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- g0dfather0, on 10/11/2007, -21/+2I don't think I'm going to hire someone who sketches their home diagrams with MS Paint to build my house.
- darkmaninperth, on 10/11/2007, -2/+6What should he have used to have drawn them in then?
- smackywentz, on 10/11/2007, -13/+1Isn't this a glorified igloo?
- fullphaser, on 10/11/2007, -1/+9they're engineers not artist. Have you ever seen their drawings? Some might even consider the picture of a boiler abstract art because of all the small and peculiar symbols for used to illustrate design to other engineers
- davidrools, on 10/11/2007, -1/+12do this in MS paint:
http://enertia.com/Portals/0/winter1.gif
(the first image on the page, not including the header) - diggcopblowme, on 10/11/2007, -26/+1"they're engineers not artist."
You lost me at "they're." - Zera, on 10/11/2007, -4/+11Real engineers make great drawings/diagrams/etc.
This is a nice idea, but there is no way that the back side of any house is going to cool that warm air quickly enough to keep that air circulating. Without the air on the backside cooling, it tries to rise just as aggressively as the air in the front, and nothing circulates. The only diagrams that are thermodynamically possible are Winter Night, and Summer Day.
And you have to remember, this requires someone to essentially build two homes in one. You need two sets of walls, two sets of windows, etc, etc, etc. Outrageously wasteful and unnecessary, and for nothing more than very, very, slight benefits of any kind.. Rood Water Heaters are great, so is aiming your home towards the south, and building an overhang. But spend the rest of your money on good insulation and a efficient ground water heat pump, which is 4-6 TIMES more efficient than normal air conditioners.
Efficiency and earth-friendly ness takes common sense, and doesn't involve re-inventing the wheel. And the most important lesson of all. Just because an idea seems good, doesn't mean it is. - fullphaser, on 10/11/2007, -2/+12@diggcopblowme
err... what the hell are you bitching about?
they're
they are...
It looks like proper grammar to me, but then again I am no English major by any means. - Zera, on 10/11/2007, -7/+7And just because someone puts the word 'Hybrid' in front of another word doesn't mean its any better. All homes are hybrid: Gas + Electric.
And Hybrid Cars? Those aren't real great either. They get about 5 MPG more than a Corolla, and cost $30,000 more, most of which goes to pay for the literally hundreds of pounds of polluting batteries in the trunk. Hybrid cars are worse for the environment than Hummers, but too many of the people who buy them simply don't care. Go ahead and Digg me down, but its time people start THINKING and not just blindly accept whatever seems to be something good to do. Science is hard, and is filled with counter-intuitive facts. You can't just spend 10 seconds and FEEL you know the answer to a complex issue, and decide based on that feeling what is best to do. But ultimately this is what separates someone who REALLY cares about the environment from someone who just wants to believe they're doing good. It will be interesting to see how far this gets Dugg down in a pseudo-environmentally friendly Digg article. Are Diggers FEELERS? Or are thy THINKERS? - tghd, on 10/11/2007, -2/+4My home is not a hybrid its electric.
- g0dfather0, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1@darkmaninperth
I asked my buddy who is an architect and contractor what his company uses for professional work. They prefers to use Photoshop or Autocad when making diagrams that will eventually be presented to clients.
- aldenhg, on 10/11/2007, -2/+22This is nice and all, but wouldn't most of the problem be solved by a Hobbit-style house with some solar panels above and few good sized skylights? You'd be the same temperature as the ground year-long (which really doesn't change much from summer to winter) and you would have your daytime lighting taken care of by the sun and the nightime light taken care of by your solar-charged batteries. I wouldn't work in places with a high water table, but everywhere else you'de have a nice house and if everyone adopted the design there wouldn't be any ugly houses sticking out of the ground. That means more area for other things, like a huge garden that could grow your food for half the year.
Yeah, I'm a crazy hippy, but wouldn't it be nice?- cynicist, on 10/11/2007, -2/+16You had me at Hobbit-style
- ironcamel, on 10/11/2007, -1/+9Do a search for monolithic dome homes. They are super efficient and virtually indestructible. http://www.monolithic.com/gallery/homes/index.html
- daborg, on 10/11/2007, -3/+2Monolithic dome homes seem great but honestly... aren't they just incredibly ugly? I'm sorry, I just can't get past the looks.
Give me a solid wood log house any time. - wingnut21, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Most people would want their homes to have a quality of living higher than of a basement. This is why geothermal is a good idea: just exchange the air with the underground space you're thinking of. (And you can still build a green roof over the house.)
- carve, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1They have those...
http://www.earthship.net/
- borium8, on 10/11/2007, -5/+0Hitting the front page with just 30 diggs? Wow... Must be that hidden "jay" force or something :-)
Wonder if the reverse (bury) works alike. - AriaStar, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Damn, it's amazing what's being done these days.
