I've said this on previous threads, the problem isn't the availability of cheap building material or designs, it's the availability of cheap land. There's no pop-up property unfortunately.
Could you expand on what you mean by availability of cheap land? It seems to me that despite the problems with suburban sprawl, it did exploit cheap availability of land that is generally available at the edges of cities. Especillay consiering the vast quanties of land that is rural in the US. More stats about land usage can be found at http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/major-land-uses.aspx#....
Two of the biggest factors in our happiness are a) the quality of your job b) the duration/stress of your commute. America faces a shortage of plots of residential real estate that are within a reasonable commute of quality of jobs. And you need to be in commuting distance of an abundance of good jobs, because job conditions at any one company can change fast, leaving you stuck. Suburban sprawl worked for a while, but in many metros the cheap land is so far out that the commuting times are horrendous.
As a remote worker, I don't commute. Therefore, I'm presently negotiating the purchase of hundreds of hectares of 50-year regenerated native forest in northern New Zealand. Price is <$1000/hectare, which is not expensive in western terms. However, my wife refuses to live there for the moment on account of the relative isolation - it's about 3.5 hours to Auckland. Because it needs a dwelling, I've been researching building over the last few years and have come to the conclusion that I'd like to try straw bale. As long as you keep it dry, you get all the high r-value (insulation) benefits of a passivhaus without being limited to modernist finishings, mass-produced truck-hauled materials and straight lines. Plus, it's surprisingly more fire and earthquake proof than pretty much anything else.
In other countries this is often dealth with through zoning. You can buy land but you can't do whatever you want with it. I assume you have that in the US too, but maybe not as restrictive?
An additional issue is that there are lots of different administrative units making the rules, so a particular set of restrictive rules won't apply 1 mile away.
Having done a lot of camping in my time, this was the first thing I thought as well. If you haven't got somewhere to poop and somewhere to get rid of it, life is miserable. Believe me, burying it isn't fun.
Seems like one of those idealistic almost art project houses rather than something you could actually live in.
My 7-year-old daughter just asked me the other day, "We can build a tiny house when I'm 11, right?" So I have another four years before I need to do something like this in tiny house form.
ph0rque, your AutoMicroFarm side project looks interesting. It's a idea I think about often. Instead of an upfront purchase of the hydroponic system, a SaaS model might increase adoption. e.g. You charge $100 per month to manage the customers vegetable garden. Basically, it's a hack. The farmer just hacked a way to farm w/o having to own land, pay for water or utilities, and gets paid regardless if the crop fails. Farmer earns ~$100 per hour per customer, and can scale. Inspiration for idea: Our local non-tech gardeners.
Thanks for the idea, Carlos. We've already considered a variant of it, but not a full AaaS (Aquaponics as a Service) idea. We'll give it some serious thought.
It's realtive for buildings. Air-tightness is measured in air changes/hour, which measures how many time per hour the internal air of a structure is completely replaced my external air. Normal construction has 3 ac/h, if it recall. I bet they're aiming for anything lower than 1 ac/h.
Oh. That's interesting. It would read much better if they specified the ac/h rating they are referring to. It would also provide some actual information rather than a statement that sounds insane.
> For the structure and insulation of a PopUp-House building (floor, walls and ceiling) it costs about 200 €/m² including labour. To this cost must be added all the finishes: waterproofing, exterior finishes, interior finishes, electricity, plumbing, heating, etc.
As a rule of thumb, the typical stick-framed Midwestern home (so, 3-4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, vinyl siding, asphalt shingled roof, drywall interior, mid-range cabinets/flooring/trim) will typically cost around $100 per finished square foot.
Of that number, roughly 1/3 of it is for framing the shell. The rest is all plumbing/HVAC/electrical/trim.
There's a lot of easily-invalidated assumptions built into that number, so take it with a grain of salt.
Pet peeve: "about 200 €/m² including labour" is not supposed to be accurate to 4 significant figures - and even if it was, the EUR/USD exchange rate varies by more than that from day to day. "$25 / square foot" is much better if you treat it as a translation rather than mindlessly plugging numbers into a calculator.
(Maybe I'm just being a grumpy old man, but I deal with this sort of thing all the time in my day job and it winds me up something rotten).
According to the NAHB [1], construction is about 60% of a house's cost (the rest eaten by land, financing, etc.). Of construction cost about 20% is foundation, framing + insulation (what we have in this design). For this particular design it's not just all the finishes though, since you still need plumbing, electrical, etc.
But the video didn't actually really show you much of anything. The first 20 seconds were straight up pointless. Anytime they showed information it was in text that was way too small unless you watched it full screen on your desktop. They were saying stuff, but at the same time not saying stuff. Why did they make choice X,Y,Z. How low cost is it? How long will it last? What trade offs are there, etc.
It absolutely amazes me how all houses in US seem to be build with 100% wood, especially in areas with termites, dryness or possibilities of hurricanes!
It is not that much more expensive to build a solid concrete block home, insulate and airtight it well
I realise wood is more plentiful in US than here in Europe, but imho i wouldnt feel safe living in a wooden home.
Traditionally concrete really wasn't that much stronger without rebar and is much more dangerous if something does collapse.
