PROPERTY & INVESTMENT
Photo by DBSA an institute focused on learning , they plan to continue doing this for the foreseeable future .
Sustainable features
In line with their ecological vision , the homes in the village are manufactured from various sustainable materials including adobe brick – a mixture of clay soil from the site and sand . These homes are very effective in regulating temperature due to the thick walls .
When the main building on the site was redesigned , they experimented successfully with natural cooling systems . Wind chimneys were placed on the roof of the main building , facing the southeaster . The system in place creates a natural cooling flow of wind going through the building , which interacts well with the thick clay walls . The whole system is like a big kind of air conditioner for the entire building .
Another brilliant and unique system is the use of thermal rocks underneath the school ; these help to regulate the temperature of the building , both in winter and summer .
7 F E A T U R E D
After making adobe bricks that were regarded as legally compliant by the local building authorities , the architects and engineers were proud of building a legal ecologically designed house signed off by the NHBRC .
Other materials used by homeowners to build include reclaimed bricks from the landfill , recycled bricks made from building rubble , as well as hay bales and sandbags .
All houses have solar water heaters . Owners are not allowed to have electric stoves ; they have to use gas , which means energy consumption is reduced by as much as 70 %. In 2017 , the Eco-Village was chosen as the site to pioneer Eskom ’ s Rooftop Photovoltaic Minigrid Project . One of the main aims of the project is to create a model where residents can trade electricity within the minigrid . A couple of houses in the village are connected to the biogas digester , an underground hut-shaped container that accumulates biogas from sewage before it is pumped into the on-site