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Woz Details His Plans for Energy-Efficient House
An anonymous reader writes "ECN magazine has posted a long interview with the Woz on his new passion: energy-efficient housing. 'ECN: In PC World, you said, "It's like the way I used to make computers" -- how so? Woz: Simple design. Think about the right way to build something and take a lot of time to get it the best that can be done with the fewest resources used. No waste. Build it right and with few parts it does a lot. Don't cover things with more and more and more technology for features. Design them in from the start. It starts with the architect, of a home or a computer, working from a knowledge of the building materials and a desire to choose wisely.'"
Woz: Simple design. Think about the right way to build something and take a lot of time to get it the best that can be done with the fewest resources used. No waste.
The answer to that is easy. concrete dome.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I don't think I can handle that much awesome in one headline. Careful there, submitters, some of us have conditions.
He is using a one-button doorbell.
There's already tons of research on the concept of energy efficient houses. One popular approach is called Passive house and it's pretty amazing how much energy you can conserve.
Using the heat of crystallization of Pine resin is a really cool idea, but it seems unlikely there is that much heat capacity there. Dang, my CRC handbook doesnt list that number.
i'd love to see buckminster fullers house given a chance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house
get it the best that can be done with the fewest resources...
Like placing a reset button right next to the door bell?
I like things simple with fewer parts and fewer added technologies. Just think out the right ways to build a home and do it. So few people know how easily all our homes could have been energy efficient rather than energy wasters. I suppose it's an outcome of the fact that energy is so cheap and abundant now. I think of it this way. The timeline of history and of man will be many millions of years long. Over that timeline, at some point man was going to find oil and ways to use it. Whenever in time that had happened, the generations it happened for would have used it up. We are those generations using it up, but if we saved it and didn't even touch it at all, some future generation would quickly use it up. The time that mankind has oil may be a short blip on the long timeline of humans. Whenever the discoveries were made, that blip would have appeared. We needn't think of ourselves as bad just because we were the lucky ones to have the oil blip. - this is the same line of thinking that I have about our current energy production methods and the pollution it causes, only there is one more variable here: population size.
Once the population size reaches some critical mass, there are enough of us on the planet to really impact on the environment in a bad way, but as we do so, we start noticing the problems we cause and eventually in order to survive we have to move to better tech for both energy production and to less polluting manufacturing techniques. From point of view of energy we use what serves us best at the time and at this time burning oil serves us best because it's there, it's easily accessible, it's easy to transport and use. But more importantly it makes it possible for us to grow the total population to a point when we reach yet another critical mass, at this point the oil is going to be pretty much used up and the environment is much worse off then before, but we have so many people working on so many tech advances that it makes it possible to shift to a different energy source (nuclear/thermonuclear/geothermal/black hole gravity pumps or whatever.)
Increase in usage of certain types of energy and resources allows our population to grow, which pushes the tech forward, which allows population to grow even more eventually forcing us to think of new energy sources and other resources etc. It's all about population growth.
You can't handle the truth.
But what if he builds a 40,000 square foot house? He'll still be an energy hog.
cool. wonder of effective it is
Some very simple house designs that have a lot going for them: straw bale houses, yurts (see www.yurts.com) and the sort of concrete-over-foam that Habitat For Humanity build. Can Woz really improve on these? I figure he'll find something that already exists and popularize it, with a bit of apple polish.
I think the better idea is to start first by thinking about build quality of houses. My house has had several repairs - things which were minor things to do right the first time end up costing thousands of dollars. The quality could easily extend to Woz's (Woz'z ? ;) ) analogy of the computer.
If the goal of the energy efficient house is to save money on heating and cooling, my thought is we have to look at the expenditure of a house across its lifetime. The materials needed costs something in energy to manufacture, transport, etc - nails, screws, tiles, 2x4, shingles, etc. When these things are thrown away due to shoddy construction* - it leads to more energy demand and wastage to replace it.
*Its usually not the materials that fail except in natural disasters. In disasters. better construction practices, building to code or better codes would help. Again quality the issue.
Whenever I hear about wealthy people talking about the environment I always have to wonder if they are serious about improving it, or just seeking acclimation from the public
has this guy built? i mean, just staying in the same house forever will save far more energy than building X number of new ones, regardless of how energy efficient they are. seems a bit self-inconsistent to me, dare I say hypocritical.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I helped build one of those once in Larkspur CO. Stryrofoam forms, reinforced with rebar, shockcrete... Not sure if the architecture maximizes or minimizes available space. One thing is for sure, the damn thing is bomb proof.
I find shipping container homes (and other modular designs) to be intriguing. I am glad a genious like Woz has a new creative outlet.
an ill wind that blows no good
After reading this article it dawned on me - Steve Wozniak is a real-life Howard Roark. Woz matches pretty closely with the fictional character: they both have uncompromising principles, they are both creative geniuses, they both use the materials and techniques of their craft to achieve creations far beyond their peers.
I wonder how Woz would feel about the comparison.
Sapere aude!
He's advocating using sound energy efficient design principals in the event that you will be building a house. I don't think his scope is 'world wide'. When energy costs keep climbing and climbing (see: gasoline, electricity, natural gas) it's a good idea. If costs continue to climb at their current rate, your energy costs might begin to approach your mortgage payment!
Blar.
Although I think Woz was talking about end-to-end efficiency, it's not too much of a challenge to build an energy-efficient house in someplace where the average temp varies between 42 and 82 (nasty flash). How about a more challenging location with a wider range? How about someplace at altitude? Talk to me about energy efficiency when it's butt-cold in the winter, with no sun, and triple-glazed windows are the standard. When summertime is unbearable heat, oppressive humidity, intense solar UV, or giant brain-sucking mosquitos. It's easy to build a show home in paradise.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
There's also Underground housing,SIPS,AAC,Rastra,Engineered Wood,ICF,Steel framing,Rammed Earth,Solar Housing (active and passive)
> Build it right and with few parts it does a lot. Don't cover things with more and more and more technology for features.