- mustacheo, on 10/11/2007, -1/+0I am going to keep my malamute in this house.
- diggcopblowme, on 10/11/2007, -4/+2I want the MS paint artist to build me a house. Mastery of MS paint can take decades.
- davidrools, on 10/11/2007, -4/+2This thing is awesome. It's a great way to regulate temperature between day and night time extremes. I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes the future of building.
The only problem I see is the difficulty of putting doors and windows through 12"-24" walls. But I'm sure those issues can be addressed and we'd get used to whatever solutions they make to that little problem.
oh and how the heck is this thing a "hybrid" as the title states. It's also barely "solar"...its as much lunar and terrestrial as it is solar. - Parisjune, on 10/11/2007, -3/+2This is the first time I've heard someone crap on about wood and its thermal mass properties. It's about as low on the thermal mass scale as you can get for a building material. Sheesh! Even my my cat, Mr. Shimmy, knows that.
- nufoto, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3I prefer the sub-terrain homes. This home looks like it would need a lot of wood still an interesting idea as an alternative to the sub-terrain. perhaps this design could be used where there are geological restraints.
- bubba9999, on 10/11/2007, -3/+2I'd like to see it take on 95% humidity and 100 degree temperatures for 3 months straight. Maybe the fluffy mold inside of the air cavity has some sort of extra insulating properties.
- lukehyper, on 10/11/2007, -0/+8my neighbors house in palmer alaska has a similar feature and it woeks like a dream, when i was burning 5 cords in a typical winter, they would burn 1. they built a solar greenhouse all along the south side of their house which was maybe at most 10 feet wide. at the top of the airspace there were vents with tubing going to the crawl space, where it zigzagged thru rock. an electric fan moved the hot air to tons of riverrock . the heat radiated thru the floor. the couple was old so i
'd help to stock the woodbox(loaded from the outside but unloaded from the inside so you don't introduce cold air everytime you stoke the stove) their stove was tiny and yet it was enough, even for -45 and the woodbox would last for 3-4 days.cheap to build this and really efficient.the attached greenhouse became the starter greenhouse in march so Mrs De Vries could plant good sized plants out June 1 which is the outdoor planting date for alaska.n sunny days the fan ran and the system stored heat, yet on cloudy days it was outside the s wall so was not a loss the the house like so many windpws are.my house has almost all s windows and they really suck the heat allllll winter. gains of sunny days but we have lots of clouds and lots of night. - egrumling, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1Much easier to build a sunroom with a large concrete floor, covered in black tile. Run tubing through the floor, antifreeze through the tubing and a heat exchanger to the rest of the living space. Correctly sized, it could greatly reduce the heating bill, even on cloudy days.
- nycmac247, on 10/11/2007, -2/+2http://www.earthship.net/
Earthship Biotecture creates buildings that...
heat and cool themselves naturally via solar/thermal dynamics
collect their own power from the sun and wind
harvest their own water from rain and snow melt
contain and treat their own sewage on site
produce food in significant quantities
utilize materials that
are byproducts of modern society
like cans, bottles and tires - BobTrips, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3A friend of mine built a thermal envelope house in the '70s. It worked great!
The house was located in the Central Valley of California which experiences very hot summers. The house was always cool without air conditioning. That did require opening up the windows at night and closing the windows and shades/drapes during the day, but that process could have been automated.
Heating was provided by a wood stove and it took only a short time to bring the interior up to comfortable levels as one was starting with a much warmer 'core' than with a single shell house.
Construction costs weren't all that much higher as one was buying only a second set of framing members for the north and south walls. Sort of like the double framing that is done in upscale apartments/condos for sound control.
The south side of the house was a "greenhouse" with a wall of glass. The core windows and glass doors looked out into this greenhouse area and the view beyond. (And quite a beautiful view it was.) On cold sunny days the doors into the greenhouse were opened to let in the solar heated air.
On the north side doors and windows (few and small) were framed in so that the were deeply set like one would find in a thick-walled adobe house. This made for some useful window sill space and a nice architectural feature.
The building department did have a problem with the design as they could envision a thermal chimney during a potential fire. The space between the walls had to be equipped with automatic sprinklers. - hipRealtor, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1I love this house!! Now I'm coveting....
Current homeowners can add value to their homes by the addition of green upgrades. Green is the new black. - catbeller, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Damn! It's the old envelope passive-solar design I read about in PopSci as a kid! In the older version, the south facing wall was a greenhouse, useful for heating in the winter. The north wall plenum and cool crawlspace was used to cool the air in the summer, and fans blew the conditioned air around the loop. I used to doodle this house for hours, trying to find the optimum design I'd have liked to live in.
Niven is right, this is the future science fiction writers dreamed of. All the old ideas are being built and shown to work. Now, the hard part. Convincing people to build houses that don't look like they were designed and built in the 19th century. Americans are damned conservative. - x911oz, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1google: passive solar
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