The Woz Planning High Performance Home
Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 9:39 pm 
By Ryan Brown
Check out this interview with Steve ‘Woz’ Wozniak in ECN Magazine about his plans for an energy efficient home:
Wozniak’s New Goal is Efficient Housing
Evan Koblentz, online editor
Ecnmag.com - August 14, 2007
Apple Inc. co-founder and legendary hacker Steve Wozniak recently found a new passion in energy-efficient housing. Last month he told PC World magazine, “I have a long dream to build my own house in a very energy-efficient approach.
Steve’s ideas on high-efficiency housing are what you would expect:
- Build with the least energy usage & pollution
- Design the home to operate as efficiently as possible
He also compares the principles of designing high efficiency homes to those he used when developing the first Apple computers - Efficienct use of resources & simplicity.
Apparently while judging the History Channel’s Invent Now Challenge Steve learned of a new efficient building system called Enertia. Steve and the other judges were very impressed with Enertia as it’s inventor won the contest. Here’s a snippet of How Enertia works from their website:
In the Enertia® Building System, solid Energy-Engineered(tm) wood walls replace siding, framing, insulation, and paneling. An air flow and access channel, or Envelope, runs around the building, just inside the walls - creating a miniature biosphere. Here solar heated air circulates, pumping and boosting geothermal energy from beneath the house, storing it in the massive wood walls. Thermal inertia causes the house to “float” between the cycles of night and day, and even between the seasons.
I’m not sure how the Enertia system would work in our climate, but I definitely plan to read up on it. It also sounds like he’s considering rammed earth walls, which you may have seen on the Cool Homes tour in 2005.
Hopefully Woz finds a lot on which to build soon so we can all follow his progress.
Photo courtesy of original photographer is Al Luckow. Photo was taken from a collection of free-to-use images on Steve Wozniak’s website.