And when you need an extra room, don't convert the loft - just knock the house down and build a new one. Think continuous revenue stream^W^W^Wdifferent.
If Southern Yellow Pine has this magic property of absorbing a lot of heat from melting above room termperature, then refreezing and letting off the heat - couldn't we make a similar synthetic substance that is even more efficient? Like a sprayable foam of this resin, instead of just using it for the building material. Would be especially neat if it could be installed in existing normal houses. Think of the market!
Also, I'd like to point out that some of the houses shown on the Enertia website are like some sort of giant hippy McMansions. The Brandywine design is 3432 square feet, while the Southern Comfort design is an astounding 6,473 square feet. Unless you have 17 kids or live in a commune, I don't see how an "efficient" 6,500 square foot mansion makes sense. Shouldn't they be concentrating on the smaller homes that have less internal space to build/heat/cool/light?
Woz can help remove CO2 from the atmosphere by using lots of wood or plant fiber (from local sustainably-managed plantations, of course). If each person on the planet used about 30 tons of wood or plant fiber for their house, it would return the Earth's atmosphere to it's pre-industrial level of CO2 (1 ton of wood sequesters roughly 1.2 tons of CO2). The only challenge (aside from growing enough wood) is termites which have a nasty habit of converting wood into CO2 and methane.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Hmm, this comment deserves Score: 5, Hit the Nail on the Head (pun intended).
Also, the article was somewhat lacking in detail - lots of talk about energy efficiency; how about talk of economy? If his energy-efficient 1500 sq. ft. house costs $30 million and there aren't obvious economies of scale to be made with the materials/techniques, it's not a particularly useful example.
Your statement is Tu quoque.
Just because they live in mansions doesn't mean there views on the environment are invalid.
Now, If a rich mansion owners can create a mansion that is environmentally friendly, what's wrong with that?
If it is successful, some of the idea may be incorporated in new houses saving even more resources.
Your just whiny because you aren't rich.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
While I can't solve all your problems, I have a few ideas that might be worth trying.
For windows, during the summer months, you want high reflectivity. During the winter months, you want low reflectivity to let more radiant energy in. Solution: double windows. The outer panes swing open like shutters. The main window can behave however you want. The outer pane basically consists of a two-way mirror, and closes during the summer heat. It opens in winter to let more radiant energy in. Make it electronically controlled based on the output of a photocell on that particular window. Alternatively, use shades in the same fashion.
For added thermal conversion factor, use the most dirt cheap black and white passive matrix LCD panels you can find as shingles. During the winter months, set them to black so that they absorb energy and convert it to heat (and disable the vent fan in your attic). During the summer months, set them to transparent (with a foil back) so that your roof reflects the sun's energy back out. Alternatively, use a crawler robot to stretch out a reflective Mylar sheet over your roof during the summer and retract it during the winter.
To warm yourself further in the winter, you'd ideally like a solar concentrator. Use an array of mirrors that track the sun and focus light on your house. During the summer months, point them instead at a solar collector to produce electricity. Alternatively, during the summer, burn the house down with the solar concentrator (due to a "technical glitch"), collect the insurance money, and buy a beach house in Florida. :-D (Kidding!)
Mosquitoes like standing water. Drain and fill the lake. Alternatively, pour alcohol on the surface of the lake and ignite it during breeding season. Alternatively, turn it into a salt water lake.
Other issues? :-D
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
If he actually cared, it would be more like this:
1. Use as little space as possible, so as to reduce unnecessary energy use.
2. Realize that the more space you devote to a garage, the larger the number of inefficient automobiles you will buy to fill it.
3. Spend all money saved in replacing inefficient corporate jets with green jets that use half the fuel to carry the same passenger load - or ride coach.
But that would be efficient design of an energy-efficient house.
Now, maybe he'll get a plug-in hybrid for the garage, that gets more than 100 mpg, that might help a bit.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Hard to believe the Woz can be taken in by this whole "southern yellow pine" bullshit. Energy efficiency is much more than using the same wood we us by the million board-feet here in the southeast. I happen to be an engineer who workes in the residential market, and I can pretty much guarantee that there is no miracle in S. Pine.
... and the best way to save energy...
There is a certain amount of value to thermal mass, but it's not a panacea. You see, if your diurnal cycle lies outside of your comfort zone, it's going to take a massive amount of energy to keep those walls at your comfort temperature, and solid substances used in building are all very conductive. Want R-19 walls? Great - go build your walls 15 inches thick! Getting that temp cycle to work for you requires that your average temp is your indoor desired temp (Lisa, in this house...).
When thermal mass houses are subjected to extended cold (like we have here, even in Virginia), they suck - heat that is.
There are lots of great things you can do, but energy efficiency can be helped most by doing the following:
1) Don't build a new house - buy an existing one.
2) If you build, don't do the code minimums - they are there so production builders can make 25% while giving you a Wal-Mart quality product (excuse me, "affordable" housing is what they call it)
3) Move somewhere where you don't need to heat or cool your house to be comfortable.
Now, if you're still dead set to build something energy efficient, give me a call and we can talk about my fees. The last house I built from scratch - about 52,000 conditioned cubic feet with several hundered square feet of windows in a 6500HDD environment cost me just about $40/mo to heat and cool, on averge, throughout the year.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
In Seattle tri-pane windows are pretty common in anything built from the mid-90s onwards.
Also, most of our houses have R values of 30 or more.
I used to live in a 1912 house with a big yard, but sold it to move to a townhouse - same square feet of space, but a smaller yard, and my electric and heating bills are about one-fourth what they were in the old house - and I had retrofit that place with insulation.
The air leaks in the old house were, as you say, the largest impact on heating.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Thomas Edison saw the cast concrete home as working-class housing:
These 25x30 foot two story homes had 500 structural pieces and weighed about 250,000 pounds.
The ultimate test of the Edison process would be in mass production. After careful planning, the first large-scale development began, with forty houses planned to be built off Route 22 in Union, New Jersey, during July and August of 1917.
