20 Innovations we'll see in our homes in 2020.

2016 is already upon us, with everyone (including us) speculating what the new year will bring. So let's jump ahead to 2020 to examine the technology and innovations that will be in our homes:

1. Smart windows

Windows will have built in smart sensors and digital panels that allow you to set the levels of light or dark, UV protection, and even scenery just by touching them. The need for window shades and coverings will be obsolete and of course the exterior face of all windows will be equipped to capture and harness solar energy.

2. Computational surfaces

Additionally, mirrors, shower glass, and just about any surface can be made “computational,” accepting our commands by touch screen and customizing our living experience.

3. Solar technologies

Likewise, a good portion of our power needs in the home will come from solar energy by 2020, no matter what the climate. Remember the solar road concept that basically made solar conductors out of paving tracks and materials? It’s a bad idea for roads but a great idea for homes, where roofing materials and even siding will all have solar cells implanted, finally taking us away from non-renewable fuels.

4. Personal 3D printing

Do you need a tool around the house? A part to fix a leaky faucet? Even a custom welcome sign with your address and family name on it? Instead of driving to the store, the average American will be able to just plug in their personal 3D printer at home, download the plans just like we download apps now, make adjustments online, and print these things. Very soon, we’ll be able to print custom clothing, toys, artwork, school supplies, and even medical tech, as the future of 3D printing is exciting and limitless.

5. Holograms

Sure, television screens will get thinner, more clear and interactive (such as with OLED technology already in development), but the NEXT revolution in communications and entertainment will be in 4D holograms, displaying television, video, phone calls, gaming, chats, etc. all in near-life like displays.

6. Closed water systems

Sadly, the UN reports that 75 percent of our world’s freshwater is already polluted. As we become more environmentally conscious and water becomes the most valuable substance on earth, even wastewater from our sinks, showers, toilets, and hoses won’t go to waste. Homes will have complex systems that allow for evaporative water and rain water to be captured, channeled into the system, filtered and used around the house. Likewise, wastewater won’t be expelled but refiltered and recirculated in our gardens, toilets, fountains, and hoses, etc.

7. Fingerprint scan security

“Do you remember back in the day when people actually carried these little metal key things around with them?” That’s what we’ll be saying in 2020, when unlocking your front door will be a matter of placing your finger on a sensor so the system can scan your fingerprints and approve you for entry.

8. Ocular scanning and facial recognition

We’re also likely to see ocular scans and face recognition technology for more advanced security systems, but in 2020, fingerprint security will do just fine for shedding these metal keys.

9. Biofuels

By 2016, the majority of people will be feeding condensed pellets made of waste, organic materials, agricultural byproducts and even garbage into heating and energy systems in our homes, allowing us to get further away from fossil fuels and save money with clean energy.

10. Light Peak technology

Light peak technology is a technology that allows super fast data transfer, eventually allowing us to sync and share terabytes of information in microseconds.

11. Personal computing will only need personal data

Information sharing will allow us to walk around with our own personal “computer” full of files, data, and storage, in a watch, pendant, pen drive or other vehicle, plugging in and accessing any portal in any room, home, business or office, anywhere in the world without relying on personal ownership of devices.

12. Personal food production

Everyone eats, and every home and even apartment has plenty of space to grow food with green roof and green wall growing systems. Spare closets, basements, attics, vertical gardens on the inside or outside of walls, and floating agriculture are all going to allow the average person to grow and consume a significant portion of their food, allowing us to save money, better monitor what goes into our food, and live healthier lives.

13. Shifting walls

Instead of applying a coat of paint when you want to change the color of a room, you’ll be able to program the exact color you want into digital walls and room, instantly turning it the desired color shade, design, or even replicating a scenic landscape.

14. Watch command

Everything in our homes – from entry to security, temperature control, appliances, filtering systems, and lighting, etc. will be controllable and adjustable by touching your watch – whether you are home or not.

15. Gesture Control

Lighting, televisions, appliances, window shading, and many other functions around the house will respond to voice commands and gestures, not with archaic keyboard strokes and mouse clicks.

16. Conversing with the central computer

Likewise, you’ll be able to program every alarm clock, reminder, and appliance with simple voice commands to the home’s central computer, which will unify every electronic and digital function into a single easy to operate system.

17. Light-up flooring and furniture

Just about every surface will have intricate LED lighting systems or digital programming, which means you’ll be able to set your floor panels to light up when you walk on them (making your own disco dance floor) or allow furniture to light up and shift in color like a lava lamp when someone sits on it. Of course, the uses of this technology will have more practical uses like security.

18. Programming based on our heartbeats

Your home’s central computer will be able to read the heart rate and biometrics of the people in the room, adjusting the temperature, lighting, oxygen content, filtering system, and even noise levels to their individual pre-settings. Your home will also be able to detect if someone is sick or unusually angry, anxious, or tired, adjusting the environmental settings accordingly.

19. Storage solutions

With our population set to double by 2050 and the urbanization of living in mega cities, space will be at a premium. Innovative storage solutions that we can’t even dream of will make sure every inch of space in the home – like in the basement, attic, between the walls, etc. is used efficiently – but adaptable and flowing enough for a modern aesthetic.

