Seed Eco-Home Eco Features 2022

1. It is a compact starter home - at 1000 square feet of space, compared to the larger 2500 sq ft average size. This means that much less cost all around - to build and heat.
2. House comes with a full-off grid 6kW as  a standard option - sufficient to run heating, cooling, water heating, cooking, and all appliances - 100% on solar - with the caveat that the system has practically no energy storage and avoids the use of a large battery bank. We increased this from 3kW of the first Seed Eco-Home. This allows an energy-conscious family to run almost all of their needs from solar electricity on sunny and cloudy days - though the system has to be switched back to grid whenever there is heavy cloud cover and required power is high. This is for those individuals who are eco-conscious and can adapt to a solar lifestyle. This leaves a choice to run fully on the grid - or fully on solar. This does require working during the day - so if one has a nocturnal lifestyle - then the solar option does not work.
3. House comes with an 800 square foot Aquaponic Greenhouse as a standard option. This allows a family to grow most of their nutrition needs right in a greenhouse - with fish, vegetables, and fruits of their choice. This requires one to invest time into the greenhouse - so we will be developing turnkey maintanance contracts for anyone whose busy lifestyle does not allow for managing the greenhouse at its productive capacity. The limit of possibility, however, is growing all of one's caloric needs for 1-2 people - right in the 800 square foot aquaponic greenhouse space. See calculations and assumptions at [1]
4. Shallow Insulated Footer - makes the house an earth contact home, allowing for heat tranfer from soil under the house that stays 60F year round. Also costs 15-20% less. see [2].
5. Heat pump - 3x more efficient than typical heaters [3]. furnace. Also used for central cooling in the summer. Saves about $500 in heating per year for the Seed Eco-Home, and cuts carbon emissions 2x [4]
6. Induction cooktop - according to one source, about 80% efficient, which is about double the efficiency of gas cooking [5]. Another source says 3x as efficient as gas and 10-15% more efficient than electric cooktops. [6]. Saves about $100/year in cooking costs [7].
7. Superfridge - For our refrigerator, we use a highly insulated chest freezer converted to a refrigerator simply by putting it on a timer, which is about 10x more efficient than a standard refrigerator. This is a standard option depending on one's needs of energy efficiency or convenience. But, if you would like to have an annual refrigerator bill of $1.5 with the Seed Eco-Home off-grid PV option - as opposed to the average of $88 for a standard home - this is for you. See more info at Superfridge.
8. Social Ecology - we build the houses as swarm builds in 5 days, as part of an immersion learning/productive experience which we call Extreme Manufacturing. This means that different communities can hold 'barnraising' style events where a complete house is built in rapid time - allowing for economic development in standard market conditions or in DIY builder scenarios.
9. Human-Centered Design - means that the DIY person can build a home to their taste, because the house is like a Lego set for buildings, with modules that do not require heavy machines to lift. See the introduction to the Open Building Institute in our video from 2016 - the concept is still 100% relevant - [8]
10. Product Ecology - the house evolves over time, our next steps are getting the Open Source Biodigester code-approved, so that when integrated with the Aquaponic Greenhouse and an open source Atmospheric Water Generator, we attain a closed loop water system - all the way to potable water.