The street was named Ingersoll Terrace. Basements for the first eleven houses were dug with a steam shovel, and all the equipment and materials were put in place. The first few houses went up very slowly, as laborers struggled to learn the system and become familiar with the molds. Eventually the crew began to move with increasing speed and expertise. By the time the mold was broken on the eleventh house, the process was almost as systematized as Edison had predicted.
In the end the technical side of the monolithic concrete house was another Edison success story. But neither Edison nor Ingersoll had predicted the marketing nightmare they would encounter. Ingersoll decided, as a test, to put the first houses up for sale at the agreed price of $1,200 before building the next block. To everyone's surprise, despite the extremely low price, not a single house was sold in the first month. Ingersoll abandoned the project, and no more Edison concrete houses were ever built.
Some historians and Edison biographers blame the publicity and Edison's grandiose predictions for the demise of his most altruistic endeavor. No one wanted to live in a house that had been described as "the salvation of the slum dweller." People were too proud to be stigmatized as having been "rescued from squalor and poverty."
But there may have been a more important reason for the Edison monoliths' failure to catch on. The architect Ernest Flagg noted that "Mr. Edison was not an architect-- it was not cheapness that wanted so much as relief from ugliness, and Mr. Edison's early models entirely did not achieve that relief." From looking at them, it is hard to disagree.
Ten of the original eleven houses remain standing on Ingersoll Terrace, so the technology of the process has certainly shown itself to be durable. The original owners are long gone, but newer residents have generally positive opinions of the little houses. According to Mrs. Joseph Fila, who occupied an Edison house for half a century, "The twenty-four inch walls keep out the summer heat and provide good winter insulation." Joe Kearny says that the maintenance cost of his concrete house is "zero." Dolores Chumsky is less enthusiastic; her house is plagued by an elusive leak that defies detection. She adds that any prospects for renovation or improvements are doomed. "Just try and get someone to come and make repairs," she says. "They may come in once, but they never come back." Edison's Concrete Homes
> A monolithic dome is at the very top of what I'd like to build to live in.
The general impression can be that of a stage set for Star Trek. Catalog of Monolithic Dome Home Plans, Torus Something that even a geek may tire of very quickly.
but he was also an Objectivist. But I repeat myself.
There is a reason nobody lives there. That are is better suited for grazing livestock than building permanent structures.
It's prone to magnitude 8+ earth quakes. California earth quake insurance typically has a 50% deductible and only pays if damage is > 90%. So it's basically worthless. Stay with a single floor wood frame structure, they typically survive earth quakes. Don't build on or under any kind of slope. The soils there are really crappy Franciscan (old sea floor), and don't stick together very well. The soils lack potash, and don't grow trees except at upwellings of water (springs and creeks). Fires can race up the canyons in no-time. When you call 911, nobody comes for a really long time. The rocks are serpentine, and contain asbestos (white asbestos is carcinogenic, the other five are not as bad), and serpentine is not very strong structurally.
What is your commute going to be like? Are the roads paved? You'll get lots of rain. Plan the drainage before the house, drainage is not something easily bolted on after construction. But that seems to be a common method. I guess the architect and builder don't care if you get flooded the winter after they get paid.
What is the source of your utilities? Water, gas, electricity, sewer.
The external view of a house is the very least important thing about a house. But it's the place where most people focus. I suggest you draw your own plans... At least the basic layout. The current fad is lots of smaller rooms. Some folks may like that, I'm not one of them. Consider the thing's most important to you, easy to build, or easy to live in. The architect or builder prefers easy/inexpensive to build. They won't insulate the interior walls, but it's a nice thing to have if you are trying to sleep when the laundry is running.
The remote living is more conducive to a stay at home lifestyle. Cuz there ain't no pizza or starbucks around the corner. So you'd better like to stay home with the barbecue and home-brew. If you enjoy hanging out with the friends after work, and getting away most weekends, you're better off staying in town.
If you can't do just about everything yourself, the remote areas are not for you. That includes going back for a chain-saw to clear a fallen tree from the road, or finishing off the deer you hit with the car on your way to work in the morning.
That being said, I prefer the rural life-style. I live where it's five acre parcels, and my nearest neighbors are several hundred feet away. Granted that's not very far, but we're in an oak woodland forest, and you can't see their houses very easily. I'm on the east side of Folsom Lake, and my commute to Folsom is about 35 minutes.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
I am looking for sites but haven't had enough time to narrow one down yet. I'm mostly interested in areas of the California coast, like Half Moon Bay or San Luis Obispo. ... I have always had an interest in my own self-sacrifice to help the environment.
Oh yeah, because living around the California coast is such a self sacrifice. I mean Half Moon Bay? Who could think of living there? Only savages.
The energy of conversion is the energy it takes to change a matter's state from a solid to a liquid, or back again. The temperature of the matter remains the same, be it liquid or solid, only it's state changes. The energy of conversion for water from a liquid to a solid is about 1,050 Btu/pound of water.
I don't know what the energy of conversion for the resin at 71F is, but that house can store and release thousands of BTUs over the course of a day and night.
The mass is conserved, but the carbon is more concentrated (by mass) in wood than in CO2. A bit of basic chemistry will show that 44 grams of CO2 plus 18 grams of water yields 30 grams of cellulose (composed of COH2) plus 32 grams of O2. That gives a ratio of about 1.47 tons of CO2 per ton of cellulose. But if you factor in the non-cellulose components of wood such as water (about 15% in dry boards), mineral ash, lignin (a protein), etc. then the ratio drops to about 1.2.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I think you were going for a funny, but there's one item most people forget about when it comes to energy efficiency. Landscaping.
We'll see if this gets further than Woz' last hobby.
Z eus/2100-1047_3-6050677.html
http://news.com.com/Wozniak+shuts+down+Wheels+of+
"This is all besides the point that you build a house to fit around YOU, not the other way around."
Isn't that what he's doing?
