No Debt Plan

No Debt Plan is a blog about living a debt-free life. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed (e-mail subscription also available). Learn more about me, or read some other popular articles. Thanks for visiting!

The weeHouse by Alchemy Architects is by far one of my favorite prefab green homes on the market. The weeHouse can be built in several forms ranging from a 341 sq. ft. studio to a 1,230 sq. ft. two story “tower”. Everything is built within the factory and placed on a truck to be taken to your site. The truck arrives, offloads the house onto your foundation, and you hook up utilities. Bam, you’ve got a house.

Pretty impressive. The photo above doesn’t do the house or the website justice. Some very nice photos of actual installed homes (again, people are actually buying these) are shown.

Info from Fab Prefab:

• Complete factory-built dwellings that arrive on trucks ready to live in.
• Available as studios, one- and two-bedroom, kitchen/living, sleeping, and stair models.
• Can be customized or combined to fit any need: House, Cabin, Office, Addition, Rooftops etc.
• On-site work includes the foundation, utility hookups (sewer, water or electrical supply), and simple fitting of the modules.

Pricing for Your weeHouse

Costs vary from market to market and on size of your weeHouse. Some examples below.

• Studio: $70k
• Small: $80k

The website is unique, not very proper “architect” which I guess you might expect from a group called Alchemy Architects. The only hiccup I had was some of the links did not work in Firefox. An example is the very nice brochure. Clicking in my version of Firefox gave me nothing, clicking in IE gave me the brochure.

I’d love to drop one of these off out in the middle of some vast land if I could get a complete off-grid setup going. And buy off-grid I mean internet, cell phone access, solar/wind power, clean water source, etc. And for the price you really could do that.

April 22nd is Earth Day. Have you made any drastic changes to your life style today? Will you make changes because of this ‘holiday’?

We do our best to live as green a lifestyle as possible. We have CFLs in our heavily used lights. When old lights burn out, we replace them with CFLs. We let the temperature rise inside the house during the warmer months, and drop in the colder ones. We try to turn off lights when we leave rooms.

I’ve promised more ‘green’ oriented articles here, and I have failed to deliver. For that, I apologize. I’m trying to do better and crank out some interesting stuff.

(Photo by aussiegall.)

What steps are you taking to be more green?

shipping container getaway by rolu dsgn

As I announced last week, I am going to start sharing green living ideas here. Not only will living green save the environment, in most cases it will save you money.

These are some excellent green living resources that I have had bookmarked for quite a while. I will continually add and update this list. And let me know — what are your personal favorites?

• Tree Hugger’s Go Green series examines multiple topics, and how to go green in them. A few examples: How to green your kitchen, how to green your laundry, and how to green your water. A really solid group of article filled with links to quality products.
• Inhabitat’s series on Green Building 101 is great as well.
• Global Green is just an all around great green organization.
• One way to save money on your gas or electric bill is through Hot Water Recirculation Systems. This is a good article explaining the concept and cost.
• GreenHome offers an online store to buy green stuff… for your home. What a concept.
• Dwell Magazine is also pretty good from what I can tell.
• Build It Green is another non-profit.
• The Department of Energy also puts on a Solar Decathlon. Architecture students build green “homes” to compete. Very, very cool.
• Greywater Re-use Systems are an interesting idea. Every little bit of water saved helps.

Architecture:

• FabPrefab - a great website with links to a bunch of different pre-fabricated green homes. This is where I go to dream.
• Greenbuilder Sourcebook is a list of a bunch of different green building ideas to implement within your home.
• Clever Homes, Resolution: 4 Architecture, Modern Modular, Michelle Kaufman, BlueSky MOD, Rocio Romero, and Marmol Radziner are all green prefab designers. I get lost in these webpages — I could spend hours here.
• Living Homes is a very interesting company that make very green homes. The website is superb with videos showing the different green technologies used in this one great house.
• Zero Energy Homes design homes where net energy use is zero.

Energy:

• US Department of Energy - Wind Powering America
• American Wind Energy Association - Small Wind
• Stirling Energy Systems - (Website is currently getting a makeover.) Very cool idea on how to concentrate solar power with mirrors.
• Home Power Magazine - As you would expect it to be.

Blogs:

• EcoGeek (RSS) - publishes up to 10 articles a day about innovations that are going to save the planet.
• Ecotality Life Blog (RSS) - Ecotality is a renewable energy company. This is the company blog that covers green technology.
• Jetson Green (RSS) - One of my favorite green blogs. Discusses a lot of architecture and green home stuff.
• TreeHugger (RSS) - the Google of the green blog world.

Photo by davesag.

A life with less impact doesn’t sound so appealing. Yet, I truly want to live a life with less impact on the environment.

In the near future you will be seeing some articles on No Debt Plan about living a ‘green’ lifestyle. By green lifestyle, I mean living in a way that is designed to reduce the impact on the environment… and hopefully save you money on the way! You will find the posts under the category titled “Green“.

Topics I plan to discuss include:

• green architecture — I love green homes.
• green landscaping — Something very relevant to me now that we have a yard!
• green indoors — appliances, light bulbs, paint, fabrics, energy consumption tactics, etc.

I hope this is of interest to you. I thoroughly enjoy reading and discussing this kind of stuff.

Some general green blogs and sites I enjoy:

• TreeHugger
• Dwell Magazine
• JetsonGreen

Living a green lifestyle used to be extremely costly and to be honest unattractive to the average person. I think the gap is truly becoming very small. In many cases, going green can save you some money. In the future, I’ll share my thoughts and more.