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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?
We just don't know what the future holds. You may want to run fiber or a new wireless standard may make that moot. You may want to swap out your heating unit without much expense, or install a battery. I wouldn't focus on individual new technologies, but give the house an electrical and mechanical infrastructure that makes it easy and cheap to make changes. I would also install extra, easily accessed conduits for new cables or pipes of whatever kind.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
They aren't very cost effective for existing homes, but for new construction they can save you tons on money on heating and cooling, giving you up to a 5x multiplier for the energy you put in. All new construction should have them.
WiFi is evil. Ethernet is good. GBE is far better.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I would try to get my heating and cooling costs as low as possible. Something similar to the Passivhaus standard. I might not be strict to the standard if the cost benefit becomes too extreme. I would probably also use some sort of geothermal system as well.
When the power goes out, it would be nice to have some sort of battery backup and/or renewable source of electricity on hand. I also like the EPA certified wood stoves that are now available, like those made by Quadra-fire. They're much more efficient than old fashioned stoves, and don't require electricity. However, their output is likely too high for a house that meets the Passivhaus standard.
What can I say, I work in the energy field. Saving energy is fun to me.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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.
I built a custom home a few years ago.
A few tips:
- Cat6 everywhere. At least 4 near every TV/Receiver
- In wall/In ceiling speakers in all rooms These should be tied into setups for receivers in most rooms. For the dining room (if you have one), kitchen, patio, and other areas you wouldn't want a receiver, have them go to the basement. When you buy receivers, make sure they have a cat5 input so that you can control them remotely.
- Wire for central alarm system for fire alarms, burglar.
- Wire the front door for a video camera. You don't need to install it, but having the wiring done is a nice thing to have just in case.
- Run empty pipes to each room from the basement or attic so you can pull wire easier in the future.
- Have your basement ceiling be 1 foot higher than your first floor ceiling. It costs little to do in the planning stage, but makes the basement look humongous when you finish it.
- Just before they drywall everything, take pictures of every wall. This is your x-ray vision for the future.
- 240V/30A line to the garage. Who knows, you may get an electric car in the future.
- Have one closet on each floor which has a power outlet and cat6 cable.
- Central vacuum. Once you have it, you will never go back.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I would look at alternatives to having a "lawn" in the first place. In almost any climate, there are a lot more productive ways to use your land than raising an eternal crop of stuff you just cut and throw away. Put that surface area to work, harvesting solar energy in some way, even if it's nothing more than composting your grass clippings to feed a backyard garden.
Also, look into "integrative" housing design, which means a more holistic approach based on first principles, rather than tweaking the status-quo with than latest gizmos. For example, if you spend enough on insulation, you might not need a heater in winter, and end up with a lower total capital cost. Or by including a water feature, combined with appropriate shading and ventilation, you could reduce your summer A/C bills by 90 percent, and thus save a bundle on the A/C capacity to install. There are lots of people preaching this sort of thing, but the most prominent voice among them is probably Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute.
As for your lawn look into permaculture. There's a ton of stuff on YouTube about this, and numerous blogs, groups, etc... Basically, you can set up your yard to be a "food forest" that naturally produces food, year round, at no cost and with very little maintenance. Checking out this trend will be very worth your time.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
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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