I've always been impressed with the Dilbert Ultimate House http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/duh/index.ht ml as an example of a cool looking and functionally efficient dwelling. If anybody could lay down the cash for one, Woz could.
Well, I have the usual Californian's reaction to that. Why the heck do people live in places like Alberta, or Texas? They just aren't habitable. My wife is from Buffalo, and now we're living in Southern California. The only way she's going back is in a coffin.
Even so, having lived up and down the California coast, I can tell you that it is by no means paradise, if by paradise you mean a place where the average person is willing to live without using heat and AC. My mother lives on the Monterey Peninsula. You get days in July where it's foggy, and the high is 65 F. I grew up in that house wearing a sweater 12 months per year. Where I live now, in Orange County, we're currently bracing for a heat wave that's expected to go above 100 F.
The real problems are (a) too many people, and (b) too many government subsidies for energy. The Iraq war is nothing but a way of paying for the unnaturally cheap energy we get in the U.S. The interstate highway system is one big subsidy for fossil fuels. Global warming is going to be the ultimate subsidy for the 20th century's fossil fuel addiction, and it's a subsidy that's going to be paid for by my grandkids. When cities discuss zoning and density, the big issue is always traffic and parking; again, it amounts to a subsidy for the automobile. If you ask any economist what the price of gas should be in the US, without subsidies, they'll offer a figure in the $4-6/gallon range. The trouble is that people are selfish, stupid, and shortsighted, and democracy is a great system for giving selfish, stupid, shortsighted people what they want. We won't vote for, e.g., Al Gore, who has advocated a carbon tax to make people pay the true, unsubsidized cost of fossil fuels, rather than forcing our grandkids to subsidize us by suffering from climate change.
Find free books.
With that said, I prefer earth bermed, for a variety of reasons, primarily energy efficiency and *security*, from man made and natural forces.
I think the best solution is to buy a Mr Fusion". I saw one on e-bay a while back....
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Ground Source Heat Pump. Earth temperature is constant, equal to the average annual local temperature. It is possible to build a passive ground source heat pump, but not easy.
As for the triple-glazing... well, have less window area, provide heat shades for night time in the winter, focus on radiant heating and cooling.
Passive energy efficiency is the best way to go, but there is no excuse for using electric radiant heat in a cold climate, or air conditioning systems that aren't optimized for local climate.
Wozniak mentions a material called "ram-dirt", but I can't find anything on that term online. Anyone know more about this?
The resin in the tree is used to make turpentine. The stuff will never rot and it was used to build ships in the past because of that, but the resin makes it more flammable than other types of pine. This is what is used to make starter kindling for fireplaces.
"The external view of a house is the very least important thing about a house. "
Ummm, I wouldn't say that.
A simple (but not cheap) solution is aerogel. Woz has the money it would require to use aerogel to insulate his home, but most people wouldn't. The upside of aerogel is you could build an average home in Antarctica and heat it with a small space heater. The downside would be you would have to probably almost double the cost of building a home to insulate it with aerogel.
Rammed-earth construction has its advantages, but there are downsides. The traditional version is strong in compression and very heavy, but weak in tension. This is a bad combination in earthquake country. This outfit has some ways to give the stuff tensile strength, involving reinforced concrete banding.
This approach requires very solid foundations. So there are problems using this for residential construction in areas where bedrock is a long way down. Expansive soils, where the soil expands and contracts with the weather, are unsuitable without extensive foundation work.
Slashdot readers should note that rammed-earth walls are hard to wire. You can build in rigid-wall conduit, or put the wiring in the floors, or put in drywall interior walls.
If you like thick, heavy walls, other options are slip-form rock/cement construction, cinder block, and reinforced concrete.
Look at this gem.
Excuse me but in most construction nails conducting heat aren't an issue. PLUS wood is a poor conductor of heat to begin with and guess what nails are embedded in?
Concrete is not a "green" building material; and in freezing areas it has trouble dealing with cracking. Properly used its worth it, but heavy use would cause me to rule it out as a good design.
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Micro Compact homes are very energy efficient. http://www.microcompacthome.com/ (Small, too.)
I think that the way to go these days is using Geothermal Heat pumps. The typical ground is ~55 degree, about 3 meters down (yeah, yeah, the Gobi, Greenland, and antarctic need not apply). This is a useful place to get your heat from (and to store). All in all, it is a cheap approach to either heat or AC a house.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
How about this?
I've been there, and it's super cool. Their heating system is a woodstove, which they use occasionally.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
One of our neighbors in central Oregon built a double shell home with passive solar heat. We visited in Febuary and noticed they had a flowerpot in the woodstove. We asked about the flowers. They said they tried the woodstove earlier but it took 3 days to cool the house back down.
t hat-heats-and-cools-itself/
v eler/local/97756?lswe=97756&lwsa=Weather36HourBusi nessTravelerCommand&from=whatwhere
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/17/a-home-
Having a house that doesn't follow the outside temprature swings requiring heating and cooling is an energy saver.
They do have some nice temprature swings there. For example, today's range is 50-95 degrees F.
http://www.weather.com/outlook/travel/businesstra
The truth shall set you free!
We've got energy efficiency (heat and suchlike) in houses just about covered, but what about electrical waste? It's covered briefly in the article, but I get the impression that he only plans to be conservative in what he has switched on all the time. How about something like a 12VDC power supply running throughout the entire house, so that all the billions of little 12V adaptors can be eliminated, and replaced with one large, expensive (=> efficient) one by the circuit breakers? All the little adaptors in your house consume a few watts each even if what they're powering isn't turned on, because they're so cheap.
So in the summer, you need the lights on 24/7, or walk around in the dark. What's the point in even having summer then? May as well live underground.
How does the forced ventilation work? I'm more familiar with nicely insulated houses that my friends have in Finland, than Sweden, but on the other side, I'd heard some research that said you need airflow to make sure a house and the people in it remain healthy. How does the 'forced ventilation' work? How do folks in Sweden get fresh air round the house? cheers!
