to flush things out, probably just a glass and no more," he explained.

The waste goes straight down into a big black tank outside the house and, after about two months, the water evaporates due to a wind extractor which sucks out all of the moisture. The end product? A dry odourless compost that can be used in the garden.

As for gardens, Andrea and Grahame also plan to develop a hydroponic one combined with a fish pond (though they are vegetarians, they enjoy eating fish), in an effort to become as self-sufficient with food as they are with power and water.

Biodiesel plan

At the moment,
the couple drive a car that fills up on gasoline but will trade it in for a diesel van soon, to be ultimately powered by biodiesel.
They also cook using gas. However, they want to construct a bio-gas plant, transforming animal manure into methane gas, so they wouldn't be dependent on oil or any
of its subsidiary products.

Grahame and Andrea try to recycle wherever possible, and that's putting it mildly. Part of the roof
of the house is recycled from the Shell gas station in Roebuck Street, The City, when it renovated; most of their kitchen appliances were destined for the dump but they salvaged them from
a West Coast restaurant that was refurbishing
and the same goes for
the furniture. And, their dining room table
was once a door.

"It was quite funny really one of [the pupils] said to Andrea: 'Do you have anything new in this house?'" he said laughing.

Not everyone can afford to build a "green" house like the Reeves-Laws,
but that is be no excuse not to conserve.

"You can do everyday little things around your house to help the environment and your pocket. The more electricity people use, the less there will be for their children or grandchildren. You don't have to build
a green house like ours
to play your part, you can do it in a small way," said Grahame, who is in the process of writing a book about his "green" house which he is thinking of naming An Island Within An Island.