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Ask Slashdot: If You Were Building a New Home, What Cool New Tech Would You Put In?
An anonymous reader writes: I am starting the process of building a new home, and I would like to make the house as wired (or wireless) as possible. At this stage I can incorporate new tech in the design. What features do you have in your house that you just couldn't live without? What features are nice to have? What features do you want? In-home Fiber? Solar? Audio/Visual? Heating/Cooling?
Fiberglass windows, geothermal heat, a good in home battery like the new Tesla product, wind and solar power generation, and wicked good insulation. Ideally something like the blow cellulose or cotton fiber, but even just a thicker layer of fiberglass, so that my heating and cooling needs are few. LED lighting throughout. Tankless water heaters. Natural gas for heating, cooking, water heater and dryer.
Drought tolerant landscaping. Because even though I live in a water rich region, I hate having to pay to water my lawn (city water, no options) just for the priviledge of cutting it later. Nuts to that deal.
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Beware of making your house too gadgety. In 10-15 years most of it will be outmoded and junk and you will spend a lot of time and hassle keeping it going (and if that is your schtick, why are you asking for ideas?!). Don't become a slave to your house if you can avoid it.
Nice to haves:
1) Extra outlets and breakers. Having fewer rooms per breaker is nice to avoid finding out that a hairdryer plus your gaming PC will pop the breaker even though one is upstairs and the other is downstairs.
2) Speakers and speaker wire in your living room is really nice, and hard to add later.
3) Pull Ethernet cable where you can do so. Most stuff will be on wireless, but it is nice to be able to put a wireless router where needed once you find out the hard way where the dead zones are.
4) Good insulation. A cheap house to heat/cool is golden. Consider a heat exchanger to keep fresh air in your house, which is a bigger issue once you make a well sealed up house.
5) Storage, storage, storage. No modern house seems to have enough good storage in it.
6) Good sound deadening in the interior walls, few houses have this, and it sucks to try and add after the fact. Solid core interior doors help too.
7) Glue and screw your base flooring in you minimize how many squeeks show up over time, which can slowly drive you insane.
8) Low maintenance yard. Mowing every week sucks. Paying for yard guys sucks. Allergies suck. Unless you want to be a gardener, put in slow growing low maintenance plants that don't trigger your allergies.
Infrastructure wise, only what would differ from 'standard'. Also, assuming I'm not in a mansion, but still 'decent' sized house.
Proper telecommunications closet. Should be fairly centrally located, but 'out of the way'. Remember to put venting/ac in here.
It should have room for at least a small rack holding my patch panel(s), switch, router, and a server or two.
Conduit to all the rooms, with at least 2 boxes per wall, even if I end up drywalling over most of them.
Right now I'd pull cat6 cable and probably a bit of coax. I don't use cable other than internet, but who knows?
The conduit makes repair/replacement 'easy'.
Electrical plug-in spots at the top end of standard in number
New idea - have a second run of conduit placed fairly high up. Suggested uses: Wall mount speakers, TVs, and such.
Basement: Pour a secure vault as part of the foundation, get a good door. Good for storing guns, valuables, and as an emergency shelter.
Shooting range: Length ultimately depends on budget and location, but a hallway that doubles as a 10 yard plus* firing range. Maybe even have it extend out from under the house, doubles as a secondary exit. Put the bullet trap on the far side, lock the distant end down *tight*. Probably even hook up a light & siren to that door opening. Safety first!
Construction wise I'd want it to be mostly a 'passive house'. IE built such that it doesn't need extensive amounts of heating or cooling.
Also, solar panels on new build is cheaper enough that there not real reason at this point to NOT have them. Depending on where the house is being built, a few solar thermal panels for hot water would be a good idea as well. Depending on region, there's even tricks with underground air circulation for cooling and/or heating as well. Geothermal heat pumps. Don't forget heat exchanger air vents - they save energy by conditioning the air while still giving you much better ventilation than a 'tight' modern home without one.
I like swimming, so an indoor pool with automatic cover.
Crazy wise - use one of those 3d concrete printers to make the walls, as they can 'print' the conduit basically right into the walls. Also, the concrete they use is surprisingly insulating and still serves as thermal mass to keep temperatures even.
*IE don't bother if it'd be less than 10 yards/meters, but I'd prefer at least 20. It would start being silly at 100.
