Gadgetory

we really were trying to design a house that uses all its own energy first and then if that's not enough it draws from the grid right now we are pretty darn free at independence people they build these monuments to their wealth and what we want to do here is build a monument for what's possible a great building we're gonna see more and more people having renewable energy and battery storage together and knowing that they can be independent of the grid they don't need to have the grid to power their homes I'm a progressive cowboy a lot of people talk about freedom you know are you free when a company has the ability to cut your power off when you're trying to take care of your family and just live your life I just wanted to build a green house as we could come up with we felt it was possible and this is a fantastic model it can be done I could done a large scale and you all you do is scale it back and you can do it the challenges along the way was to bring in these technologies in it it kind of snowballs a little bit like how about doing this and how about doing that okay one what's the best way who's the expert knows how to do that with our dual axis solar trackers we're extending the solar day out to a very long period of time typically it's about five hours for a solar day with ground mounted solar trackers and we get up to nine hours a day it's remarkable with the tracker technology how much we're able to gather dual access trackers it means you're tracking exactly where that Sun is across the sky both vertically and horizontally and when you add it all up it's the 40% more than if you had a stationary amount PV panels these strong well-built German trackers can go up to 75 miles an hour before they actually go to a horizontal and shut down so that they've not destroyed by the winds it's like this beautiful piece of art that is very functional and productive clean that's gonna generate enough to take care of all the lighting needs of the house so this particular one is called a vertical access so when it turns it actually looks like a solid cylinder the birds actually see it we didn't want to be chopping up needles right now those batteries are for electrical outages when the grid goes down which happens a lot out in this area what we'd like to do is to be able to be off the grid for three or four days if we have no son eventually with some lithium-ion batteries like Tesla's developing we'll turn off the grid altogether we came up with the idea midway through the project of utilizing rainwater to provide the domestic water supply here it sounds like a lot of water but it's not that much when when people use shower and do everything they do in their and their daily lives they can use water pretty quickly and we became the first property of its kind to have a black water treatment system in San Diego County we've put a lot into this quote unquote case study home but there's a lot of it that I see being the homes of the future I like to think of the term the high hanging fruit the low hanging fruit the low hanging fruit or things that are easy to do are not expensive to do that can make your house much more energy efficient you you