Tiny house designed at OSU emphasizes efficiency

By The Columbus Dispatch  • 

The newest home in Downtown is small, but with a neon green exterior, it's hard to miss.

The home packs a bathroom, combined kitchen/living room and sleeping loft into 125 square feet, about the size of an average bedroom.

No one lives in the home, but its designers hope people might someday live in something like it.

"People don't need McMansions," said Stephen Turk, an associate professor of architecture at Ohio State University. "This shows that small, energy-conscious space is possible."

Turk, working with associate professor Lisa Tilder and other teachers and students from OSU's Architecture and Engineering departments, designed and built the "pod" house as a radical example of a sustainable, energy-efficient home.

Three weeks ago, they moved the house to COSI Columbus, where it will be permanently displayed as part of the science museum's collection of energy and environmental exhibits.

The museum setting keeps the home from being fully functional. Its plumbing isn't hooked up, and its solar system isn't linked to an external electrical grid. But visitors can plainly see the home's unusual features, starting with its size and shape.

The home is a modified rectangle, with one end wall angled to better exploit the sun's heat. The roof is likewise pitched to maximize the sun's rays on the solar panels.

Stucco covers the exterior, including the roof, in keeping with designers' goal of using as few manufactured materials as possible and in only using materials made within 500 miles of Columbus.

Inside, the goal is seen in the birch-veneer plywood (from a sustainable forest) that covers the walls instead of drywall and paint.

But perhaps the most unusual interior feature of the home is the 70 or so glass discs embedded in the floor. The discs cover cake pans that hold polyethylene glycol, which absorbs the sun's heat as it passes through the four glass doors in the home and disperses that heat as the material cools.

The home has no air conditioning, but does have a small fan that circulates air when the heat rises.

Except for the bathroom, the home is one room, with a built-in bench under the sleeping loft, a built-in table and a small kitchenette featuring a two-burner electric range (no oven) and dorm-style fridge.

The toilet and shower are combined in the small tile-covered bathroom.

Four batteries under the house store electricity from the solar panels, which ideally would provide enough juice to run the home's modest demand.

In addition to the range, refrigerator, lights and outlets, the home's largest electrical user would be the heater, which kicks on when the sun's rays aren't enough.

The home is wrapped - including the roof and floor - in structural insulated panels, providing insulation values of up to R-40, according to Lamit Industries, which makes the panels.

The dorm fridge serves as a reminder of the home's target audience: college students or young adults.

Such a house could be built off-site and transported, as this one was, to where it is needed.

"You could put it in a backyard, you could put it on top of a building, you could put it anywhere," Tilder said. "It's affordable and sustainable."

Just how affordable isn't clear, because many of the materials and much of the labor were donated by area companies.

Tilder and Turk see the pod home as an experiment and a beginning, rather than a real-world prototype.

They hope to build a Pod 2.0 version aimed at a different audience, such as empty nesters. The home might be larger, but don't look for a three-bedroom, three-bath patio home.

"With really good design, you don't need these extravagant spaces," Turk said. "You can have everything in a more modest scale."