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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.
Easy Online Role Playing Campaign Management
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.
I don't read AC A human right
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.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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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