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Hi, I'm Rick Jury with the house for all seasons.

We're here to look around your house as part of our program today on high technology in the home, I am the code computer Please enter your code.

By 1990, one third of the homes in this country will have computers.

And they'll be used for a lot more than just playing computer games.

On today's program, we're going to look at high technology and see how it will help us lower energy costs while making our lives easier and safer.

We'll join the designer of this futuristic house in Ahwatukee Arizona for a tour.

Tom Fellow will bring us new shelter magazine's consumer review of how the microchip is being used to improve life around the house.

Arlene visits renowned energy experts Amory and Hunter Lovins at their demonstration house in Aspen, Colorado.

But first, from the country that brought you light beer comes solar light.

Tom Fellow visits Doctor Richard Lee in the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island to learn about a new, lightweight solar heating system that may soon bring the cost of going solar way down.

Well, Dick, I've been around a lot of solar collectors, and I've never felt anything.

This light, that's just remarkable.

You might want to compare it to a commercial unit that we've got here that weighs about 60 pounds.

I want to lift this.

Whoa.

This comes in at 16 pounds for a somewhat larger area, so it's 4 or 5 times lighter .

Yeah.

We do it by using a lot less material.

And the reason we use a much less material is for economics.

This commercial unit cost $50 for a square foot.

Counting the storage, the system and the installation.

And I know a lot of it, at least, is tied up in expensive glass and copper and other materials, and it's just material intensive and it's hard to assemble.

The major point, however, is that at $50 for a square foot.

Without tax credits, you cannot compete with gas and oil.

Our analysis indicates you've got to get down to $10 for a square foot for the whole system in order to be able to compete with gas or oil and make a go of it.

We do that by using a lot less material.

Now, I noticed you've got one of the panels being assembled over here.

That's right.

This shows first, the frame is made of a roll formed aluminum sheet, which is formed so as to fit snugly around the foam plastic insulation that we have here.

There's many different designs for the frame, but this is one of them.

And here's the whole box with insulation in the bottom of it.

The foam plastic insulation can't take the extremes of temperature you get under some circumstances.

So we have a thin layer of fiberglass insulation, which is also quite light.

This is one of the most remarkable features.

This absorber plate is paper thin.

The absorber is the core of any solar collector.

It collects sunlight coming in, turns it into thermal energy which is carried away by water.

Got a rather interesting side by side comparison here.

Now here's a conventional absorber plate made of copper and with the risers.

And it's rather heavy and of course, rather expensive.

It is.

It's heavy, it's expensive.

And it's one of the light, most the light and lightweight ones you can get today in a commercial unit.

The one we looked at over there was stainless steel sheet adhesive.

We found form together.

This is made out of a Teflon film that's one mil thick, 2 or 3 mills of aluminum foil and a half mil of nickel, which serves as a selective surface.

It absorbs the sunlight coming in, but it doesn't infrared back out.

Now, here's when you sandwich those layers together, which you get.

I guess.

Yeah.

This has channels for the water which we can open up here.

And although once it's operating, these are actually quite thin and water is flowing down and uniformly wetting the interior surface.

Now you've got an experiment going on over here that shows it a little better.

Yeah.

This demonstrates how the water flows down the individual channels.

You can see the on rushing water filling up each channel.

One of the early technical problems people had to overcome was both getting water uniformly distributed among channels and getting a smooth, uniform wedding within each individual channel.

Now you're allowing a pump, then to take the water to the top of the panel, and then relying on gravity for the water to flow through the panel.

That's right.

But it's a very low pressure pump, a low pressure system that's essential to the use of the thin materials.

It will drain itself dry as soon as the pump shuts off.

What are some of the engineering problems you're still having with these systems?

The main problem is around what's called stagnation.

In summer, everybody's away in vacation.

What?

No water flows through the system.

The sun beats down.

It can hit 400 degrees.

That's very tough on the adhesives that fasten things together.

It's even tough on some of the polymers.

So we're looking at other adhesives and metal foils to see if we can overcome this.

Now, what about the glazing itself?

I know you've replaced the glass with the plastic.

What is this stuff?

This is it's a commercial plastic.

It's used in many outdoor applications, including some other solar collectors.

Commercial solar collectors that withstands the ultraviolet light very well.

