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What Would Be Your Ideal Futuristic Home?
deman1985 asks: "As the owner of a small commercial and home integration company, I'm exposed to a wide variety of customers with differing tastes and needs. I'll get requests for anything from the ordinary audio distribution systems and full home theater systems, to downright bizarre requests like having bubble baths run automatically, when they walk in the door. However, the vast majority of customers I encounter are not technologically inclined and are more interested in simplicity rather than impressiveness. What would your ideal integrated home look like? What's the most unique feature you would like to see? If you had access to an unlimited budget, what would you spend money on to make your home stand out? Whole-house audio? Hidden video screens? Automatic locks? Do most people view home integration strictly as a toy for entertainment, or is the technology ready for prime time?"
I love technology. My family has several laptops, desktops and we run a few servers as well. We have gadgets. But the thing about it all that bothers me, is that it is all dependent on the precarious infrastructure for power and telecom. I would love to have solar and wind power backup. I'd love to have redundant methods of communication, even going back to low-tech/old-tech radio systems. I'd also like to have local caches of reference materials such as wikipedia, about.com, CIA world factbook, etc. I'm not a survivalist freak, but I do find it painful when the power goes out for a few days at a time! It'd be nice to have some basic backups!
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I'd want a small home(1,500 - 2,000 sq.ft.) on plenty of land (4+ acres) with trees. The only electronics I'd want is something that blocks anything wireless so I can have some peace and quiet for once. Also, I'd have an excuse for why I wasn't pestered by any phone calls...I mean, why I didn't get someone's call.
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Ideal home integration? ... probably could do with a bit less.
Simplicity. Japanese style furniture, and few and selected furniture, and the stereos, hifi, etc would be simplistic as well. No TV - possibly a projector. Ideally Bose but any small and good sounding speakers, integrated with iPod. Integration with Airport Express should be easy - so can control the musics of all the rooms of the house by the computers (a few in different rooms or where needed).
Actually, for TV needs now the computers do fine - mostly viewing movies anyway, and some cartoons with eyeTV.
Lots of small lights in ceiling and on walls to get enough light on winter, and enough analog candles for the mood.
And simple materials to keep it all timeless - such as white walls, dark wood, some stone, some metal, and selected details in bright colors.
And the simplicity factor will make it more simple than now - there are 16 iPods in our house now
This is modded as Funny, but the truth is the DUH actually has some pretty cool features, a few of which I plan on retrofitting to my place and incporporating if/when I get around to building a house.
That way should I not like my neighborhood, I can move to a new one.
That and live like the turtles, taking my house with me as I visit places across the sea.
First of all, we'll need an architect, we'll have to resurrect John Lautner.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I think I would like to live in a modernist prefab home like the ones listed here. The shipping container home looks damn cool too.
It isn't a matter of being a Luddite. Most people can't control who their neighbors are, which is one reason why living in the subburbs is so darn stressful. The only defense against neighbors in high population density areas is to have tons of money, to pay the association people to enforce restrictions, and to put up big fences.
Outside cities, the other defense is a lot of land, and lots of shrubbery in the woods to block sound and line of sight to roadways.
Another defense is a lot of insulation in the walls and ceiling to block sound, which is an added bonus on top of energy efficiency. Unfortunately, a lot of the cookie-cutter 1000-unit neighborhoods were built quickly and cheaply, meaning often inadequate insulation (one house I lived in wasn't even up to code, before I fixed that).
I want my home to feel like a home, not some crazy science experiment or an office building offshoot.
As such I am already in the process of buying my next home.
the most advanced features, multiple zones for my heating and cooling. Sure I will have the atypical security system and such and a bunch of florescent (sp?) lighting in place of incandescents. The point being, I go home to escape the technology of my day to day life. It is my refuge from reality.
As such, my TV is confined to a room I rarely go to. Same for my PC. The biggest reason I use my PC now is to play DVDs while I exercise.
Honestly, too many people are wasting their lives on tech outside of work. My favorite tech is having a nice easy to maintain house and landscape. It is seeing what will grow outside to provide year round color. I get all the tech I need at work. It can stay there too.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
What I'd like to see in a home is interoperability between "smart appliances".
If my fridge has the ability to tell me its internal temperature, I'd like to have a way to query it. And ideally, I'd like something similar to query my home's thermostat, water heater, etc.
The problem with these "smart homes" is that they often seem to rely on a single vendor having a "home automation solution" rather than a system I can plug into.
What I want is something akin to Wi-Fi or bluetooth + XML-RPC
1) you always grow out of your home until you have kids and they leave for college.
2) home values go up, mostly.
so, buy the biggest house you can afford, a little ways from the edge of surberbia. You will grow into it, and you will make more money over the long run.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The real problem with what you want is that the water sits in the pipes, so you have to wait for older water to be flushed out by the warm water behind it.
So in order to have hot water truly on demand, the old water has to go somewhere - why not back to the water heater? You could design all your heated plumbing to be able to be looped back to the hot water heater and a pump to circulate it, so you could have a constant warm flow to tap into.
That would require more insulation and even then be less efficient, so you'd probably still want to combine that with a timer for shower uses. A side effect is that you could also have the loopback pipes run under your bathroom floor and heat the floor for you while it was warming up the system, or possibly chill it in the summer by having it circulate cold water instead.
Basically the system just involves a lot of extra pipes, and possibly a somewhat larger water heater to handle the extra load of heating the returned water.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes! My biggest pet peeve is that I pay the electric co. to heat hot water in the summer and cool my food in the winter.
You people are insane! Who has the kind of money you people are talking about and if you do have it to spend it on speakers? Come on. The majority of the people who read these posts make well under 100K a year.
Self cleaning.
I don't really care about details of how it's accomplished. Nano-treated surfaces and micro-robots? Sweet, whatever. Just so long as I never have to clean the tub or mop the kitchen by hand again.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.