Seed Eco-Home 6 Future Work

Max Feedback

For one, I think there are quite a few trade offs in design, materials, and frankly level of comfort/finish if you were to sell it commercially or optimize for DIY/"cheap housing" people. I think the SEH also has some of these trade offs or you could call it "conflict of target customer group" that we exposed in the SH6 build.

For example, the SEH is designed to a relatively high level of comfort/trim that would fit into a normal suburban environment and is intended to attract normal commercial market home buyers. E.g. the island, the wide open living room/kitchen space, color scheme, level of trim detail. It is also not designed in the current loadout for off-grid use, since there's no battery planned (IIRC James bought those separately) and e.g. the electric on demand water heater can't even theoretically run off the 6kW solar on the roof, and having all-electric appliances like induction stove would mean you can't cook at night without adding a battery.

So the current SEH needs to be on the grid, the PV is just a cost saving measure, and it's designed to a level of trim/quality that is intended to appeal to regular home buyers.

If you were to design it to appeal to more rustic people who build it themselves and don't care as much about curb appeal, a lot of decisions could be changed. E.g. no island, not necessarily as big a living space but more interior rooms. I've designed it in Sweet Home 3D to be a 3BR/1BA pretty easily! You'd probably use gas appliances for the big power hungry ones like stove, oven, on demand water heater if you intend to be off grid.

These are all pulling in different directions. If you want to flood the market with cheap, high-quality housing, you'd use the SEH as currently intended. And if you were to design a cabin or ADU for that purpose, you'd be selling to retired boomers with high standards that don't care about off grid.

If you were to appeal to rustic DIY or "cheap/fast build over curb appeal" preference people, the cabin/ADU might not need nearly the same level of finish or comforts, and might use different materials.

I think you can solve much of this with differnt variants of the same basic footprint/design. There could be an off-grid SEH variant, or a low-cost/fast/rustic one, in addition the current hybrid on-grid/suburban/stylish one.

Same for cabins/ADUs.

If you're wanting to make a business out of it, it's probably way more profitable to hit the higher end retired boomer market. But if you're wanting to make an open source solution for cheap & fast shelter for DIY people, you'd do the opposite variant.

Therefore I'm conflicted one the thing. My own preference and focus would be on the rustic/DIY side, because I'm not necessarily as interested in running a fancy ADU for boomers business as in solving cheap housing, potentially off-grid, for DIYers or homesteaders, cause that's sort of what I'm looking for myself.

Thoughts?