By Richard Keech
2025-12-12
The Facebook group, My Efficient Electric Home, known as MEEH, turned ten years old in late June 2025. As of that anniversary, MEEH had about 150,000 members and 38,000 visitors. MEEH is helping drive the surge in interest in home electrification in Australia and educating those trying to do it. At the time of writing MEEH has just passed 163,000 members.
What is MEEH?
My Efficient Electric Home is a successful Australian community forum hosted on Facebook. It focuses on home electrification and energy efficiency. Rather than re-hash this, I’ll just link to Tim Forcey’s article about MEEH, here. There are spin-off MEEH groups covering Victoria, South Australia and New Zealand.
The lead up to MEEH
I met Tim Forcey through Beyond Zero Emissions (BZE), an environmental NGO focussing on on climate solutions for Australia. BZE had a campaign called Energy Freedom, and they commissioned me to write a book on all-electric home efficiciency retrofits – what today we call home electrification. The book was called “The Energy Freedom Home” and was published in early 2015 by Scribe.
At the time Tim was working at AEMO. He wanted to contribute to home electrification and his daughter suggested he create a Facebook group.
Milestones
First post
MEEH was born with the first post by Tim Forcey on 28 June 2015 with me, Richard Keech, assisting with group admin. The group was initially formed for discussion about the Daikin US7 reverse-cycle split-system air conditioner. The name changed to My Efficient Electric Home some time later when it became apparent that the scope was much broader.
The early admin team
In the beginning the admin team was just Tim and Richard. In September 2018, as the reach of MEEH started to increase and the admin load increased, Jenny Edwards from Canberra was brought on as third admin.
Jenny is an experience building science professional and brought great expertise to the administration of the group.
The viral ABC article
In October 2021 the admins were all hands to the pumps in response to this article by James Purtill at the ABC. We got our biggest single-day kick in new memberships ever.
The current admin team
In 2023 Tim stepped off the admin team but keeps involved in the day-to-day discussions.
The current admin team is:
- me (Richard Keech)
- Katy Daily, from Melbourne
- Sophia McRae, from Melbourne
- Alessandra Whiting, from NSW
- Simon Samson, from Adelaide
The growth of MEEH
Over the course of ten and a half years the group has grown to over 160,000 members. The growth was slow at first. It took the whole first year to get 200 members. Today, it is not uncommon to get 200 in one day. It took about 20 months to get to 1000 members. Over the last few months we’ve been getting about 1000 new member per week.
Who’s who
Another satisfying sign of the impact of the group has been learning about the influential members. Without naming names, we’re aware of many movers and shakers in relevant energy and building policy areas who are members. So our reach isn’t just measured in raw numbers of eyeballs.
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