20. Self-cleaning bathrooms and kitchens

We might not have maid robots in 2020 but the cleaning systems will be pretty self reliant, with intricate sensors and ultrasonic self-cleaning systems installed in the most germ-addled areas of the home like toilets, showers, sinks, garbage cans, water spigots, and on kitchen and cooking counters.

Look up. The Green Roof Revolution is coming.

There will come a time soon when if you walk outside and scan the horizon, you’ll see tranquil green gardens as far as your eyes can see, not the drab brown and black rooftops we see now. Everyone will have grasses, natural vegetation, and flowers on the top of their homes, sprouting and changing colors with the seasons and attracting birds, butterflies, and endangered bees to flourish in their new rooftop habitats. Even commercial buildings will have green roofs, with full trees, water gardens, and organic fruits and vegetables produced in space that is wasted now.

Thanks to these green or “living roofs,” there will be less pollution, cleaner air, less water waste, less noise pollution, and our energy costs to heat or cool our homes will be lower.

Does it sound like something out of a futuristic sci-fi society – or only for the ultra modern homes of the super wealthy? In fact, living roofs and already here and being used around the world, growing fast in popularity as we better understand and focus on the consequences of our mass ecological footprint.

 In this blog, we’ll cover some of the basics of living roofs (and living walls.) In part 2, we’ll go into the amazing benefits in detail and also outline the installation and maintenance process if you wanted to add one to your home!

What are living roofs?

Green roofs, also called living roofs, is when a residential or commercial building has a specially constructed micro ecosystem of grasses and vegetation installed as the top layer on its roof surface. The roof can be flat, sloped, or pitched just like any roof. But instead of using a top layer of shingles, slate, rubberized membrane, or other traditional roofing materials, vegetation is grown in a thin layer of topsoil or organic medium that lies on top of waterproof sheeting.

There are also living walls, which can be incorporated into horizontal living spaces large or small, indoors or outdoors. Living walls are usually either grown from specialized posts that hang affixed to the walls, with plants growing up a climbing net, trellis, or similar structure, or grown right out of an organic membrane that hangs on top of regular sheetrock and includes specialized irrigation and drainage. For the purposes of this blog, we’ll include living walls whenever we say living roofs or green roofs.

There are terrific benefits to living roofs and living walls, both for the homeowner or resident, the immediate neighborhood or city, and to the ecosystem of our world as a whole.

Why are living roofs so important?

You only have to turn on the television to hear calamitous reports of climate change, global warming, and draught. And as our world gets more populated, our urban areas become more dense, with more buildings and pavement and less trees, grassy areas, and natural habitats. Rivers and waterways are more polluted than ever and at the same time, human beings are toxifying the environment to the point where other species of animals are being killed off or crowded out.

But every building has a roof, which becomes completely wasted space 99.9% of the time. The good news is that not just environmentalists and scientists but the average person is starting to understand the mutual benefit to installing solar panels to capture energy and lessen their environmental impact. Or now, living roofs.

Living roofs have some amazing benefits to the environment, and with almost 120 million homes (or households) in the U.S. alone, and countless other large commercial spaces, imagine the positive impact if they were all utilized to “green” our society.

Where can living roofs be found?

Living roofs may seem ultra-modern, but they’ve been used for over 1,000 years around the world, from the Vikings with turf living roofs in Scandinavia to traditional living roofed cottages in Ireland and Scotland.

Germany has been very progressive with clean energy and clean environmental practices, already having used living roofs for 30 years. The German government encourages Green Roof building through their Federal Nature Protection Ac as well as building codes and incentives. In nearby Austria, cities like Linz mandate green roofs for new residential and commercial buildings over a certain size. The UK has been experimenting with green roofs, anchored by the living roof atop the notable Rolls Royce showroom. And in Australia, living roofs are starting to take hold and grow in popularity.

In the United States, living roofs are still rare – mostly seen only in ultra modern and luxury, cutting-edge architecture. But already in many cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, the idea of rooftop gardens on urban buildings is becoming prevalent, a precursor to familiarity and comfort with living roofs.

What kinds of living roofs are there?

There are generally two types of living roofs; intensive and extensive.

Intensive living roofs have deeper soil and can support all sorts of large vegetation up to the size of full trees. Most rooftop gardens are intensive roofs.

Extensive living roofs have a much shallower growing surface that hosts groundcover vegetation like grasses.

Of course, there are all sorts of rooftop gardens where people grow flowers, fruits and vegetables. Those may have similarities but usually are built separately and after the fact on top of a traditional roof, not incorporated into the roof itself.

What kind of vegetation do living roofs use?

There are different kinds of grasses and vegetation commonly used in living roofs. What you use depends on your climate, what plants are native to your terrain, how much rain and sunlight you get, and how deep the soil or growth membrane is on your roof.

When first setting up a living roof, installers and homeowners usually plant at least four different grasses for several reasons. Some of them may not take root or flourish so it’s good to have several varietals. And with different kinds of grasses or vegetation, you’ll have different blooming times and colors during different seasons.

