IKEA solar shack might prove the seed of cheap future housing

45 million refugees living in tents prompted IKEA furniture to develop a new solar-powered shack that can be dismantled, transported and reassembled elsewhere. Eventually, they hope to make it as cheap as $1000 per shack. And they also sell an IKEA house costing about $86, 000 or so.

In that case, if a basic shack can be as cheap as $1000, why not develop an excellent 3-bedroom home for something like $10,000 to $18,000? Or a different model could be mounted onto a boat, created a mobile solar-powered boathouse. Indeed, a day might come when such housing is integrated into aircraft or hovercraft.

If my ideas come about, a revolution would occur in housing. In my boyhood computers filled a whole room and cost over a million dollars. Today I have a PC on my desk! Such marriage of different technologies, plus evolution of experimental housing out of early basics, might someday make a decent home even cheaper than a new car is today.

 

... yes, affordable housing would be great. $86K for that ikea home you mentioned still seems outrageously expensive. other companies build modular homes as well ...

 

The whole trouble with pre-fab housing is that it is flimsy. Future technology could erase that defect. After all, we build military ships and aircraft carriers which last decades. Who knows? One day we might start creating floating villages with all basic amenities and social services on board. Post office, police, children's schools.

Today people take cruises. One day they might live permanently on something resembling a cruise ship docked not too far from real cities or metropolitan centers. A floating neighborhood. But the key words here are inexpensive and quality.

 

... good points, Vivek Golikeri! ever see that kevin costner movie waterworld? it dealt with a similar concept in which everyone had no choice but to live on boats and floating communities because the entire world became submerged in water ...

... but getting back to that ikea house, i still think it's grossly overpriced. if the $86K included a plot of land then i might consider the price more reasonable. you can buy a house and land for less than that in a lot places ...

 

Oh, I agree, Mechanic. $86K is utterly el too mucho for some pre-fab housing. But my point is that it will not indefinitely stay that way. What costs a fortune with today's technology could be easily done by the technology of, say, the 2030's. This applies in all kinds of things. Computers. Cellphone cameras recording events and then posting them on YouTube. Blogging! What we are doing right now!

Forty years ago only those with a newspaper or a magazine could pick and choose what opinions were published in letters to the editor. Today anyone can share candid views. What only a large company could do ----- produce a movie or a commercial ----- is becoming increasingly viable with technology similar to YouTube.

Do-it-yourself housing won't happen in just another year or two, but you never know! And yes, I definitely recall Kevin Costner's Waterworld.

 

Speaking of Waterworld and flooding due to rising sea levels, I see reasons why that nightmare scenario can be stopped. Again, because of quantum leaps in technology. A couple of years ago, a US inventor came up with a machine that literally creates water out of thin air. It extracts humidity from the atmosphere and turns it into liquid water. Currently, this machine costs about $500. In the near future, as further research make it as cheap as eighty bucks, the bottled water industry will go the way of pay phones and telexes.

Someday, when solar technology and desalination are so advanced that they can be cheap and widespread, such machines will practically extract lakes' worth of water from the air and the seas, and send them in canals or aqueducts to desertish areas. The Sahara and Saudi Arabia, as well as Australia and India's Thar Desert, will see deserts shrink as huge amounts of water are routinely liquified and piped into them. Excessive heat will simply keep refilling the atmosphere with moisture evaporating from the oceans because existing moisture is now water flowing to deserts. And desalination will be more widespread.

 

Actually, the 86k for the house isn't bad when you consider that the cost of building a house on an empty lot in Vancouver will run you between $200-$300 a sqft. Considering that in Vancouver the lot will cost you at least $800,000 it is an expensive enterprise.

The IKEA house might be a good alternative for a second vacation home or a residence in a rural area.

 

In WW2 the British had condensers attached to their vehicles in the desert to capture moisture for drinking. They weren't very efficient but they did produce a small amount of drinking water for the crew of the vehicle in a time of emergency. Most modern advanced armies have newer more efficient condensers but at this point they are mainly for emergency use only.

Desalination does work but as you deftly pointed out, it is not cheap. There are major desalination plants in the Persian Gulf that supply drinking water to UAE and Saudi Arabia but they are horrifically expensive to build and maintain. A recent plant in the UAE that provides water for 100,000 cost over $10 billion to build with maintenance added on.

 

Exactly, Bine. You and I are encouraging and helping each other along on this thread, and it's so refreshing to co-work with a constructive and intelligent poster like yourself rather than wasting time rebutting mischief and bigotry by negative posters.

By current technology desalination is affordable only to those awash in dollars, like Saudi Arabia and the UAE. But by future capabilities it might be possible to extract as much fresh water out of the oceans as is currently in Lake Michigan, which would both undo rising sea levels and flood deserts in Australia and the Middle East. Solar power would render operating costs incredibly cheap. A century from now, the water supplies of major population centers will not come from nearby reservoirs. They will come from the atmosphere and from the seas.

 

... you are absolutely correct, by vancouver standards $86K is a steal! for a wealthy person it's cheap. still too expensive for poor people though. an economical pre-fab home shouldn't cost more than $15K ...

 

Plus, in future generations there will be large communities of water dwellers who make their homes permanently on boat homes. Eventually, humanity might even create artificial island towns stationed out in the seas to serve these traveling homes as centers. These "sea stations" would be to water dwellers even as space stations would be to space travelers.

Solar power and cheap desalination technology would be key to making all this possible.

 

... why do you believe the earth is going to be flooded with water in the future, Vivek? global warming?

 

Oh, I'm sorry, Mechanic. I never meant that. I meant that large numbers of people with live on motorboat homes. True, global warming is causing melting at the ice-caps, but a mixture of advanced solar energy and cheaper desalination technology not yet invented will offset rising sea levels. Countries like Australia and many in the Middle East, with large deserts, will siphon water from the seas and pipeline it inland for irrigation.

 

... thanks for the clarification!