It spread out over the surface and adhesive bonded around the edges.

Okay, then it's put into the oven and shrink wrapped onto the entire collector.

This means that you've got a squeezing going on on the central piece of insulation, the insulation board, which gives the whole structure a very rigid, strong construction.

Now, I imagine a lightweight collector like this is also a lot easier to install on the roof.

Oh, absolutely.

The installer can carry these up on his shoulder, and we've put up an entire array in less than 30 minutes.

Now this looks like the storage tank in here.

But how did you get it through such a narrow doorway?

Oh, it comes through the doorway in pieces.

Lift up the top.

You can see the top comes through the slab.

Here's the heat exchanger.

The house water circulates through this pipe so that you never have to drink the water.

That goes to the collector.

That just goes into the solar heated water.

The solar heated water just circulates between the collector.

And here it's contained by this plastic bag, which is heavy gauge plastic.

And that sits inside a piece of sheet metal which comes through the door flat.

And it's then clipped into the cylindrical configuration with another slab of insulation underneath.

And you can see that the side insulation here comes through the door easily and separately.

Now the pipes going to the collector.

They look plastic.

Yeah.

All the pipes are plastic.

And the installation of course is plastic.

Things just clip together as easily as we can work it out.

Now it looks like you're trying to reduce the cost of the tank and the pipes in the same manner that you're cutting the cost of the collector, right?

The point is that the cost of the collector itself is only about half of the total system cost to get the whole system down to about $750.

For how?

Water system.

We've got to get the balances system, the storage tanks, the installation procedures, the pumps and so on.

The cost of all of that down equally well.

The the technology looks really exciting.

But when do you think this kind of thing is going to be commercially available?

The technology for the storage tank is available now to question people starting to use it.

The technology for the collector is a little harder to predict, but I wouldn't be surprised if we saw people manufacturers selling these systems in 2 to 5 years.

The future is here now in Phoenix, Arizona, many of the jobs that people used to do.

But this house is much more than just a collection of electronic gadgets.

It was designed in 1980 to be the House of the future.

It incorporates what were at the time advances in architecture, building technology and creative living concepts.

Architect Charles Schiffer of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation created the concept.

The whole design was basically a nature study.

First, we had to take into consideration the nature of the need.

We're in a suburban arrangement.

We're dealing with the solar application and the Sonoran Desert.

Here.

We have great consideration for the summer sun.

We also had to take into consideration the budget.

We did have a budget.

We had to take into consideration what was the purpose of the home.

Schiffer also says the house was designed to adapt to the changing family of the 80s.

A flexible floor plan offers a series of rooms that open off a central atrium, a space that serves as a buffer zone between the quiet and active areas of the house.

From the atrium, I consider a semi-enclosed area, basically taking in the walled in backyard and putting it in the center of the home.

It does several things energy conservation.

The atrium is on a totally separate heating and cooling mode than the alcove rooms, which are basically the living spaces.

Heating gain or loss from the alcove rooms is into the atrium, where it is in fact recaptured.

The House of the future also uses a variety of innovative building materials.

It was the first house built with a material called Pulver on the exterior walls.

Pulver is a lightweight concrete block made from pulverized fly ice that comes from electric power plants.

These translucent skylights have fiberglass insulation between the plastic panels.

They offer the same insulation value as the walls.

The house is partially earth burned to help conceal it in the stark desert landscape.

Space h eating is done by its passive solar design and active solar panels.

The panels also heat water for the house and the swimming pool.

Air conditioning is a necessity in this part of Arizona, but there's also an experimental ice storage air conditioning system here.

The unit makes and stores ice at night, then water circulates through the ice during the day to cool the home.

And here's where the home computer begins to play a part.

The computer controls the heating and cooling functions through sensors, which compare the climate inside with outside temperatures and humidity.

The computer also acts as the home's security system does the bookkeeping waters the landscape controls the lighting, acts as an answering service, and turns appliances on and off.

But a sophisticated as the system is, it's already becoming outmoded.

In 1980, this pioneering effort required the power of five computers that cost about $50,000.

Today, the house is completely controlled by one Apple computer and off the shelf software that costs about $3,000.

Perhaps the biggest lesson to be learned from this house of the future is how quickly technology changes.

