The Heliotrope house is not a particularly small home but it provides all its own energy, in fact it produces about five times what it consumes. All this in a high northern latitude in Freiberg, Germany.
Built by Rolf Disch, a Freiberg Germany Architect as his combination home-design experiment, it is one of the most unusual and complex solar homes in the world. The entire building is designed to rotate and track the sun. It does so on a single huge axle at the center of the home. It is cylindrical in shape, has features such as a large array of PV, a large number of evacuated tube collectors for heat gain, and passive solar window use. Additionally, it has a waste compost system, and a research monitoring system integrated into the control of heating and cooling.
The cost of the home is about $2.6 million in US dollars, and it is about 15 years old.
