Blue bomber man
Welcome to the site.
There are many good ideas made here. Alot of them on the cheap. Taking an old humidifier and turning it into a very efficient heat pump water heater. Making your own ground source heat pump from an old scrapped air-conditioner. This is what I had learned here. Now over at builditsolar, building your own solar hot water collector was a site I learned how effective it can be.
I've been very fortunate I'm living in a home that I had built. For the area I live our home has things that were not common here. We have a heated concrete slab and exterior walls that are insulated on the outside as well as the inside. As the construction was happening I included conduit run from utility room to roof for the latter installation of solar PV. as well as a recessed area in the floor for batteries. With these innovative items and future plans already part of the homes envelope it makes it possible my addition of solar water space heating keeping our house comfortable.
IMHO I think if your goal is to live in a home that is gathering energy from its surroundings it should be from the ground up.
To buy an exsisting traditionally constructed home and to retro-fit it in order to acheive a higher level of efficiency is near impossible
As you had mentioned your looking for a candidate home to apply your ideas. You may want to consider the home itself first.
Look around make plans and gather ideas, save some money. There are a few Net zero homes out there and you could build one to. Some are show cases of colleges and university engineering, others are actual homes people have though about and built.
I think its a great time in which we live.
Imagine you can build a home that can be illuminated and air-condition by energy you collected with your PV and or wind. Heat your house without burning anything. Just gathering heat left in the ground from the past summer and pumped in with a heat-pump you built and learned about here.
Randen