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Because whatever idiot came up with the idea of having your toothbrush, comb, shaving gear exposed to the same air as your toilet had never heard of germs or fluid dynamics.
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Be careful with water. Don't get me wrong, I plan to incorporate water features into my house. But humidity has profoundly negative effects on many aspects of housing, from the walls to your furniture to your books and so forth, and a water feature with inadequate circulation is a good recipe for high humidity. In a bad case (as a plant nut I've had this happen), in a cold winter it can make its way through the ceiling and the insulation and freeze out on the roof, and then when it warms up melt back into your house.
Water can be nice, but don't skimp on the ventilation! :)
"Who the **** put an emergency exit in the interrogation room?!" -- Police chief, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
Literally just put the entire house inside a green house. Have the green house extend as far away from the house in all sides as I can afford.
Then manage the internal temp and humidity of the green house to create a year round micro climate for my house.
First, you have to make use of as much geo thermal energy as possible. The ground stays stable at the same temperature all year round. If you're in an area that gets cold in the winter, then what you want to do is cycle all the air in the green house through the ground. The ground stays at about 55 degrees which is well above freezing. Just using some shafts and some fans, you should be able to keep the green house at 55 degrees.
You can push it higher by storing heat collected during the day. Even in the dead of winter, a green house will get warm in the middle of the day. Often so hot that you need to vent heat in the middle of a winter day. Instead of venting, store the heat in the ground. Just pump air from the top of the green house through pipes about six feet under the ground. You'll heat up the earth under the green house which will release that heat all night. You also don't have to lose humidity if you're in a dry area if you're cycling the air that way. If you vent, then you'll equalize the humidity inside with outside. If you don't need to vent then you can keep it trapped.
After that you can play with aquaponics... get yourself a fish pond and cycle the water through a hydroponic grow bed.
Inside the house, I really liked that idea about switching to low voltage DC. It makes going off grid more affordable because you're not wasting so much power converting things to and from AC all the time. You just go DC to the batteries, then DC from the batteries into the home grid, and then from the home grid right into the appliances etc which will use DC natively. All you'll have to do is watch voltage and amperage.
Beyond that, I'd smart house the whole house with arduinos.
So... all the boring stuff like lights, power management, water management, doors, security, etc. But go farther with a sprinkler system, etc.
Then for the entertainment system, I'd go with a black screen projector for my home theater. These are neat because they work in broad daylight. No wash out of the picture despite having a huge screen or the lights on.
I'd keep the house to one story and might even sink it into the ground a bit. Keep in mind that most windows don't touch the ground in the first place. So why have the window be that far above the ground on the outside? This is relevant to the green house concept because you want the house to be in the green house but to block as little light as possible.
The roof of the house could be flat and planted or have a deck on it or something. Remember, the roof doesn't get rained on. The rain falls on the roof of the green house. It never touches the actual house.
The garage for the car should either be a separate structure or be under the house. There's no reason for a car's garage to be on the first floor. That space is too precious. Have a ramp go down into the basement and have the car kept there.
An interesting idea is to CNC mill the bricks or stones that the house is made out of. A CNC machine capable of doing this isn't that expensive and you wouldn't need to mill literally every stone. Just enough to get the effect you were going for.
A few ideas that are interesting to me are perfectly fit stones. If you look at neolithic buildings they don't use mortar. They use perfectly fit stones that fit together like a jigsaw. Gravity holds the whole thing together. You can and probably should use mortar and steel reinforcement. BUT if the stones fit together like that, you don't have to do that. They click together like legos.
Another thing you could do with that is have the entire structure carved... or milled. Imagine some sort of pictogram or pattern in the stone.
Lighting in the green house would be a big deal. You'd want the green house to be able to
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
All piping / conduits will not only be visible, but shown off as part of the style
This is genius (assuming people get to like the style). It is such a pain to try to work on anything around the house when you have to guess where the conduits go, or fiddle with a plumbing trap through a one foot opening that can't even fit a slip wrench. Walls covered with pulverized rocks made a lot of sense when they were just there for privacy but now that the lifeblood of a house is running through them architects should figure out how to make the whole system more accessible.
So to OP, even if you don't go this far, make sure that things can be worked on! Pipes leak and room configurations change and if you designed the house without flexibility for infrastructure then one day when you (or a professional) have to deal with an issue it will suck.
As a side note, IANAL but whenever you sell you may need to disclose the fact that you are storing evil spirits in the floorboards.
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