US Department of Energy Reveals Net Zero Mass/Energy House

Net zero energy homes, which produce as much energy as they use, are all the rage in the world of green building. Environmentalists and hippies have taken that a step further and proposed net zero water and net zero food homes. Now, researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, under orders from their funders at the US Department of Energy to “be more practical and do something useful,” have unlocked the secret to using antimatter in building materials. The result is the Net Zero Mass/Energy Home, which could revolutionize the construction industry.

2 big breakthroughs

Physicist Paul Dirac predicted the existence of antimatter by applying Einstein’s theory of special relativity to quantum mechanics. Since then, the antistuff of dreams has been produced only in tiny quantities in physics labs around the world—and at great cost. One gram of positrons, the antiparticle for the electron, cost about $25 billion in 2006. Scientists at Argonne, however, have made two huge discoveries to bring antimatter to the masses.

The first breakthrough was finding that they didn’t need to produce miniscule amounts of antimatter at particle accelerators. Dr. Maria von Ploy from Argonne made the unlikely connection between antimatter and the missing oil in an exercise on predicting oil spills on the Keystone XL pipeline. The simulated mystery had physicists staring at their chalkboards for hours.

The end result, though, was the discovery of a gigantic underground reservoir of antimatter. A few test wells verified the reserves, and production from the antimatter field, named the Bunker Field because of its undisclosed location, began in 2012.

The second breakthrough was figuring out how to incorporate antimatter into building materials. Dr. Yuli Goldfeather realized in the restroom one day that the missing key was to be found in frequency-shifting oscillations that offset the Charge Conjugation-Parity-Time (CPT) invariance.

“As I stood there at the urinal,” he said, “I realized that we’d been going about this all wrong. I’d been trying to think like a manufacturer, but it was really the contractor’s point-of-view that I needed because they know that codes don’t matter if they’re not enforced. Once I made that leap, it was easy to see that the frequency-shifting oscillations would do a double whammy on the CPT invariance.”

The first experiments proved him correct, and now we have not only antiprotons, antineutrons, and antihydrogen atoms but also antiwood, anticoncrete, and antifiberglass. (Of course, antifiberglass has existed in the world of building science for some time, but fiberglass insulation manufacturers have worked hard to keep its development quiet. Some, however, think the original antifiberglass is an artifact of contractors’ work and not strongly tied to fiberglass itself, thereby not resulting in annihilation when brought together with fiberglass.)

The first net zero mass/energy home

Massive amounts of work have been done on the top-secret Net Zero Mass/Energy Home since 2012. Construction began toward the end of that year, and anticonstruction proceeded apace. Because of the special requirements of working with building materials made of matter along with materials made of antimatter, researchers assembled special crews of contractors and anticontractors.

Any misstep could lead to total annihilation of the project. Some theoretical physicists have even speculated that as little as 50 milliliters of anticaulk squirted into a gap rather than an antigap could result in a tiny black hole. Therefore, as a precaution, the team built a special antimatter shed containing a tiny antiblack hole to be used in case of emergency. (Unfortunately, the International Code Council has now added that as a requirement, along with antisprinkler systems, in their residential code.)

Late in 2013, construction on the Net Zero Mass/Energy Home was completed. It’s a meticulously maintained 5BR/5BA custom home near a major metropolitan area with upgrades galore. It has an open kitchen with granite countertops and stainless steel appliances, a keeping room with stone fireplace, separate breakfast room, and a large open dining room.

As you can tell from the description, the finishes are all made of matter. The scientists on the project calculated that the market for this home didn’t include enough antihumans to make a Net Zero Mass/Energy Home with antifinishes cost effective. Further, human buyers being annihilated upon touching the front doorknob was determined to be a risk factor that could make the home unsellable.

On the positive side, the home had stellar results in its performance testing, after a bit of a learning curve. There was a little mishap of scheduling an antiHERS rater to do an antiblower door test at the pre-antidrywall anti-inspection when none of the antidoors were available. As it turned out, the door that was available was not properly antiprepped for the antiblower door, and the antiHERS rater was annihilated in a puff of theatrical fog. The scheduler and contractor have since been placed in antijobs.

The real beauty of this home, though, is in its perfect harmony of matter and antimatter in a building enclosure/anti-enclosure that has a perfect zero cfm50 blower door-tested infiltration rate. The air and anti-air infiltration rates are identical and have opposite signs, thus canceling each other out.

The even bigger news is that the Net Zero Mass/Energy Home’s heat loss could be balanced by anti-heat loss, so the house has no need of a mechanical heating or cooling system. Once the initial psychrometric conditions in the home were optimized, no further adjustments were required.

A similar development in mechanical ventilation has led to unparalleled indoor air quality. Each pollutant discovered in the house meets its antipollutant, thus eliminating the need for any type of mechanical ventilation with outdoor air, the annihilation of pollutants with antipollutants being the ultimate balanced system.

The prototype Net Zero Mass/Energy Home is undergoing further testing now. Within a year, the US DOE will release the full details to the public and expects production homebuilders like Pushte Homes to begin construction sometime in 2015. With energy and the environment playing such key roles in public policy, it was only a matter of time before antimatter moved beyond the stuff of dreams to become the stuff of homes. And dreamhomes!

 

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Photo of home by Gordon Tarpley from flickr.com, used under a Creative Commons license.