OBI Kickstarter Product Narrative:

  1. 5 core products
  2. House and Module Designs
  1. The Seed Eco Home Concept
  1. Specific Features
  2. Cost
  3. Build Time
  4. Future Features
  1. Aquaponic Greenhouse
  1. Specific Features
  2. Cost
  1. Seed House With Aquaponic Greenhouse- Towards Autonomous housing
  2. Other Modules
  3. Future Developments
  1. Machines
  1. Brick Press
  2. Swing-Blade Sawmill
  3. Cellulose Insulation Machine
  4. Continuous Lime Production
  1. Materials Production Facility
  2. Training Program

5 Core Products

We are offering 5 core products:

  1. House Designs and Housing Modules Designs - including renewable energy, food production, and materials production as part of the housing system.
  2. Machine Designs - enabling construction machines and machines that produce building materials
  3. Materials Production Facility - design and operations manual for running small scale, effective production of CEBs, lumber, insulation, concrete, and paint.
  4. Open Source Collaboration Platform - a platform for developing, submitting, and showcasing house designs and house modules
  5. Training Program - a 6 month course where we train Extreme Builders: individuals who can build housing using our modular designs, open source equipment + facilities, and swarm-build process, This is an immersion, highly selective program for those who are serious about impact in bringing local materials and house building to their own communities.

House and Module Designs

OBI is a flexible building system. At the heart of the project is a library of module designs that can be assembled, like building blocks, to create a variety of building configurations. One can build anything from a studio, to a greenhouse, to a multistory house. This is like Lego blocks meets real-life construction.

The basic building block is a 16’x16’ structure (256 sf footprint and 225 sf usable area). Larger structures can be built as multiples of this basic unit. Smaller or larger building blocks can be built if needed. The system includes both structural modules and utilities. The library can be imported into Sweet-Home 3D, a cross-platform, open source design software. These models are also compatible with FreeCAD and Blender - two key open source packages.

This Kickstarter is funding the specific design of 2 products: a starter Seed Eco Home, and an Aquaponic Greenhouse. While the house modules can be used in any configuration to build a structure of any size and shape, we are producing these 2 specific designs so that we can take specific products through the full product development cycle to market.

Seed Eco-Home

The Seed Eco-Home module is 225 sf structure that includes all the necessary utilities. On its own, it can function as a MicroHouse. When more modules are built with the Seed Home - they make for a decent starter home. We are producing the specific design of a Seed Home module with 2 additional units - for a total of 675 square feet - as our core product offering - called the Starter Home. This starter home has a kitchen, bedroom, and living room. We will build this structure in Nov. 2016 during an Extreme Manufacturing event.

Fig 1: Model of Starter Home.

The Seed Eco-Home module consists of 16 wall panels and 6 roof panels - as well as a total of 15 other functional utility modules. Other modules contain the same number of wall and roof panels - but a smaller amount of utility modules because most of these modules are in the kitchen and bathroom. For those on a tighter budget, we have a lean version of the full Seed Eco-Home. The lean version includes a complete set of utilities. It can be upgraded to the full Seed Eco-Home as resources allow - while allowing for a lower budget entry into home ownership.

Fig 2: Model of Seed Home module comparison to - Lean Seed module

Features: Seed Eco-Home

  1. Off-Grid Seed-Home  16x16 (w/ bathroom and retrofittable mini kitchen) - Nov 4

Theme: an off-grid starter home - expandable housing / incremental building

  1. Entire house later becomes a kitchen - expandable housing / incremental building
  2. Efficient Building Techniques (fully worked out module and interface design)
  3. Solar Electricity
  4. Passive Solar
  5. CEB Floor + 1 CEB 8x8 wall (hybrid construction)
  6.  biodigester for cooking gas
  7. Open Source Hydronic Pellet Stove with heat exchanger -$500 - Heating & Hot Water
  8. TEG on hydronic stove
  9. Shower Module
  10. Back-to-back Sink Module
  11. Greywater pit
  12. DIY stove top
  13. Conventional water & propane gas for stove top