You know, having a house that works like this one might not be so far into the future, is it looks.

Tom fellow visited with new shelter magazine editor Mike Lefebvre about what computers can do for us today.

Video games now I love video games.

What's so special about this one?

Well, this video game can control your entire house.

It's a GE home minder, the master controller, right?

You can program it to control whites, your television set, your thermostat, your coffee pot.

Leave a memo for yourself saying that the reminding of your anniversary.

Good idea.

Set your sprinkler system, your crockpot, your curlers.

You have to stay plugged in all night, I guess so.

Yeah.

Can you give me an example of how it works?

Yeah.

For instance, you're sitting on the couch, you're watching television.

You staff forgot to turn the light off in the bedroom.

You punch up bedroom punch another light, another button.

The light goes out.

So you control lights in every room in the house, even the front.

Even outside.

You can turn the outside lights on and off automatically.

Can you phone this kind of thing up from.

Yeah, there's a nice feature with this.

If any touchtone telephone, you can call it up and say, I'm coming home, turn the outside lights on so the drive will be lit when you come in for security.

Now, what about security?

Most of us have little $8 timers we take and we plug into our lamps when we go out of town, and they go on and off at the same time every night.

This has a built in program that randomly does.

That's what might turn one line lamp on one night, another lamp on another night.

It's, I think, a little more sophisticated.

Likely to fool a burglar.

Better.

How about, say, the coffee pot?

How would that work?

Well, I say you want your coffee, right when you get up in the morning.

I've said it so that the coffee pot is going to come out at 8:00.

Going to go off at 825 when I'm out the door.

How about the coffee grounds?

You have to do that yourself.

I'll do that the night before.

That's too bad.

What about the cost of these things?

This television has the computer built into it.

This is about $1,200.

It's also a TV top model.

It's connects to any television sets.

About $500.

Do the modules come with?

You'd have to get five with each.

With each unit, you probably need a few more than about $20 each.

This is a nice one.

This module is a thermostat module so you can control the cycling, heating cooling cycles of your home every remotely.

I think it's pretty neat, but what do you think the prospects are for these things in the future for the average homeowner?

Well, it's a big a large builder that's including these as standard equipment on all his new homes.

And I think other builders are going to follow suit, sort of selling the automatic house.

What happens if you're not ready to spend 500 to $1000 for one of these things?

Do we have any options?

They're a little less expensive.

Yeah.

Come on in here.

I'll show you.

This looks like a little phone answering machine.

Way it is.

This is the X10 system.

It's kind of a scaled down version of the Home minder.

You call it up from a telephone, tell it to turn lights on and off.

Appliances.

What are the buttons here?

With eight buttons here, this will control eight items and opposed to something like the homeowner, which would control about 100.

Looks like you've got the little lamp modules again.

And appliance module right.

You just plug the appliance in like this, plug this into the wall and it's all set up with the system.

Okay.

Now here on the module you've got a house code and a unit code.

What are those for.

Well a house code is a security that if your neighbor has one of these systems, he won't he won't be turning your coffee pot on in the middle of the night.

Wonderful idea.

But they've got the same problem with the radio phones.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

What's this?

Unit?

Looks pretty much the same.

It is.

This is a remote control for inside the house.

You.

If you're sitting on the couch, you want to dim the lights or turn the TV on in this at the at the master and press the button.

Do either of these use connect to a television at all?

No they don't.

It's all the programing is down on the keypad here.

What are you paying for these?

About $100.

So there are quite a bit cheaper.

Yeah, they just do fewer things.

We've talked a little bit about security with lighting both this system and the other system.

What about the function of a full blown burglar alarm.

Do these these will just maybe deter a burglar because he thinks your home, if he's going to try it again to your house, they're not going to help you.

You need a real burglar alarm and smoke detection system or the microchips finding their way into those as well.

Yeah.

This is for instance, this house has a alarm system in it, and with remote sensors, it sends a message to the to the main panel telling you that someone's trying to get in the house or walking on your carpet or mats that go underneath the carpet.

It's going to be quite a bit more of an investment, though, isn't it?

Yeah.

If you have a professional install system like that, it'd be about $1,500, but you can do it yourself fairly easily for about 4 or $500.

