Citizen Power

This looks a bit like a Hobbit house or a place where gnomes or something like that might live.    It’s a house built right into a hill, naturally cooled and as self-sufficient as possible. And according to the owner and builder of the house, it took no special abilities or tools to build. In fact, the builder had only worked once before on a house like this before he built his own!

The house is in Wales, and it was built by the builder, his father-in-law, and visiting friends.  It only took four months to build, and cost about 3000 pounds (sorry I don’t have he pound symbol).  It reminds me of a treehouse or a house in a cave. It’s energy efficient because the hill it’s built into keeps it cool and warm.   Another good thing about it is that it wasn’t built with modern building materials, so the air quality inside the house, where a lot of pollution comes from, is great.  Everything is natural.

It was built with materials such as mud, turf, straw bales in floors and walls for insulation, oak wood for frames for the house (very strong wood) and skylights give the house a feeling of light and being larger than it is.

The energy comes from natural sources too.  Solar panels for the electricity, and the refrigerator is cooled by air from underground.  It’s hard to see how that could be cool enough, but I have to say I’m not very familiar with the weather in Wales.  The builder was highly ecologically motivated.  He wrote:

“Our society is almost entirely dependent on the availability of increasing amounts of fossil fuel energy. This has brought us to the point at which our supplies are dwindling and our planet is in ecological catastrophe. We have no viable alternative energy source and no choice but to reduce our energy consumption. The sooner this change can be begun, the more comfortable it will be.”

I’ve wanted to live in a house like this for a long time. Would this be feasible to build in the United States?  You can see several other photos of this house here, and a lot more information about it and how it came about. Plans for the house and videos are there too.