Heck if all he does is build the Apple-ified energy efficient house, and as a result, persuades a few million people to buy the same sort of house (or undertake improvements to their existing houses), that's got to be a good thing. I'd be very happy if Woz persuaded a whole demographic otherwise not interested that energy efficiency is a very cool thing to do.
Actually, you got to admit, if he's looking to keep the bills down, shopping around for a good location isn't a bad idea. Wish that we were all rich enough to be able to move to where we wanted on the planet. As you note though, it's less of a challenge than some environments. Mind you I've never understood why people in hot areas crank up their air conditioning to put out freezer like temperatures, and folks in cold areas crank up the heating till you're dripping with sweat.
Something like:
http://www.redi-rock.co.uk/index2.html
http://www.redi-rock.co.uk/v3products.html
One of the reasons houses are torn down is they are inflexible, and the bits left are usually of little use. With some sort of lego concrete block they can simply be reformed so no constant rebuilding and using new resources. If it's no longer needed, the blocks can be re-used to build something else. The concrete itself should pretty much last for ever, there are 2000 year old concrete buildings in Italy.
Huge thermal mass so AC requirements are much lower or non existent and insulation can be applied internally so heating requirements are also largely removed.
Build time, extremely short, you just hoist the blocks into position.
Deleted
Thanks for the Apple II! I really liked the manuals too. Thanks to the well written manuals I learnt 6502 machine code and basic from them when I was 8. OK so my parents got me an apple 2 clone first, but they did get me a IIGS later on.
Anyway, the self sacrifice stuff is overrated. The helping others bit is good. While the second often requires the first, that's not always true. If everyone went around helping others the world would be a better place, but I'm not so sure the same applies if everyone went around self-sacrificing...
With regards to the house stuff, I figure since you're reasonably smart and can think "out of the box", nothing wrong with you doing the thinking, researching and experimentation even if it uses more energy and resources, especially since you're doing it with your own money.
Leave the not so smart ones to buy/use existing already built efficient houses, after all they are unlikely to come up with something better.
While the world has got X resources, letting you use a bit more than the rest (that you've acquired legally and reasonably ethically) to potentially figure out new stuff doesn't seem a bad thing to me. That's the principle of investing in R&D.
Anyway I bet you'd be using less energy than shipping a single M1 Abrams tank to Iraq and keeping it active there.
p.s. As for those silly complaints about Al Gore - he's a politician, he can't live in a two person hole in the ground - he's got to throw parties, entertain heads of state and all that stuff. He still needs a bigger than average house whether he pays for it or the taxpayers pay for it (and it belongs to the country).
If you cover the dome with this stuff
http://www.line-xicd.com/bomb/bomb.shtml
the stuff won't crack, so water won't get in
If you cover the dome with this stuff
http://www.line-xicd.com/bomb/bomb.shtml
the stuff won't crack, so water won't get in
Sorry, Woz, but that's not how you built computers. Using the fewest parts might be "simple" in engeering and construction terms. But a complex design is required to use fewest parts more more functions. I spent hours marveling at the design of the ][ in the SAMS Photofacts and on the mamaboard itself. It was well compared to a work of art. Most marvelous was the management of those fewest pieces for more functions through complex design, and the lack of catastrophic failures due to the multiple interactions in the complex design. Simple? For you maybe. And for the builders who won't care about the deign complexity if it's easy to build. For everyone else, it'll be a magic balancing act of matter and energy.
Still, call it what you want. I'll buy one. I'll even pay extra if I can get a cave in the basement like at your old house. IIRC, I paid $600 for a Disk ][ to go with my $1350 Apple ][. They still work. I'm betting your cave still does. Just PLEASE, if some bonehead tries to team with you and convince you to sell it, then tells you not to build in all the neatisms into it you can, this time RUN AWAY.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
That is about as wrong as you can get. Externalities that are severely damaging the human habitable biosphere are almost never part the price.
It has been proven in a really convincing fashion that you can have breathtaking stylishness in an energy-positive (!!, not just zero-energy), 100% recyclable house in moderate climate (Germany):
c hitecture/Smart-House.asp
http://www.iit.edu/~blipski/R128house.html
http://www.robbreport.com/Articles/Home/Design-Ar
It's even in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_R_128
If you use the right glass panels (triple-glazed with integrated IR control sheets), you can have insulation equalling many, many inches of rock wool.
Of course it helps if you a one of the leading structural engineers in the world to pull this off.
How about reinforced carbon carbon? Sure it would be heavier than the Aerogel, but it should be a fair bit sturdier.
I read the internet for the articles.
I fear that Woz will spend a bunch of money on another well-meaning but ulimately failed project.
So much of the new technologies we hear about are full of hype and unsupported claims. I wish the folks who are enthused about building the "next ground-breaking energy efficient house" would take the time to purchase, read and understand the ASHRAE Handbook of Fundamentals, download some typical weather data for their locale, and then DO THE CALCULATIONS. If done properly, you can can find out how much energy each scenario will use. It is much cheaper to do this on paper than with bricks and mortar.
Someone like Woz would have no trouble figuring it all out.
Is this the same "efficient" computer that today uses over 1KW of power, which is likely more than most of the microwave ovens in a common household? I put a bunch of these in the lab this summer and I cannot place more than 2 on the same breaker without tripping the fuse. Right next them I got custom-built Linux boxes which offer practically the same amount of horse power (2.67GHz Core 2 duo) while using a highly-efficient 400W PSU (~90% efficiency).
Concrete donesn't just spontaneously crack when it is cold. It cracks the same reason ice cracks - it is trying to expand into a confined area.
A dome such as this is not confined. It can expand or contract as much as it wants. It also has no seams. Hence it will not crack.
Sorry, but I fail to see why anyone would live in CA anymore if they could help it -- let alone try to build a house there (unless of course you're Woz, or anyone else for whom money is hardly an object). The only decent land left for a home is long gone, the potential for quakes, wildfires, mud slides, etc. is more than just a little significant, and the pricing, cost of living, and congestion are simply absurd. "Let's move to California" and "let's work harder to make less" are functionally equivalent statements.
