In recognition of Earth Day on April 22nd, we spent time chatting to Brisbane-based Good Mover, Rob. Subscribers since 2023, Rob and wife Emma, recently embarked on a sustainable home renovation of their early 1900s workers’ cottage ~4km north of Brisbane city. We chatted with Rob about how they’re using renewables at home, why they were happy to stay on their small 202 sqm city fringe block, and how their Lug+Carrie eBikes have become part of their growing family.
Tell us a bit about yourselves…
I’m Rob and my wife is Emma. We have two kids and a pug called Pablo. We’re both engineers juggling full-time work with family life.
Tell us about your journey with Lug+Carrie…
We started subscribing in May 2023. Our friends owned a Cargo eBike and also had a Lug+Carrie on subscription, they encouraged us to get one too.
In the beginning, Emma signed up but, because I was on parental leave for 6 months I was the one who ended up riding the [Tern] GSD most of the time. As all parents know, days can be very long when you’re at home with a toddler, so it was an awesome way to spend time with him and get out of the house and explore! Eventually Emma started getting FOMO so we subscribed to a second Lug+Carrie, a Tern Quick Haul.
I should say that I’m not someone who’s into outdoorsy stuff, or exercising really, so the joke with my mates was that it was very ‘off brand’ for me! But the eBikes are just so practical and the kids love them. I couldn’t go without it now. I do think we’ll eventually buy out at least one of our eBikes but, for now, the ease of the subscription suits us. We value our time and the subscription takes a lot of the time and hassle out of it.
How do you use your Lug+Carries in your daily life?
We drop the kids off at school and daycare and I ride to and from work in the city. Where we work has ‘end of trip’ facilities which is a big thing. Somewhere to lock up the bike safely and get changed if you want to. It’s also a good place to talk to other riders and share tips on safe routes etc. I turned down a job recently because they didn’t have these facilities, it makes a big difference!
On the weekends we’ll get out as a family and with other families we know who ride. That’s something we love, the sense of community. You’ll be riding around the area and see other Lug+Carrie or cargo bike families and wave, it’s nice. Every Sunday we’ll ride over to West End with our friends (the ones who got us onto Lug+Carrie) to take the kids to ballet and usually stop off at a playground or similar on the way back.
We do also use the buses, particularly in the rain, and we’ll use the car to travel further on the weekends or go away.
So you do have a car…
Yes, we have a car. We’ve made the conscious choice to only have one car though and it works really well for us with the eBikes. We have a Toyota hybrid, we do eventually want a fully electric car and even installed an electric charger in the garage. But, on balance, we feel like that’s a wasteful purchase right now when our car is still relatively new.
You’ve recently undertaken a big renovation of your home in Brisbane…some of the decisions you made speak to your commitment to living a more sustainable life, tell us a bit about those…
Yes, so we bought a 3 bedroom workers’ cottage before we had kids. We started to outgrow it once we had kids and began to plan a renovation to make it a 5 bedroom home over 3 levels. Some people might have moved further out to get a bit more space and a larger house, but we love our urban lifestyle. Being really close to the city means we can ride our eBikes and catch public transport easily so we only need to have one car. We also have a nice community of friends close by who we didn’t want to leave.
We chose an architect that was really keen on high quality, smaller footprints, rather than big, rambly 500 sqm homes that have more of an impact on the environment. They helped us to realise the vision we had within the space that we had.
The renovation included installing solar panels and a battery for energy storage. Before we went ahead, I did some basic modelling that showed that solar had competitive returns relative to other places we could put our money (and the price of electricity since then has gone up by close to 50%). That made the decision easier to make.
We also installed an EV charger in the garage that can be set to run off solar. While we don’t have an EV yet, it was more cost effective and practical to install while doing the renovation.
Now that you have solar, are you finding it’s paying off?
Definitely. Despite the cost of power increasing and increasing our power usage (larger house plus induction cooking), we still spend less on power than before. About two-thirds of the energy we use at home comes from solar and I expect the solar system we installed will pay for itself after 5 or 6 years.
We use an app called ISolarCloud which helps us to track our solar energy use and this shows us that it’s usually about 10pm when we tick over to the grid. We’ve started consciously using more power during the day when there is more solar, like we’ll use the timer on our washing machine to set it to go during the day, instead of starting it after the kids are in bed. I never realised why people had timers on their washing machines, now it makes sense!
The other great thing about battery storage is that, in the event that we lose power, we’ll have back up. So, our lights would still have power, our fridge, our cooktop (although the induction cooking would deplete the power fairly quickly). Recently when Cyclone Alfred came through QLD, while everyone was worried about losing power, we were able to manage our energy usage so that we’d have back up power if it did go out. We didn’t lose power in the end, but it was still nice to be in control of that. We were also surprised at how much solar was being collected during that time despite the bad weather.
The original house had a one car garage and you made the conscious choice not to increase the size of it which shows your commitment to being a one car family! What would you say to people who are considering trading in a second car for an eBike but aren’t sure?
Most of the challenge I get from people is thinking that riding around the city is unsafe, particularly with kids. Emma’s dad is an ex-policeman and he was quite concerned to begin with. Last time he was visiting, I took him out for a ride around the paths that we take and he was really blown away and decided that he was ok about us getting around by bike! All we see from our cars is the road, so people don’t realise how great the bike paths are until they go looking for them. It takes a little bit of planning and exploring in the beginning, but then you’re set.
People may also think that it’s expensive to subscribe to or purchase a cargo eBike, but when you can actually replace a car, it definitely makes financial sense. We save a lot of money by only having one car. We have friends that were able to sell their second car because they stopped using it after subscribing to Lug+Carrie. That makes the eBike a good financial decision.
As far as getting around the city and commuting in particular, the eBike is hands down the most reliable form of transport. Traffic sucks, public transport can be unreliable and walking is slow. There are definitely trade-offs we’ve made by living closer to the city in a smaller space, but the time I get back from commuting by eBike, is more time I can spend with my family and that’s more important.