So living roofs usually look like wildflower meadows, not tightly cropped short grass on our front lawns (which isn’t healthy and takes much more water.)

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Tune in for part 2 of this blog, with the benefits of living roofs as well as information on installation and maintenance. 

10 Ways "going green" around the house can also save you big money.

1. Install high efficiency light bulbs.
Did you know that the traditional light bulbs we still use waste up to 90% of their energy emitting heat? So replace your normal incandescent bulbs with high-efficiency Energy Star bulbs. They’ll lower your energy costs, last much longer, and are much friendlier on the environment.  Look for compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), and light emitting diodes (LEDs), which you can buy at any Home Depot.  Those should save you a couple hundred dollars or more per year. And if every family in the U.S.A. replaced their bulbs, we’d reduce greenhouse gas emissions by one trillion pounds!

2. Program your thermostat.
A new “smart” thermostat, like an Energy Star, allows you to program specific temperatures for different times of the day.  Too often we set one temperature for night and one for day, or even worse, one set temperature, which is completely unnecessary. So you can lower the temperature at night (when you are under blankets) or during the day (when you are at work.)  The U.S. Department of Energy estimates you’ll save 5 to 15 percent per year by turning your thermostat back 10 to 15 degrees for eight hours a day.

It's recommended you keep the thermostat at 78 degrees or higher when cooling the house in the summer, and 68 degrees or cooler in the winter.

3. Stop pouring money down the drain!
Water is expensive these days, and the vast majority of indoor water usage comes from toilets flushing (30% of residential consumption) and showers. So install low-flow showerheads in your bathrooms - they only cost $20 or so and spray no more than 2.5 gallons per minute, saving you a couple hundred dollars per year. And install high-efficiency (low-flush) toilets, which can save a family of four a whopping $300 per year or more in water bills. If you don’t want to replace your new toilet, there’s a super simple (and free) way to turn it into a low-flushing model. Just fill up a few plastic water s with sand and place them in the tank!

4. Plug air leaks
Whenever you turn up your heat or AC, drafts can waste a lot of your money. Close doors, windows, and curtains appropriately to keep the heat or air in the rooms you need it most. Consider foam rollers or stick-on energy tape under doors or around window frames where the most air leaks in or out. In addition, caulking around exterior doors and windows and installing weather stripping in the chilly seasons can save you a bundle on energy costs!

5. Set up an outdoor compost bin.
Did you know that up to 50% of the trash in your home comes from food waste? All of that organic material goes in the trash and fills up landfills or is even dumped in the ocean! So instead of burdening our trash system with food scraps, set up a small compost station in your back yard. Over time, it will naturally break down organic material and create a safe, health fertilizer for your yard and plants. Studies show that separating food scraps from the trash also increases the amount of recyclable materials that are properly separated.

6. Optimize your water heater
If you don't have one installed already, put an insulated blanket around your hot water heater and also insulate the pipes around the water heater. Insulated blankets cost between $10 and $20, and you can get pipe insulation for less than $1 for six feet. Also consider turning the temperature on the water heater down to 120 degrees. Think about it – we turn the water on super hot and then use cold water to cool it down to the proper warm temperature – what a waste! Setting your water heater to a comfortable 120 degrees. It will save you up to $450 annually in energy bills…and use far less water!

7. Fans
In warm climates like the Central Valley of California, it takes far more energy (and money) to cool your house every year than it does to heat it. So during the scorching summer, instead of cranking up the air conditioning in the whole house, use fans. Ceiling fans are inexpensive to install and can cool down a room for cheap. Attic fans do a great job pushing hot air out of the attic, which accumulates because heat rises, attics have less ventilation, and roofing materials like tiles or shingles collect heat.

 On rooms that face the sun (on the south and west of the house) hang heavy solar-blocking curtains to keep the rooms cool, and consider energy efficient windows to protect against UV rays.

8. Native plants and shade trees.
Pull up your front lawn – which wastes an incredible amount of water for nothing more than an aesthetic. In fact, 30% of all water used in the U.S. goes to lawns and outdoor irrigation! By installing native species and draught-tolerant plants, you’ll have a much more attractive, natural, and garden-like front yard – and help the planet in a huge way. Shade trees plated on the south and west of your house can reduce AC bills by up to 15%, and many cities will come plant them for your for free.

9. Rainwater barrels and proper irrigation.
With California in the throes one of the worst draughts in U.S. history, every drop is precious – even rainwater. So why not put out a few barrels in your yard and next to your house, with gutters and downspout flowing into them. In a typical good night of rain, 300 gallons of water may be dumped on your roof alone, so capture this water and then use it for natural irrigation.

10. Go solar.
There is no doubt –the solar revolution is here, and in dry and hot climates like California, it’s nonsensical NOT to take advantage of the free and abundant sunshine. Thankfully, the cost to install solar panels on your roof or at your home has gone way down in the last several years, as technology and infrastructure has improved. Solar panels pay for themselves pretty quickly and grant homeowners huge tax rebates and incentives. If buying solar panels was too big of an investment, you can even lease them, which costs less than your energy bill every month!

For more information how solar works and availability in your area, click here.