If you really want to build an energy-efficient dream home, take care of your finances first. Start by relocating to.. well, almost anywhere else. (Preferably somewhere with a much, much lower probability of some horrible disaster wiping out what you've worked for.)
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
You need an Energy Recovery Ventilator. It takes outdoor air, does heat/humidity exchange with stale indoor air, vents the stale air and replaces it with fresh air. Here's one:
http://www.ultimateair.com/
Several companies make them. I consider them to be must-have items for energy-efficient homes and modern homes built with an abundance of synthetic, outgassing materials.
For the record, I've helped build two houses in your 'at altitude' site, that are very comfortable. They're mostly conventionally built, but are dug well into the ground for some earth-sheltering, have small double- or triple-glazed windows up high (because although this hasn't happened in 40 years, there are records of windows below 2 meters high being crushed in by snowpack in the winter) and lots and lots of insulation jammed in the 8-inch-wide walls with staggered joists (minimizing thermal coupling via the joists.) And, most critically, they're built to be very easy to drain down: open two valves and the whole house water supply dumps into the well from whence it came, so then it's just a matter of dumping potable antifreeze into the showers, toilets, and sinks and cycling it through the clothes washer and dishwasher.
Summers are easy, by comparison. The adiabatic lapse rate means that when it's 100F in Denver it's 80F in Leadville. I've seen temps over 80 maybe a dozen times in my life (almost all of them in the last five years.)
If I were to do another one, I'd probably use construction relying on OSB-plywood bonded on either side of 12-inch-thick foam for all the walls and 24" for the roof, and run all the plumbing internal (in standard 2x4 walls) with electricity via surface-mount on the outer walls, or maybe behind a floor moulding, and put a standing-seam roof over the whole works. (Occasional very heavy snow loading and relentless cold -> eaves freeze, water forced back under shingles.) And solar power: lots and lots of solar power. The insolation up there is unfreakingbelievable. You can boil water in a jar by focussing two pieces of aluminum-foil-covered plywood on it. There's a downside to that amount of sunlight: trex and other similar pseudo-wood lasts like 8 years. The UV just fries it. (At noon, when you look straight up, the sky is a deep purple, rather than blue.)
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Another way of dealing with radiant energy is careful design of eaves. The sun is higher in the summer and lower in the winter, so by extending the eaves, they largely shade the windows in the summer but leave them open in the winter. Lots of people put up sails (essentially) in the summer to shade the side of the house.
What I've done is use mylar-coated bubblepack, that claims to be 99% reflective for heat, on swinging frames, in the attic. In the summer, the frames are swung up against magnetic catches perpendicular to the sunlight, so the heat radiating in from the roof is reflected right back, while in the winter the frames are parallel to the sunlight and all that radiated heat hits the ceiling of the house itself. You wouldn't think, with 75 cm or so of insulation on top of the ceiling, that it'd matter so much, but it makes a 15 degree C difference in attic temp, which definitely affects the temp inside the house.
Tracking mirrors are very expensive, take enormous amounts of maintenance, and take up a lot of space. It's much better to just dig the house down into the ground as far as you can and rely on the ground heat. Some clever people have been doing stuff with digging a very deep hole, filling it with sand and embedded tubing, then building their house on top, and spending the whole summer pumping heat from the house down into the sand, and relying on it throughout much of the winter. A physicist named Ted Thompson, who was involved with early atomic bomb design, was doing later work with having crawl spaces open to the outside during winter and spraying fine mist into them, forming immense ice piles, then using that for cooling for the early part of the summer. (ice lasts a long time with just a little insulation, if there's enough of it.)
Lakes aren't the problem with mosquitoes: puddles are. Lakes have fish, which eat larvae. Plus, in most locales, salting a lake would probably be illegal and certainly would piss off your neighbors. Turning wetlands into lakes is much more effective, but screws all the wildlife that was living there. And, for the record, alcohol is 100% miscible with water, so in order to burn a lake you'd have to pour roughly 45% of the volume of the lake worth of alcohol in there and burn it. If you're convinced you need to burn a lake, what you want to do is pour oil on the lake and light that up: it floats and doesn't mix.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Just
Uh oh, here we go.
Build your own furniture
Sounds easy!
(or have it built)
Custom-built furniture is cheap!
come up with different ways to use the space
Instead of having all those clunky, square objects (like refrigerators, clothes washers, televisions, computers), just do without! Drum circles are round, after all! So are drums!
otherwise change your lifestyle
Also known as, "Can't see the forest for the trees." If you insist on a dome, then you're going to have to make some likely uncomfortable sacrifices in your lifestyle. Why not just say that and stop pretending that a dome is the next-best-thing compared to cold fusion? That question isn't for the parent poster. It's for all the starry-eyed geeks who are waxing dreamy about their next dome home.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
But the real key to improving our world and our lives on it.. Stop. Having. So many. Fucking. Kids. Reduce the population.
... what? Tell us, o brave college student!
Thank god we finally have a college student who's brave enough to share with us the key to improving the world and all our lives! Unfortunately, your solution is a moldy old idea. Much of Europe and Japan has already been following your advice for decades now. As a result, those societies are having brand new problems for college students to solve. Young, healthy people (people like you, 100% of which come from "fucking kids") are rapidly diminishing in numbers while crunchy old people stubbornly refuse to die off like they used to, thanks to our ever-improving medical system. Who will pay for old people's social security? Who will pay for old people's medicare? It takes young people to do that -- young people to work and create the economy that people who vote (read: old people) will leech from.
Japan's solution to this problem is to build robots. Europe's solution seems to be militant denial with an extra helping of cow-towing to Islamic Fundamentalists on the side.
I'm guessing your solution will be to do
It's time we stop being the Human Virus and return to the Human Race.