Wood use to be much cheaper because it requires special knowledge to create strong concrete.
The wooden walls also allow for pipes and utilities to be easily ran. How do you run utilities into concrete homes? The ones I've seen are either exposed or behind a wooden wall.
The US has a large amount of brick homes, but it's usually wooden walls on the insides so it ends up costing more.
It's also more difficult to make a concrete block home look good, and since there aren't too many major storms in many parts of the US, cheap wooden homes work fine.
A building material that is in common use in Europe, but hasn't really caught on here is foamed concrete (Autoclaved Aerated Concrete, technically). They're large blocks that can be mortared together and can be worked with powered woodworking tools (drills, circular saws, etc) to make cavities/channels for utilities. They need some additional reinforced concrete to make them hurricane proof, but they're very fire resistant, are quiet, and go up relatively quickly. It's more expensive but lasts longer than wood framing.
The brick and stone homes here are actually masonry facade over wood frame. You need to have an air gap and flashing between the brick/stone and the wood, as water will seep through the mortar via capillary action fairly quickly, and stay there to rot the wood.
What does it mean to say that it lasts longer than wood framing? There are wood framed houses that are well over a century old, right? So is this being measured in centuries, or am I missing something important?
> There are wood framed houses that are well over a century old, right?
Yes, but that doesn't mean a wood-framed house built today wild last 100 years.
First, there's a survivor effect. Only the best wood-framed houses from 100 years ago are still around today. The rest have been pulled down over the course of that century.
The lumber used 100 years ago was true-sized -- a 2x4 was actually 2 inches by 4 inches. Today, the lumber is dimensional -- a 2x4 is actually 1.5 inches by 3.5 inches.
Houses were often overbuilt 100 years ago, because they weren't as confident in the engineering. Today, we're becoming more comfortable going to the engineering minimums. Thus, there's a lack of redundancy in the structure -- redundancy that may compensate for some construction shortfalls.
The building had not yet been properly attached to the foundation and the wind was record breaking (80+ mph). The wind likely went up under the structure and lifted it enough to push it off of it's foundation. NC is known to have regular hurricanes and tornadoes.
Electricity, water, telecoms, sewage comes in underground (and I instructed builder few years back to bury them deep against cold)
My house was all build using concrete block with only the roof and interior flooring made of wood,
This winter we had some crazy gales here with gusts up to 100 miles+/hour no issues :)
I would not feel comfortable with too much wood in homes around here due to the extremely wet and damp climate on the west side of Ireland, house is airtight and well insulated with heat recovery system and solar water heaters
If the structure is airtight the damp won't really be getting at the wood. There's people talking about "the best wood houses lasting 100 years" somewhere in this thread, but I've seen lots of 50 year old wooden houses where the structure hasn't really started to age (but I've not spent much time in termite country). Even the cheap fast growing pine used for dimensional lumber these days is a pretty impressive material.
Actually I think our weather and ground is favorable as well as clay being abundant. I imagine wood is more abundant in the US seeing as we either protected or chopped down our forests.
A wooden framed house can be strong and hurricane resistant. The strength of a building has as much to do with the design characteristics as the material of construction.
These alternative house construction strategies always get my attention. But the real tough part is finding affordable and desirable land upon which to build one.
I have a suspicion that once they encounter and solve all of the challenges associated with building houses (mold, cost, weather, a second floor) they will end up approaching a pretty normal modern residential construction.
They're using the term passive house to mean the 'new wave' passive house, which is more about super-insulating a nearly airtight envelope. Usually a heat-recovery ventilator is added to recover interior heat when cycling in outside air. While thermal mass can be an element in this design it's not a major factor like in a 'passive solar' house.
>which is more about super-insulating a nearly airtight envelope
That last part is the problem. Insulation is a huge part in any passive home, but heating the air means keeping things airtight. Which means terrible air quality and living conditions.
I am fully aware of what they are, we stopped building them for a reason. They are hell to live in. You get the bare minimum air exchange as required by code. Try being in such a building for a day. Properly constructed passive buildings use thermal mass to maintain comfortable temperatures while allowing proper ventilation.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that there's no way this is a passive house. No data (temps or energy consumption) and a concept (lots of insulation and nothing else) that's been tried many times and always fails.
That strategy is successful everywhere. You already insulate anyways, you still need thermal mass. It isn't just about capturing heat during the day to release at night, it is about heating the house instead of the air inside the house. This lets you have proper ventilation.
> most of the air exchange with exterior is done by controlled ventilation through an heat-exchanger in order to minimize heat loss (or gain, depending on climate)
Without tricks like that, you'll have a hard time getting below 15 kWh/m² per year.
No, you don't. Heating the structure is far more efficient, allows for proper ventilation, and is far more comfortable for the inhabitants.
>Also, passive houses do have proper ventilation:
Yes, but this is not a passive house, that's the point. This is just an airtight box of insulation. They have the least amount of ventilation allowed by code. The air quality in such houses is terrible, and they are very uncomfortable to live in.
>Without tricks like that, you'll have a hard time getting below 15 kWh/m² per year.
You can very easily get to 0 without "tricks" like that. South facing windows + thermal mass.