How long does that take?

About 20 hours to install a wireless system.

Now, over at this end, we've got something a lot of us are now putting in our homes.

I call them smart thermostats, little microchip thermostats that give you a lot of programmability.

Right.

I think it's important to buy one that has different cycles for the weekdays when you're at work and weekends when you're home, you wouldn't want the same cycle.

You can also get these to control heat pumps.

And I think it's good to remember that for every one degree you can, you can turn your thermostat down.

It's 1% you're going to save on your fuel bill.

So it does offer some savings, some potential to return your investment on this thing in the long run.

Yeah.

What are you going to pay for these now?

You're going to pay about $100.

But for that in any of these things, what you're really paying for is convenience.

Something to remember to do.

Things that you might forget to do.

High technology doesn't just mean computers.

As Arlene Arms Parker found when she visited well-known energy experts Amory and Hunter Lovins in Snowmass, Colorado.

I understand you've incorporated water and energy saving measures in this house that are among the most advanced in the world.

It is a super insulated, passive solar earth, sheltered in daylight building so that in a climate going to -47, we use no heat that's cold.

We use about a third the usual amount of water.

Our electric bill totals about $28 a month, of which 18 is the office equipment for the research center, five is the waterfall pump in the Semi-tropical jungle, and the other five is for all the domestic lights and appliances, which are extremely efficient.

We get our money back on the extra cost of those savings in about ten months.

That's incredible.

What about the design is certainly unusual.

What were you trying to achieve with that?

The curving slip form, stone walls we did really as an esthetic measure.

It's the kind of house we want to live in.

And it happened to work.

It works really well.

It turns out it has a lot of advantages for the solar design.

It enables us to get light and heat all the way to the back of the house.

Whereas in an ordinary box square house, the back part is cold and dark.

It also is a technique that can be built by unskilled laborers like us.

The home also is more than just a home.

It's also an office for 15 people and a greenhouse that will enable us to grow all of our vegetables Can we take a look around inside?

Let me show you the features.

Okay.

Oh, this looks like a comfortable spot.

This is a good spot.

And what makes the whole house so comfortable in the winter, especially, is that these are argon filled, gas filled, heat mirror windows.

It's a European technology, and they insulate three times as well as double glazing.

In fact, in the winter these windows gain more heat than they lose facing in any direction, including north.

That's amazing.

Yeah, that's what keeps the whole place warm.

You do have a backup heat source.

We also don't need it that that stoves for esthetics.

Oh, well, it does look good.

I like your tree house.

Rich Bruce post holding up a 16 by 12 and some six by 12 oak beams.

These are from friends in the Ozarks, and we got about 50 tons of oak to hold up.

All all the weight of the of the earth sheltering on the roof.

Tell me some of the significant features of this area.

It's beautiful.

Oh.

Thank you.

Well, we get three quarters of the stove heat back.

This is one of our five air to air heat exchangers to give us fresh air without losing heat.

And we also have some nice electricity savers.

Instead of just using ordinary high frequency ballasts, which eliminate flicker and hum and save 40% of the power, we use a little photocell up there to tell them to dim according to how much daylight is coming in, so the light goes on bright and then you see it dims down.

Then you save more like 90%.

When everybody's got those, it'll save about 60 big power plants.

But is it is it really economical for me to have that in my house?

They're normally used for offices, but they're good for your house.

If you if you use a light a lot, like in the kitchen.

And for ordinary lights you can use these compact fluorescent bulbs.

That's an 18 what bulb that does the job of a 75.

Throws that much light.

Yeah.

It's a quadruple efficiency bulb that lasts about 13 times as long and pays for itself several times over.

What does it cost?

Well, they usually run 10 to $20, saves 40 to 60 worth.

And then we have the world's most efficient refrigerator and freezer.

This saves 90 odd percent, this about 85%.

And we know how to save another two thirds of what's left.

But we just haven't bothered.

And they do it just through super thick insulation all around here.

Good gaskets and seals and a compressor up on top behind this board.

In fact, half the cooling on the refrigerator is done just by coupling a little copper pipe that takes freon up to an outdoor fin.

And whenever it's cold enough outside, the freon condenses runs back down and the compressor doesn't turn on.