Which human viruses do you propose we shall kill off first? It must be awesome to be in the comfortable position of deciding who lives and who dies. Oh wait, you weren't advocating for the deaths of the abhorrent human virus? What's the use in being a half-assed misanthrope? It sounds like you're not really very committed to your ideals.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Woz is perfect for a dome home, which has no ill-fitting angles and corners for Woz's supple physique.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
And if you do, do you ever discuss these things with her? Those things are just frickin' ugly. What self-respecting woman with any aesthetic sense at all would let some nerdy geek of a husband make her live in one of those? Yeah, I know there's going to be some nerdy woman out there who's going to blast me for saying that, but I'm sorry, I'm sure most non-techno-geek women would find those tech-domes absolutely abominable.
Well, I have the usual Californian's reaction to that.
If the "usual Californian's reaction" is myopic, self-centered, and indulgent, then you're entirely accurate. But California is a highly-populated state, and I refuse to believe that most Californians are as selfish as you are.
Even so, having lived up and down the California coast, I can tell you that it is by no means paradise, if by paradise you mean a place where the average person is willing to live without using heat and AC.
Yeah, that sounds like a ripe hell-hole. It certainly explains the vast quantities of cheap land out there on the California coast. Do you remember what happened in France a few years back when about 20,000 old people were not willing to live without AC? Something tells me their sacrifice was steeper than those who suffer the indignities of living up and down the idyllic California coast. Yes, I've been there. Yes, it's idyllic.
The real problems are (a) too many people
Bring on the misanthropy! Whom should we kill off first? Albertans? Texans? Tell us!
The Iraq war is nothing but a way of paying for the unnaturally cheap energy we get in the U.S.
You should get a blue ribbon for that clause. Not only is it one of the stupidest comments I've ever read about the war in Iraq, but it's also one of the stupidest things I've ever read. How, precisely, do we get "unnaturally" cheap energy? Does George W. Bush pray for it, and Jesus delivers? Do Scientologists audit it out of thin air? And how in the world does conducting an immensely expensive, futile war which necessitates massive expenditures in fuel for the thousands of trucks, humvees, stykers, planes, and helicopters "pay for" cheap energy? The *least* we could have done was steal Iraq's oil, but we're letting them keep it!
The interstate highway system is one big subsidy for fossil fuels.
Nevermind all of the millions of people who use the interstates to get to work, or the millions of trucks that use the interstates to get food and clothes on the shelves, and all those aforementioned people who depend on fossil fuels to do all those things. I suppose that you enlightened Northern Californians, living in your charming, 2.2 million dollar bungalows in Monterrey or Santa Cruz, know the right way that everyone else should live. We should all live like you do.
Global warming is going to be the ultimate subsidy for the 20th century's fossil fuel addiction, and it's a subsidy that's going to be paid for by my grandkids.
Whatever you do, don't read this!
When cities discuss zoning and density, the big issue is always traffic and parking; again, it amounts to a subsidy for the automobile.
All those people should just take the bus. If it works for you, it must work for everyone! Life is so simple in San Francisco! Why can't everyone live like that? They must simply be stupid and selfish. No wonder they inhabit inhabitable places like Alberta and Texas.
The trouble is that people are selfish, stupid, and shortsighted
And the answer is that you are selfless, intelligent, and enlightened. I get it, now! I should add you as a friend because you are clearly as prophetic as your ideas are fresh and new.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
1) Build it underground, perhaps in the side of a hill to minimize heat loss/gain.
2) Build it next to a lake so as to have a heat sink for efficient cooling nearby.
3) Get sued by Bill Gates for IP violations.
Have gnu, will travel.
In Seattle tri-pane windows are pretty common in anything built from the mid-90s onwards.
I live in Alaska and tripple-pane windows are rare. None of the home-improvement places stock them (special order only, if they will do it) and the builders don't use them.
Learn to love Alaska
You're qualified to learn.
Once you graduate you might be qualified to know, but until then it's just an unproven opinion.
And I _am_ qualified to know that, given that I work at a University. Buckminster Fuller was sent to Milton Academy, in Massachusetts. Afterwards, he began studying at Harvard but was expelled from the university twice: first, for entertaining an entire dance troupe; and second, for his "irresponsibility and lack of interest." By his own appraisal, he was a non-conforming misfit in the fraternity environment.
You can't take the sky from me...
Completely incorrect, circular use of space is the most efficient use possible. Nobody is talking about living in a pile of homes here
You can't take the sky from me...
Wow. You could bury that Torus in the ground for even more passive savings, and geek style, too.
No need, you just need to coat the window with the right material (I don't remember which one exactly, could be TiO2, could be something else). These kind of coatings reflect more sunlight when the sun is high in the sky (summer) and let more light pass through when the sun is low in the sky (winter). So, during the summer the house doesn't heat up so much.
Oh really? I live in Seattle too, and the buildings people live in around here are basically cardboard boxes. Very pretty and expensive, but cardboard boxes nonetheless. The (single pane) windows of my apartment aren't even glass! There's so little insulation that when we were hit by an 8-day power outage last winter (awesome infrastructure there!), the temperature inside dropped to the same as the outside within a day. Judging from the subsequent firewood outage, the smell and visible cloud of smoke covering the entire area and the layers of soot on everything afterward I was not the only one affected either.
I've since been looking for apartments (on the eastside) built to better specifications, but there aren't any. I've even watched a number of apartment/condo buildings being constructed and paid attention to the building methods, and they're no better than what I live in. Coming from Finland, the building quality here is just outrageously crappy. Here, energy efficiency appears to mean "make the windows tiny" even if the walls leak like a sieve... I'm used to having floor-to-ceiling windows with 22C/72F inside and -40 outside not being a problem. And no plastic or aluminium anywhere to be seen.
You mean he'll have the fridge with all the pies in right next to the couch, and there won't be a shower because he never uses one, the big fat smelly fuck.
I've seen a few people who like the thermal mass approach to walls, unless a person can make the wall something like 12 hours thick (so that the peak of the daytime heat wave reaches the inside surface at the coldest part of the night), you are likely to still need auxiliary cooling and heating. This is especially true if you live in places where the average outside temperature is different from the desired internal temperature of the house.
