Open Source Ecology Seed Eco-Home 2 product release
The Seed Eco-Home 2 is an ambitious project to be the world’s only open source house design to be offered as a product you can replicate, not only as a DIY, but as a commercial offering. The open source design features a 1,000sf house that you can build for only 50,000USD in just one week with a friend. The house is code compliant, modular construction for a incredibly short build time, with the ability to build in parallel with non-skilled workers who can put together pieces like Lego. The end goal? To help solve affordable housing, and to transition the built environment economy away from the proprietary and towards the collaborative.
As the name suggests, the Seed Eco-Home 2 is highly environmentally friendly, with a number of LEED and Living Building Challenge qualities. It can run off-grid, with sustainable nickel and iron battery banks and 5.6kW of roof PV, an induction cooktop for half the energy requirements compared to gas, all water saving fixtures, tankless water heaters, and an edible garden, aquaponics, and miniature forest. The house is zero energy, producing more energy than it uses, and can operate without a grid connection or a gas connection.
This project comes from a larger offering of tested and proven designs by Open Source Ecology. Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, architects and supporters, whose main goal is the eventual manufacturing of the Global Village Construction Set. It is a series of cost effective open source hardware designs for the easy fabrication of the 50 types of industrial machines that it takes to build a small civilization with modern comforts. This begins from things like how to create bricks, weld, build a tractor, and of course, build your own house. This means that the entire system is open source, right down to the PV and water systems. Not only are the designs open source, the funding and revenue model is also designed to be sustainable, to upskill and empower the local communities who choose to build and occupy these homes.
The 2022 product release of the Seed Eco-Home 2 involves the publication of all CAD models used to design the home. These are produced using the free and open source parametric modeling package FreeCAD.
Images are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 from the OSE Wiki.