Cost

The detailed cost breakdown of the lean seed eco-home is $12k:

Fig - Cost Breakdown Table

Features: Lean Seed Eco-Home

The features are: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Rea79A1KylycmjFiDW9DUPzIlgYR97NaoadKm_p2F3Y/edit#slide=id.g12e151eb30_0_64

Cost

The total cost of the Lean Seed Eco Home is $7k-

Fig - Cost Breakdown Table

Future Features

(Features after the Nov 2016 build)

 features of the Seed Eco-Home that will be developed in 2017 include:

  1. 16kW wind turbine - breakthrough cost using a hydraulic-electric hybrid VAWT design, allowing for significant cost reduction over industry standards
  2. Closed Loop Water System - by including an open source ozonator, sand filtration, charcoal, a
  3. Continuous Charcoal Producing Heating Stove - Building on the pellet wood hydronic stove - why not generate charcoal for filtration, fuel, and soil amendments? By truncating the burn process of wood pellets at a certain point - charcoal can be extracted while producing heat in the winter.
  4. Solar Hydrogen Generation and Storage - This would be a home-scale first. Hydrogen storage is a formidable issue, and our plan is to build upon the industry standard of utility-scale hydrogen storage - and bring it down to the home scale. Electrolyzers that can do this are proven technology. We will opensource them, reduce cost, and store the hydrogen in 1” PVC pipe buried underground at 33 atmospheres. At $1250 PVC cost, we will be able to store a .7 gallon of gasoline equivalent energy for night-time use - if the solar, wind, or TEG are not producing. (about 2-3kWhr electric)

Aquaponic Greenhouse

The Aquaponic Greenhouse module is 225 sf structure that includes biological systems for growing food using aquaponics. Aquaponics are a food growing system which the waste produced by fish or other aquatic animals supplies nutrients for plants, which in turn purify the water. One or two of these modules can be used for a starter greenhouse system. One of our Greenhouse module is designed to produce all the fish, vegetables that one person can eat. Moreover, it produces plenty of fish stock that you can share with your friends.

Fig. 4. Model of the greenhouse in Sweet Home

The system contains in-ground ponds and hanging towers, which combine for effective use of space. A chicken coop may be added so that the system to produce eggs. The design contains worm towers for processing scraps and making compost, and azolla/duckweed troughs for additional fish or chicken food, and mushrooms which can be grown on fermented straw. We also provide information on integrated pest management, such that a full ecosystem is maintained. There is space on the walls for hanging additional, bottom-watered shelves or troughs, and space for other growing beds with compost, sand, soil, or any other growing medium of choice.

The aquaponic greenhouse may be built as a standalone structure, or as an addition to an existing house. The standalone greenhouse costs about $3000 __ in materials, and the attached version costs $____.

We have built our first prototype in Nov. 2015, and our results so far have been spectacular. We decided to include the Aquaponic greenhouse in the Kickstarter becuase of popular demand.

Fig 4. Detailed cost breakdown of Greenhouse: attached and standalone.

Seed House with Attached Greenhouse: Towards an Autonomous House

Together the Seed House with the  Aq GH - we move far towards autonomous housing. Why autonomous housing? Qoute from The Autonomous House etc.

  1. Machines
  1. Compressed Earth Block (CEB) Press Infrastructure
  1. Soil Conditioner
  2. Stabilized CEBs
  1. Swing-Blade Sawmill
  2. Cellulose Insulation Machine
  3. Continuous Lime Production
  1. For stabilized CEBs
  2. For concrete
  3. For silicate mineral paint
  1. Large Format 3D Printer for Construction Materials
  1. Plastic Lumber
  2. Polycarbonate glazing
  3. Rubber seals
  4. Plumbing pipe and fittings
  1. Pelletizer and Continuous Charcoal Pellet Machine
  1. Materials Production Facility

Materials and Machines

In order to make construction possible with local materials, we are pushing the limits of open source housing towards common materials that are available in abundance around the world. We believe that we can take leadership in developing eco-industry in construction materials - thus addressing the construction sector as the number one cause of greenhouse emissions.

