Eco Makeovers

By Alex May

Neco director Jeremy Davies is out of breath. He’s been dealing with a fraudulent credit card user buying electric scooters on his website.

Even thieves, it seems, want to be good environmental citizens. Neco is a cross between an online store and an eco makeover service. Founder Davies, who speaks with a neat British accent and the passion of an entrepreneur, set up the company in 2003 after realising Australian houses were “great big buckets with holes in them” that were cold in winter and hot in summer.

“I was building an investment property and could not believe building companies would not install insulation as standard or use non-water efficient taps,” he said. (This was in the days before NSW introduced BASIX, which now makes it compulsory for new homes to integrate energy efficiency measures.)

“It dawned on me that there was a massive gap in the Australian market for efficiency and eco products that create lower energy bills.”

A mechanical engineer by trade, Davies – who says his father always “banged into me that you don’t bugger about, you just do it right the first time” - was on a mission to make Australian houses clean, Green and sustainable. Neco offer a tailor-made eco-assessment of a house for $149, which involves an inspection of your home with a trained assessor who then delivers a report outlining the quickest, cheapest and easiest way to make your house energy efficient.

The inspectors arrive in a Toyota Prius and don’t make you feel the least bit idiotic for failing to succeed at composting or not having aerators on your taps. You show the assessor through the house and give them you last 12 months of energy bills and – voila – they write you a neat two-page report (on recycled paper, of course). The reports detail an action list of things you can do to improve the efficiency of your house, complete with rough cost guides and estimated payback periods. Oh, and the assessor will bring you a heap of free energy-efficient light bulbs and water-efficient fittings as part of the deal.

Davies – who has worked as a government energy efficiency inspector – says Neco’s big advantage is to hold people’s hands through the eco makeover process. “There are no easy, simple general answers to energy efficiency – every house is different and generalisations fall down at the first hurdle,” he says.

“It’s no good telling people they need to insulate their house – they need to know what type of insulation, where to install it and how much it will cost. Then they will commit to doing it.”

The Neco website sells a range of eco-friendly products, from insulation to rainwater tanks to greywater systems to water-saving taps crazy gimmicky things like a bicycle jacket with solar panels to charge a mobile phone while cycling to work.

“Basically, 95 per cent of the products people want us to sell are from backyard bob who has just won some new inventors’ prize or something. We only want to sell tried and tested eco products,” Davies explains.

“The problem is that the Baby Boomers tried to do the eco hippy thing in the 1970s, but most of the products were crap so they stopped bothering with being eco. We only want to sell products that are good, products that work.”