From the listing description:
Serious inquiries only please. Partially blt eco-home. Website SylvanEcoHouse.com. 1 1/2 story home, three BD’s, 2.1 BA’s. 1944 sf. Needs completion.
Not a lot of homes have their own website. That number is probably even smaller among half-finished disaster-zone homes like this one.
What am I even looking at here? Why is everything covered in a metal grid? How is living inside a steel cage “green”? So many unanswered questions, and unfortunately reading the home’s website doesn’t really clear anything up for me.
I have the sense in this case “green” means more efficiently using (and storing) current energy sources, rather than avoiding them. I don’t know whether the building materials are produced from renewable sources. I only skimmed through a couple of areas in the “technology” section of the Sylvan Eco-House website.
One feature of their homes is a system to pull in and store the home’s energy needs from the grid during off hours. This way, the owner can have as much power as they want from the batteries during peak hours but without paying peak hour rates. (Do all states/providers use varying costs depending on peak usage?) There’s also talk of computer coordinated sensing and control for power needs. I don’t know what sort of batteries they’re talking about, but perhaps the metal mesh (which likely resides behind finished walls) is part of it. Or it may be a sensory net that tells the computer when there are people around, how many, whether they’re active or sleeping, etc. Anyway, more efficient use does help reduce the side effects of current power plants, but it’s still hitching one’s wagon to a fading star.
Rather than call this a green building, I’d be more inclined to call it a smart house. Anyone who watched the late, lamented Syfy Channel show “Eureka” will fondly remember Sarah, Sheriff Carter’s smart house.
It reminds me of the home of parents-of-friends, previous century. In a sort of cobbler’s-children-have-no-shoes situation, a building engineer raised his family in a never-finished poured concrete abode that still had forms falling off it decades later, when his estate sold the place for redevelopment. Talk about a solid structure – I can only imagine the effort it took to remove it; one of the kids had raised orchids in a greenhouse on the poured concrete roof…
@Anodean: After showing this post to my husband, I realized two things:
1) The house may not even be about efficient energy use, only how to best obtain as much energy as one wants at the lowest price possible, i.e., at off-peak rates. (He was not familiar with variously priced energy depending on time of day, either.)
2) The metal mesh might be especially helpful in deterring any NSA-ish looky-lews wanting to have a peek at the home owners wi-fi content. I believe similar mesh is used in such places as embassies, software companies, and spy agency buildings, though I don’t know if it’s the mesh alone or some sort of electronic signal running through it that provides jamming capabilities.