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Home of the future or glorified caravan?

Strap on your tin foil hats and pack up your over-sized backpacks because we’re going off-the-grid.

PassivDom is the latest company to make waves in the world of prefabricated homes. Their main offering, the Dom.ai houses, boast a long list of features and benefits that would make even the most avid brick and mortar lover stop and look. 

The houses produce all their electricity through solar power and, thus, require no connection to the electrical grid. They also feature a water recycling system which means no external water connection is required either. They are so well insulated that the energy gained from their solar panels is all that is required to heat them up or cool them down, depending on your climate. They come pre-assembled, and can be set up on ‘any flat surface’. Thanks to their incredible level of insulation, they’re 20x more energy efficient than the typical household, can be unlocked using your fingerprint, include a built in Sonos system and 100″ projector screen, and even come with wine glasses! 

What more could you want? Maybe an open fire place or a staircase, but these homes will never have either of those things as they come preconfigured and ready to go – almost like buying a set menu at a restaurant – you kind of want the steak but you trust the chef’s menu will be good enough. 

So, are these homes anything new? Caravans have been around for a number of years and do, although much more crudely, resemble the appearance of the Dom.ai homes. The key difference here is the integration of tech in the houses. The whole home can be controlled from a single app which monitors temperature, energy consumption, water levels, etc. The primary structure is also just a single piece, built from a polymer composite that expands and forms a rock hard surface – which is also the reason they are so well insulated. 

But do the houses really mean anything to the wider manufacturing industry? Probably not. Pre-fab homes are already a rising trend, and the introduction of an all-in-one ready-to-go home probably won’t make much of a dent in that, as most people would prefer to have a three bed house in the suburbs than a 37.25 metres squared space pod in the woods. The technology they bring along with them, however, could be of more use – and I’m sure we’ll see construction techniques such as 3d printing and polymer moulding have an increasingly large effect on the construction industry in years to come. 

Here at Polestar, we love to see companies like PassivDom pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in business through ingenuity and technological innovation. For this reason, we are always keen and excited to work with new and exciting companies that have something new to offer. 

(Now to address the elephant in the room – ‘are the houses zombie-proof?’. The company’s founder, Maxim Gerbut, would like to assure you that – yes, they are. Apparently zombies sense people through heat detection, and since the houses are so well insulated, this won’t be a problem in the case of the apocalypse.)

This house is designed to be installed in less than a day, and so well insulated that it only needs solar power to heat or cool it. Is this what the pre-built homes of the future will look like?

By Oli Hoade on 06/06/2019