Solar-Hydrogen Eco-House

Cymage writes "An architect in Malaysia has built a Solar-Hydrogen Eco-house, the first in the world that is fully self-sustainable and runs entirely on hydrogen. The house has an electrolyser to generate hydrogen that runs off of solar panels, then that hydrogen is used for heat and electricity for the house. Pretty cool stuff. I wonder how long before a kit is ready to convert regular houses?"

Comments

Not a bad price.

[Neil Blender]

250000RM is $65,800 US. I would guess it would cost more in the US though.

Re:Not a bad price.

[MrChuck]

Perhaps you're unaware that architecture is one of the lowest paying professions there is. Most architects can make solid secretarial wages for years and years (that's AFTER the master's degree).

The few big name architects CAN make a bunch of money. And we're all Internet billionaires here too, right? (my stock options are 2-ply ... mmmmm, soft)

Now an architecture firm might charge a lot for design, but that usually means that for 4 months, you are using a staff of highly trained people and their equipment (rolls and rolls of e-size paper) and resources (you must use 6x12 beams spaced on 12 inch centers here to support this amount of weight), plus the bonus that for whoever stamps the plans that are filed, they are pretty well perpetually liable.

Someone slips on an icy sidewalk? The guy who designed the building 20 years ago is in the suit.

So next time someone calls themselves a software "architect", mock them and refer to them as "software interior designers".

Real architects get 6 years training and brutal exams on par with the bar. Too many "systems architects" and the like get some training on Microsoft Project and wonder why this web application they designed isn't scaling like it should. And most often, they are NEVER accountable for systems that fail.

Safety of Hydrogen

[gevmage]

Hydrogen (gaseous that is, not liquid) is actually a reasonably safe fuel. As far as explosiveness, it's roughly equivalent to, say, natural gas, and much less explosive than acedalene.

Keeping hydrogen in a tank (outside of a house or in a vehicle) is fairly safe. If the tank is ruptured, the hydrogen is so light that it leaks into the air and floats up and away very quickly. (Unlike, say, gasoline, which tends to sit on the ground, mix with air, and cause explosions). (The article said that the H2 tank was _outside_; having it inside _would_ be dangerous.)

By the way, the reason that the Hindenburg was such a horrific accident wasn't primarily because it was filled with Hydrogen. It was because the body of the blimp was painted with a substance that was essentially rocket fuel.

Hindenburg

[addie]

I'm sure many /.'ers are aware of this, but the fact that the Hindenburg was filled with Hydrogen had very little to do with the disaster. The problem was the coating of the balloon, which was highly flammable and susceptible to static buildup (someone provide more details if possible). Add in the metal frame, and as soon as a small spark erupted it arced across the whole balloon and the rest is history.

Hydrogen is pretty safe, if you know what you're doing. But a good point the Hindenburg can teach us is that all elements of a system must be inspected with respect to each other, in order for something to be truly safe.

Re:Hindenburg

[slickwillie]

In effect, the Hindenburg was coated with solid rocket fuel.

Re:Why convert to hydrogen?

[SenatorTreason]

Storage?
If you are not using the electricity from the solar panels, conventionally, it is stored in huge battery arrays. With this setup, it is converted to hydrogen and can be stored more easily in a big tank, or, if the tank is filled, that electricity is then fed back into the grid directly. That hydrogen tank probably doesn't need to be maintained like a battery array, and, if you'd like to upgrade, a bigger tank, or another auxilliary tank is probably cheaper than the equivalent batteries.

Re:Not to rain on his parade...

[Sylver Dragon]

First off, storing volitile gases in tanks outside of the house is a common, and noramlly safe practice. Granted, when the fire swept through Oak Hills here in Southern California last year, there were some big booms, but that is a very rare occurance. Second, hydrogen is safer to store than propane is. Hydrogen, when release from a tank, tends to spread out, or mostly up, too fast to create a good explosion, unless you are storing the hydrogen mixed with oxygen, and I doubt that they would be that dumb. Overall, I'd much rather have a huge tank of hydrogen outside my house, than a huge tank of propane. And (insert diety here) forbid that I would end up driving around sitting on a very volitile liquid for hours on end, oh wait, I do, and its considered safe.

But it's not built with sustainable materials

[weiyuent]

The designers should be commended for the power self-sufficiency of the house.

But I notice from the photo that the house has been constructed primarily from steel and concrete, which are hardly sustainable materials. The amount of energy that goes into extracting and processing steel or concrete is thousands of times more than that for wood or masonry. The net energy balance from both the construction and long-term operation of this house is likely to be very negative.

For reference: stats, stats and more stats

Re:Hindenburg; Hydrogen not cause but....

[Arjuna]

In fact only a year or so previous to the Hindenberg disaster, a similar event took place in California though fewer lives were lost. That blimp was full of helium and it still went up in a great ball of flames - because like the Hindenberg it was coated with cellulose acetate (I think to keep water off it). Not sure if it had the aluminium paint as well though.

So yeah, I think the gas used for bouyancy makes little difference to the hazard.

Now if we could produce some kinda field that stabilises positive muons by an order of, say, many trillions, we could have muonium lofted blimps that make do with 10% the volume. But. Alas...

Re:Might cost more for some of us.

[dasmegabyte]

Really? Because the Department of energy's report claims "Biodiesel yields 3.2 units of fuel product energy for every unit of fossil energy consumed in its life cycle." That's from 1995. A similar report came out in 1998.

I'd like to know what numbers you know of that are different, maybe based on more modern numbers and not some study produced during the invention of bioethanol in the 1970s. Because processes in general become more efficient over time -- it's hard to believe that a 6 or 9 year old report was SO wrong that the 3.2 units they claim were actually negative.

I'm not doubting you (well, okay, I am). I just would like to see this counterreport. Back in 1995, I still trusted government scientists.

Re:Why convert to hydrogen?

[Dun Malg]

I always wondered if, in those case when the setup is stationary (as it is the case here), if it would not be more efficient to just use (lets say) a big block of steel to store potential energy... They could just use a small electric motor to lift up the steel block up a rail of some kind so they would accumulate potential energy (mechanical batteries?). Then, when they would need to use the stored energy, they could let this steel block go down slowly (with reduction gears etc etc) which would in turn drive a generator... I really don't know, but I would think that much less energy would be lost due to friction and heat in such a setup then in an electrolysis setup... What is wrong in this idea?

I think friction would cause problems for such a device on a small scale. The mechanical conversion of energy from a slow-moving heavy weight to fast moving rotating axle is too complicated. They do, however, do something similar on a macro scale with the power grid as a whole. During non-peak hours, the excess generating capacity is often used to pump water uphill into a reservoir. Later, when demand increases, they use the reservoir to generate power hydroelectrically.