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If you go to 300house.com you can learn about a fascinating project/contest whose goal is to design a $300 house for the world’s two billion poorest inhabitants: We started with five simple questions: * How can organic, self-built slums be turned into livable housing? * What might a house-for-the-poor look like? * How can world-class [...]
Invention – a full-size erector set lets you build real things
by Marshall Brain | April 14, 2011
This product is not yet a product you can buy, and it has not been fully fleshed out, but you can definitely see where they are going as soon as you look at the photos: Construction Toy The kit gives you full-size parts to build real things. It: a) really makes you wonder why no [...]
In the movie “Up”, a house floats using normal helium balloons that you might find at a birthday party: Could this ever happen in real life? Probably not, because real houses are really heavy. The Sheetrock alone weighs many tons. But if you stripped down a house to its barest essentials, used foam for the [...]
Back in September, a challenge was issued on Treehugger’s web site to create a 420 square foot living space that can do everything a space twice that big would normally do: Help Design, Build an Ultra-Low Footprint Apartment: The LifeEdited Project Specifically: One reason New Yorkers use less energy per capita is that they live [...]
This video opens with a great quote: “Earthquakes don’t kill people. Buildings do.” And this is very true. For example, in last year’s Haiti earthquake, thousands and thousands of people died as poorly-constructed buildings collapsed on top of them. The way to prevent tragedies like Haiti is to build buildings that can survive earthquakes, and [...]
Cross Laminated Timber panels (also known as CLT and X-LAM) are a relatively new building material. They have been used to build everything from houses to multi-story apartment buildings: The building is made from prefabricated cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels, made in Austria from sustainably harvested lumber. They are strong; Craig says they can go up [...]
Public Service Announcement – Your space heater can kill you
by Marshall Brain | December 17, 2010
This article… Electric heater: Five safety tips for when you turn it on …mentions an amazing statistic: Between 1999 and 2002, [space heaters] were responsible for an average 9,900 residential fires and 190 fatalities a year, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). That was nearly five times the annual fatalities linked to [...]
This week we have talked about two ways to save money on your home heating bill. You can add insulation: I have an old house with bad insulation. Will new insulation really save money? And you can lower your thermostat at night: Can lowering your thermostat at night really save you money? How much? There [...]
Right now in the United States we are in the grip of a very cold winter. Heating the house is going to be expensive with this kind of weather going on. What if you want to save money? One option, especially if you have an older home, is to do things like adding insulation: I [...]
I got an email from someone who has recently bought an older home (2,000 square feet, one story). He looked in the attic and there is a layer of 40-year-old fiberglass insulation up there that may be four inches thick now. And he has a reasonable question – how much money could he really save [...]
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