Affordable Green Housing – Prefab Style
“It looks like a house you’d order from Ikea. It sounds like a house designed by Apple. The I-House just might be the future — well, one future, anyway — of the housing market.
Clayton Homes, based in Maryville, Tenn., is one of America’s largest manufacturers of mobile homes and prefabricated housing. So when President Kevin Clayton wanted to go green, he gave his architects a free hand, instructing them to incorporate as many green products as possible and to produce a home that was super energy-efficient — the only constraint was that it had to be something that could be built in existing facilities.
The result was the Clayton I-House (view Clayton’s online tour of it here), an innovative prefab home that can be powered for a dollar a day, thanks to Low-E windows, solar augmentation, high-efficiency appliances and superior insulation. The solar panels on the roof don’t supply all the home’s needs, but they do cut electricity consumption in half. There’s also a tankless water heater and a cistern that collects rainwater from the roof for use in gardening, car washing or other outdoor uses. Floors are made of fast-growing bamboo, and paint and insulation are low- or zero-emission.”
More pictures after break.
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