But wouldn't the upfront cost of something like that be so high that it would offset any savings I might get?

You do get a pretty long payback on handmade prototypes like these, but when these are in mass production in the next few years, I think they'll cost less than a regular refrigerator because there's no super worth it, right?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

What about drying clothes?

That's such a big energy.

Oh, we have a neat solar way of doing that.

Let me guess.

The clothesline in your backyard?

No, it's a it's a newfangled, rather simple method that actually saves us 90% of the electricity and dries the clothes.

Oh, yeah, it works great.

What about water conservation?

Well, we have some ordinary things, like these faucet aerators.

We have half gallon a minute compressed air showers compared to the usual 4 to 7 gallons a minute.

I'm wasting that much water.

Oh, yeah.

And we have all solar water heating, so that saves us a lot of solar installation.

We have 0.8 and one gallon toilets compared to the usual five gallon flush.

That saves 40%.

And then we have some special water saving measures down in the greenhouse that Hunter can tell you about.

Okay.

I feel like I've stepped outside.

You know, Hunter, most people have an aquarium in their house.

What is this?

This is an aquaculture system set up by doctor Tom McKinney.

To meet you.

Runs the institute's agriculture program.

Who's this guy?

Little crayfish, who cleans up stuff on the bottom of the tank, provides food for the other fish.

And there.

And also food for us when they get big enough.

And what's with the floating plants here?

Well, this is a hydroponic system.

It cleans the water, which lets a very dense amount of fish think they're living in a much bigger body of water.

It also feeds us.

This, for instance, is water spinach.

You have a floating meal here, don't you?

Sure.

Can you show me the rest?

Sure.

The really exciting thing about the greenhouse is that it enables us to produce most of the food we need vegetables and fish.

We can grow tomato plants, fresh tomatoes and zucchinis and papaya, melons, carrots, strawberries, everything you need.

You know, I would think with all this overhead glass, you'd have quite an overheating problem though.

Well, in fact, some folks thought that would be a problem.

But what we do is just open the high events and it's right out.

The hot air rises and how it goes.

If in the winter we want to save all that nice warm air, we use the duct on the side to suck the inside air into an air to air heat exchanger, which warms up incoming fresh air.

We then send that out to the corners of the house where we want the energy.

What you've created here, then, is sort of an outside area that links your living space on one side to your work area over here.

Yeah.

Some folks have joked that we ought to install vines and let Amory swing to work.

Would you like to go see the institute?

I would, this is the Rocky Mountain Institute.

It's what you might call a modern cottage industry.

With the computer, with the phones, with the library.

We can be anywhere.

Hello again.

Hello.

A gift from your garden.

Thank you.

Garden?

Why this house?

What are you trying to achieve here?

Our institute is fostering the efficient, sustainable use of resources.

And it seems sensible that it.

And we should be in a building that shows people there are opportunities for living a lot more lightly and pleasantly.

Now, the features that you've incorporated into this house, are there things that anybody can do no matter what they build?

Sure, you can put these in any ordinary house and get the same quality of life that we do.

No, I think you'd also find in any other house that similar techniques would give you about a one year payback as we got.

In fact, the savings here are going to pay off this entire building in about 40 years.

It's pretty good emitting about half a ton of sulfur a year from power plants and things like that.

What is your vision of the future with your institute and your house?

Really a higher quality of life for people.

You can grow your own organic food.

You can work with colleagues in a pleasant setting, have a house that keeps you warm all by itself.

That's a wonderful place to live.

And we we hope it's helping other people discover how they can make houses that are not consumers, but net producers of energy and food and beauty.

(Robot: Goodbye Rick) As all the people we've talked to today have shown us, we're moving toward a blend of technology and function, a blend that will offer us a more livable home environment.

And next week, we're going to look at a technology from the past, one that's being used today in the Rhone valley of France will tour historic chateaux, churches and farmhouses dating back to the 17th century, which have all been made from earth.

Then we'll see a French renaissance of rammed earth construction at an apartment and townhouse complex north of Grenoble in California.

We'll look at a rammed earth house that's being built strong enough to withstand an earthquake, and will travel to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to visit acclaimed Earth shelter architect Malcolm Wells.

I'm Rick Jury.

See you next time on a house for All Seasons.