I find it interesting that both houses were designed by engineers to live in. I wonder how similar their solutions for utilties are. Both are being sold when the builders have gotten too old.
My main question is how easy are they to maintain, or do they require the experience of the engineer builders. It is a good sign that they have been going for decades.
There might be a market for selling designs and parts to people who want to build their own.
Those houses across the street are reminiscent of the sort of mid-century build you'd see lining the streets of every city and town where a young New Zealander might have grown up. So you get views of the three things your average Kiwi idolises - the sea, the bush, and the suburb.
This would actually be very helpful for improving your lighting when webcamming in your home office, since you could rotate the house until you achieved optimal lighting for that time of day. Overkill, but that's how I'd use it!
> “The advantage is that you can change the view, you can change the sun, you can get out of the wind or into the wind … If there is a storm coming at night [and] you don’t want that on your bedroom windows, you turn it,” he told the Guardian on Tuesday.
I'm going to be honest, if it takes 33 minutes to rotate all the way around, I don't see the utility in this at all. "Oh no the sun is in my eyes in the living room, let me rotate away from it!" 15 minutes later sun is back in your eyes. I'm with you too, I think of it like the sleep number beds. It's really cool but I'm going to end up finding a specific setting I like and the functionality that makes it expensive is going to be nullified bc I'll never move it again lol
NB, "barpat" from this story seems not to exist other than in it or references to it. Several glossaries of naval terminology entirely fail to mention it.
we have a 11-story building that rotates each one independently here in Brazil [0]... according to the creator, spinning it uses the same energy as 3 light-bulbs ON at the same time
> There's some technicality of "with enough gearing anything can move anything" but at some point the losses involved overcome the power provided.
I don't see why they would. You can keep your gearing losses low as long as the first stage requires medium force.
If we oversimplify, if each stage loses ten percent of the incoming power while applying an 8:1 gear ratio, then you gain 7x more force every stage.
The situation where power disappears is when you add so many extra stages that the first stage requires almost no force and has to spin super fast to input work. So don't do that. Design the system so that the input is in the correct speed range for your power source.
Ran across this recently upon finding that time trial bicycles don’t really aim to be lightweight, only aerodynamic. When you’re cycling on flat ground, wind resistance is the greatest drag. (Pun intended.)
> It took Dunick and his colleagues five years to design a system that ensured all the services such as water, electricity and sewage piping were independent and could rotate with the house as it moved – something the local council required before it would sign off on the build.
I'm curious what the actual system is -- I can't find additional information on it. Does anybody know?
It’s not the same rotating house, but Tom Scott did a video last year that has a great 3D render of the system that designer used to facilitate their build!
Unsure about this particular house in NZ, but there's one in California that Tom Scott did a video on with a very good animation of how its electricity/water/sewage slip ring works:
For those interested in the concept, there's a rotating house (aka Round House) in Wilton, Connecticut. I remember visiting it when it was for sale, it was pretty cool.
Maybe I'm jaded because I live in what could be called a cabin in a forest and things are constantly breaking, but this just seems like an incredible layer of complexity that's begging for expensive repairs and constant maintenance.
Does anyone here know someone who knows someone who has actually been involved in one of these homes, and can you relay if it's actually as big of a pain in the ass as I'm thinking it is?
Very cool. Also, I'm 100% sure this would be very expensive to maintain over the long term. You have custom motors that only a few mechanics would even touch, and who knows how this setup would hold up long-term against water, the elements and wear-and-tear.
The final drive and the bearing(!) would be the most custom parts, most likely. The rest could be off-the-shelf industrial parts, which can last a very long time.
> who knows how this setup would hold up long-term against water, the elements and wear-and-tear
Thirty five years so far. I'd presume you'd get an inspection before purchasing, but if it's mechanically all good after that time period, it sounds pretty sustainable.
Yeah, I've been watching; his video's implementation supposedly just requires an annual lubrication of the bearings taking about an hour. That said, the guy's trying to sell (for health reasons not related to the house) at the time, so I'd want... independent confirmation.
Eh, lifting houses with jacks is a well-established process. As long as there's crawl-space access to the understructure of the house, you could slide some jacks in there, jack it up six inches or a foot, do whatever maintenance you need, and then jack it back down.
Will they keep it at all? This is not a mansion ($600k in USD), but the other features make me suspect it will be sold as a mansion not a house. A house is sold, but mansions are not sold, they just go with the lot (view), with the understanding the new owner will knock down the house to build the house they want there. Sometimes they will leave one wall standing so it qualifies as a remodel, but the next year there will be another remodel to replace that wall (depending on local laws).
These days support staff doesn't live with the family anymore. They often have contractors who never work anyplace else, but they don't live there. (at least not in the US, I don't know how NZ is different).
I don't know of a good distinction between house and mansion, other than I know it when I see it... Mansions are places where rich live - or at least those with enough means to appear rich (some of them are mortgaged to the hilt - but they have high income and can pay a large mortgage)
Ones I have seen that are similar have a rotating "donut" but a stationary core where 90% of the services (particularly water) are. I think the BT tower used this arrangement.
Not that the following necessarily negates HN's dislike for such one-liners, but here's a little context on the above comment, for people outside NZ:
The single city of Auckland, which is located at the northern end of New Zealand's 1600km long landmass, holds about one-third of the country's total population.
By contrast, for example, the entire South Island of New Zealand - which is about 60% of the country's landmass - holds about 23% of the country's population.
The somewhat extreme geographical population spread means that there is a constant undercurrent of "Auckland, and The Rest" in NZ culture. It is this to which the above poster attempts to make humorous reference.
https://rotatinghome.com
(Tom Scott video) https://youtu.be/gisdyTBMNyQ?si=31z_x0SHVH1_QAue