Off Grid Kit Home Building and Organic Design

What this episode covers

Show Notes: Off Grid Kit Home building and Organic Design.  In this episode we talk about how organic design and off the grid design can merge. We can help people with the orientation of the house, the energy calculations to make sure the house is efficient in keeping heat or cool that it creates.  We work with you on solar design to make sure the solar capabilities are taken advantage of and we’ve had customers that have worked with wind power as well.   Transcript: Interviewer: Hey everybody. And welcome to Episode 29 of the Panelized Prefab Kit Home Building Show. With me in the studio as is always the case is President and Founder of Landmark Home and Land Company, a company which has been helping people build their new homes where they want and exactly as they want across the nation and worldwide since 1993, Steve Tuma. Steve, how are you doing today, buddy? Steve Tuma: It’s an excellent day. It’s a good day. We’ve helped a lot of people with some interesting projects this week, people all over the country doing different types of designs, building in different areas, below sea level, at 10,000 feet up in mountains in Colorado and then ocean front projects. So it has been an interesting week. Interviewer: Good. Having a good week is always a good thing. I thought today we might hit upon off the grid home design. And while we are at it, some – talk about some architectural design and design features. And I would also like to ask you about something called organic design and can you run these specific design terminologies by us? Steve Tuma: Yeah. What’s interesting – our architectural design is basically just the process of designing the home to make it look, the exterior, the roof, the floor plans, some foundation details, so that you know what your house looks like. Is it a 1000-square foot simple ranch? Is it a 5000-square foot Mack Mansion? Is it more of a modernistic design? So that’s the concept of architectural design. Now, you wrapped a couple of things in here, architectural design, off the grid, and organic design. So off the grid building is basically where people are building off the electric grid. So it’s not necessarily in a subdivision. It’s not necessarily in a city. It might be in a raw piece of land far from civilization as a lot of people would think of it. So you’re just out in raw land. Off the grid meaning, you’re not going to be using electric from your power company. You’re not going to be using gas from your power company. You’re not going to be getting water from your water department or use a sewage department. You are literally going to be building, to make it easy, out in the middle of nowhere, to take advantage of nature and maybe use some of the natural resources to power your home. So how that comes along with organic design, organic design was kind of thought up by Frank Lloyd Wright and that the concept being of let’s take advantage of the natural breezes, let’s take advantage of shade, let’s take advantage of sun, let’s make the house blend into nature instead of making it look like a sore thumb on the side of a hill. So the concept of the off the grid is kind of like, “Hey, how do we generate our own electric to power our own house? How do we get our own water? How do we not rely on other utility resources to power the home?” So within that, you might have different design elements. The picture of your roof might be oriented in a southern direction so that your solar panels can gather the most sun. The overhangs may be designed in certain ways. I shouldn’t say maybe. They will be designed in certain ways so that they let the sun in in winter and possibly when you need to heat your home but then they shade it in summer when you don’t want the sun to go through the glass and then heat your house up. So a lot of the concepts are in the orientation of the house in relation to the sun, where it is on the land,