Thermal mass makes a lot of sense in the context of regulating internal house temperature, in which case a person needs insulation to keep the changing outside temperature from affecting the inside very much. The idea of insulation on the outside walls makes sense here. If you like the rammed earth walls, there are people that also incorporate insulation within the wall. One such contractor lives on one of the islands between Vancouver and Vancouver Island in British Columbia. I would imagine there are others.
With partition walls inside the structure, I really like using mineral wool insulation. The more dense stuff that is good for sound absorption and fire resistance. If you can handle thicker walls and like drywall, I like a double layer of 5/8 fire rated drywall. The first layer goes horizontally so that it can be well fastened to whatever you are using for studs. The joints do get taped. The second layer goes on vertically using adhesive. Green Glue is supposed to be the best, but it can get expensive if you use the recommended 2.5 tubes of Green Glue per sheet of drywall. Construction adhesive would be cheaper, but not as good at absorbing sound. The fire rated drywall is also a bit stiffer, so you get straighter walls. All that drywall in the house is going to add more thermal mass to help regulate inside temperature.
I really like EyeLEDs for an easy to work with LED based lighting scheme. I haven't used them, but everything I've read about them looks very good.
Alcohol may mix with water, but it is also lighter than water and tends to stay at the top. If you've never seen somebody pour vodka on a lake and light it before, you should go to Disney World some time. That said, I was joking about lighting the lake on fire.
I wouldn't say that puddles are the problem with mosquitoes, though. The places I've seen mosquitoes back in Tennessee have almost exclusively been around moderately large bodies of water. Okay, you'd probably call them ponds, but not puddles. Puddles tend to be transient. They dry up after a couple of days, and are thus unsuitable for mosquitoes. The problem is not that the incubation period is too long---for many species of mosquito, incubation can be as short as 1-3 days---but that it isn't there on an ongoing basis, and mosquitoes have a short lifespan of a couple of months or so. Thus, unless you have fairly frequent rainfall all year around, the mosquito population would largely die out without a more permanent source of water.
Of course, the usual fix for mosquito problems seems to be draining the pond, but that's far less entertaining than a good fire. :-D
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I spend a lot of time lighting alcohol on fire, but obviously not in large-enough areas -- I'll give the vodka-on-water a shot this weekend when I'm up at high altitude fooling around by fishing lakes. I wonder if they're just being *very* quick lighting it on fire coz I'd expect it to mix with water basically as fast as you can pour it in. Interesting.
The worst mosquito breeding place I ever saw was a tire disposal area called Tire Mountain that had, it was rumored, over a million tires in it. Many had picked up water, and it was the perfect place for mosquito breeding. There were zillions. Likewise, when I was living near a feedlot, there were mosquitoes everywhere, and we assumed it was because there was lots of standing water from where cattle were digging up the ground by the water troughs. But I'll have to go do some reading on it.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Wouldn't have to be a panel built with the same materials that modern LCDs use. The point was a material that electrically darkens, not so much a suggestion of specific physical properties of that material or the use of existing commodity parts. Use glass instead of plastic, use electronic paper... I'm not sure what would work in that regard. If I had an exact design in mind, I'd be building it and making money off of it instead of throwing out ideas on Slashdot. :-D
Use heavier film or just buy it in large enough quantities that you don't care if it has to pull a new strip once in a while. Better yet, conform it to the roof better so that the wind can't get under the edges to lift it up. Then it won't tear. Alternatively, reinforce the edges with a strip of 1/8" thick flexible plastic. That would make the roll at the end a whole lot bigger, but would significantly reduce problems with tearing. Those are probably relatively minor problems in the grand scheme of things, but only actual real-world experimentation would say for sure. The point is that the roof is something that we currently think of as an unchangeable thing, and it is precisely that unchangeability that makes it energy inefficient, and thus, a great target for improvement.
Everything I say is usually a combination of sarcasm with some truth to it. Many of the ideas I suggested are completely absurd. The point wasn't to solve the problems, but rather to point out specific areas of concern and get the thought process started. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Why buy a door? its not rocket science. pre-fab insulated doors suck. I need minimum R14 but walls up here often are R16; me I'm going to be doing R30-R50 using straw. I've not seen pre-fab doors with high R values outside of giant refrigeration doors.
Double doors are a great idea; although, after 1 inch of air gap it is not helping (which is probably why storm/screen doors are more bang for the buck.)
I can build a thick door with the R value I want and the seals I want with hinge without a whole lot of work. If I want to fuss over it, I can make it balanced or pull off the nice metal front from a pre-fab. The garage doors will be fun stuff --heavy stuff-- the best design is just down the street and uses a single balanced wheel to hold a 5" thick fiberglass insulated garage door and can be opened with a single finger. Thats no fun... I want a vertical lifting one with a counter weight... (the single finger thing for that would be way too much work, but its possible.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Which Seattle do you live in? Washington? 'cause, I have seen a LOT of houses in the area - hanging out with contractor friends - and in older homes I seldom see double glazed, never mind triple.
I also spent time with contractor buddies in Portland, and they are no better.
(Two years ago, when I built a house for a friend I got MAJOR price breaks from my contractor friends, NOT because they were my friends but because they were all saying "Let me do it dude. I never get to do this in the shit houses we have to build for people who have no sense of value.")
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
Double doors are a great idea; although, after 1 inch of air gap it is not helping (which is probably why storm/screen doors are more bang for the buck.)
I have a storm door as well, so I've effectivly got three doors.
As for building them myself, well, I'm not a carpentor nor do I have enough time to mess with it.
I don't read AC A human right
If you read my post, I said homes built to the code that Seattle adopted in the 1990s.
Obviously this would not include housing stock from WW II or before.
But you should note that the population of Seattle has literally increased more than 50 percent since 1990. And that's a lot of new housing with triple pane windows.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --