8. Moss Vale Community Garden

Moss Vale community garden members with off-grid solar installation

Project 8: Moss Vale Community Garden, NSW

Moss Vale Community Garden (NSW) is a place where the community can gather to grow and share healthy food whilst developing supportive friendships. The community garden aims include being a demonstration site for sustainable technologies relating to building materials, energy & water capture and use as well as diverse, permaculture & organic food production strategies.
https://www.facebook.com/MossValeCommunityGarden

Project story…

This was CORENA’s first off-grid solar installation. The community garden had no electricity on site, so this installation enabled them to expand their activities and to function as a demonstration site for cost-effective off-grid power using gel batteries.

Regional partner CANWin instigated and assisted with this project.
Manuel Cilia of Cilectric carefully designed an off-grid system to suit the needs of the community garden and donated his time to install it.

See what has been achieved via the CORENA loan to Moss Vale Community Garden so far

* The MWh figure is the amount of grid electricity avoided by solar electricity generation and energy efficiency measures. The resultant reductions in carbon emissions can be visualised as an equivalent number of average households switching from grid electricity to 100% renewable electricity, noting that the subsequent projects have been avoiding grid electricity for less time than the original project.

Huge thank you to Embark for matching contributions from new donors (from Oct 15).

This project has been fully funded- Thank you!

Progress bar showing fully funded via $5,327 in new donations and $673 in loan repayments

Honour roll

Thanks to all the people who have donated to this project.

Status: Funded project – loan repayment in progress
Loan amount: $6,000
Loan repayments: $300/quarter

Loan repayments table - loan fully repaid

Work details

– 12 x Suntech STP250/20/WD-SPC 250w polypanel panels (3kw)
– Clenergy Solar railing and earthing system to suit
– Solar conduit and dc cabling
– 1 x SMA 3000TL-21
– 1 x SMA sunny island 4.4kw inverter/charger
– 8 x hoppecke 6v 250amp/h gel batteries
– Cabinets to house batteries
Cost: $8,498.20 ($6,000 loan from CORENA, with the remainder paid by the community garden)
Expected savings: 4,380kWh/yr. Since there was no power at the site previously and therefore no savings on electricity bills, loan repayments were set to enable the 5-year payback time that is typical of other projects.