{"id":9294,"date":"2011-05-12T12:30:10","date_gmt":"2011-05-12T16:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=9294"},"modified":"2011-05-12T10:30:23","modified_gmt":"2011-05-12T14:30:23","slug":"it-should-have-been-called-the-cell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/05\/12\/it-should-have-been-called-the-cell\/","title":{"rendered":"“It should have been called The Cell”"},"content":{"rendered":"

That’s Rob Lyons and he’s talking about an eco-residence called The Cube<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I think estate agents would refer to it as \u2018compact and bijou\u2019. It\u2019s The Cube, the eco-home that\u2019s showing just what sustainable living is all about. It should have been called The Cell.<\/p>\n

The tiny house, which was on show at April\u2019s Edinburgh Science Festival and is the brainchild of Dr Mike Page of the University of Hertfordshire, has an internal footprint of just three metres by three metres, yet has all the modern conveniences. There\u2019s a tiny lounge with a flat-panel TV. If you want to dine with a friend, you need to swap half the sofa round with the sliding table. On the next level — reachable by a staircase so tiny that there\u2019s only enough room for one foot at a time — you\u2019ll find the composting toilet, the walk-in shower and the kitchen. (Is that even legal?) From there, you can clamber into the narrow bed, which could only accommodate two people if they both happen to be skinny vegans who don\u2019t suffer from claustrophobia.<\/p>\n

Everything is extremely well-insulated, including triple-glazed windows. Heat is provided by a heat-pump attached to the outside wall while electricity is generated through solar panels on the roof. Of course, they won\u2019t work during the night, but you\u2019ll have made so much money flogging electricity to the grid during the day — thanks to the insane prices at which electricity companies are obliged to buy micro-generated power — that you could actually earn \u00a31000 per year.<\/p>\n

All this could be yours for \u00a350,000, assuming you\u2019ve got some land to stick it on and you\u2019re prepared to live in such cramped conditions. Considering you could buy a far larger luxury caravan with better facilities for less money (though not so well insulated), you may wonder why you would bother. But Page isn\u2019t really interested in building eco-homes; in fact, he\u2019s a psychologist. What he\u2019s really interested in is why there is no demand for such eco-living, given that we now have lots of technology available to reduce our \u2018impact\u2019 — our \u2018ecological footprint\u2019.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That’s Rob Lyons and he’s talking about an eco-residence called The Cube: I think estate agents would refer to it as \u2018compact and bijou\u2019. It\u2019s The Cube, the eco-home that\u2019s showing just what sustainable living is all about. It should have been called The Cell. The tiny house, which was on show at April\u2019s Edinburgh […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,65],"tags":[640,497,426,139],"class_list":["post-9294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-environment","tag-alternativeenergy","tag-electricity","tag-housing","tag-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2pU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9294"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9296,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9294\/revisions\/9296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}