To this end, we will be producing these materials for use in construction:

  1. Stabilized Compressed Earth Blocks (CEBs) - these are blocks made of compressed earth that is stabilized with lime, and have an 8x lower embodied energy than fired brick. They are a durable building material, and most houses on earth are made of earth. Good thermal mass properties make CEB homes cool in the summer.
  2. Lumber - by enabling small scale lumber production with an open source swing-blade lumber mill - we intend to make local lumber much more widely available.
  3. Bio-fiber Insulation - we will develop a machine for producing cellulose insulation from waste paper, cardboard, hay, straw, and other cellulosic materials.  We will experiment with using lime as the stabilizer for Insect and fire proofing. Cellulose use is on the rise because of increased interest in greenT building. Cellulose has the highest recycled content of any insulation material and also has less embodied energy than fiberglass and other furnace produced mineral insulations. Further, converting recycled cellulose fibers into premium building insulation is superior to fiberglass and mineral wool insulation in both thermal and acoustical performance. Cellulose insulation is often made by hammer milling waste newspaper. The newspaper is treated with chemicals, such as boric acid, to retard the spread of fire.
  4. Lime - Lime can be burned from limestone to make a carbon-neutral building material when using biofuels. This can be used to make bio-concrete, to stabilize cellulose insulation, and to make silicate mineral paint
  5. Charcoal - for use in biofilters, water heating, fuel for gas cookstoves, gasifier backup generator, and soil amendments. Pellets can be used for heating, and using a charcoal-making stove, charcoal can be produced as a byproduct.
  6. Paint - petroleum-based exterior paints are expensive, costing  $100 for 5 gallons. Lime can be mixed with sodium silicate to make a durable exterior paint.
  7. Polycarbonate Greenhouse Glazing - using large format printers and printing filament made from recycled CDs, we can print greenhouse glazing panels.
  8. Plumbing pipe, plastic lumber, rubber seals, and fittings - all products of our large format 3D printer.

        

Machines to Produce Materials

To this end we are publishing a Construction Machines Source Handbook -  full plans for:

  1. CEB Press
  2. Soil mixer
  3. Swing-blade sawmill
  4. Eco-Tracor - one that runs on solar energy, charcoal, and is filled with biohydraulic fluid grown on site.
  5. Insulation production machine
  6. Continuous lime kiln
  7. Continuous charcoal maker
  8. Process for producing paints
  9. Large format 3D printer for printinig Polycarbonate Multiwall Glazing panels and other plastics

This will continue the saga from 2011, when OSE where since then, we’ve gone through dozens more prototypes of machines - where the total unique prototypes now stand at 17, with 2 dozen replications in 7 countries, and 12 with 1 dozen brick press replications in 7 countries

CEB Press: Onsite soil can be used to make Compressed Earth Block. We have developed a machine that can produce 5000 blocks in an 8 hour period, and are releasing a version that is now intended for commercial production.

Soil Mixer: To make high quality block, we will add a stationary soil mixer that pulverizes soil, takes out rocks, and adds the correct amount of lime prior to the materials being used in our CEB press

...

The Last Step to Freedom is Materials: Materials Production Facility

All of our construction machines will be placed in a solar powered, 4000 square foot workshop. The structure will contain 20kW of solar panels on the roof, so that brick, lumber, insulation, and lime production can be powered 100% by solar energy and charcoal pellets.


This design will be published by 2018, and the materials produced will be used in our Advanced Eco-Home. This autonomous structure will be built using our own concrete, brick, lumber, insulation, paint, glazing, plumbin, paint, and landscaping, so we can build a $500,000 house for $7k in local and recycled materials. We will demonstrate how such local production can take place anywhere in the world.

Fig 4. Eco-construction materials facility concept