History - Why we chose Enertia®
The founder of EdenSAFE Homes, Julius Toth, spent years researching house-building systems. Each system had a few good points - but also negatives. Toth, whose company EdenPURE®, specializes in environmentally-friendly products, wanted everything....both strong and green, but it never even occurred to him he would find a building system that was all of that and heated and cooled itself without fuel or electricity.
Every year the History Channel, and the US Patent office sponsor a competition called the Invent Now Challenge. The goal is to find inventors and inventions that can change the world. The 2007 Grand Prize Winner was a company in North Carolina called Enertia Building Systems, Inc. This made national news, and the prize was bestowed by Steve Wozniak of Apple fame. Toth read about it, and within days was on his way to North Carolina.
The inventor, Michael Sykes, had stumbled on the discovery that Southern Yellow Pine wood could store solar energy. Heating energy-crisis solved! But a side benefit of his heavy, solid Southern Pine Gluelam construction was amazing strength - many times that of conventional 2x4 stick-framed homes. Gluelams are the strongest assembly of wood known to man. You usually see them holding up the long-span roofs of churches, gymnasiums, and airports. But used as walls, they make the house monolithic, yet resilient, and impact and bullet resistant.
Even with “Hurricane Clips” a stick-frame house can only be beefed up to 120 mph winds. Nails and clips rust and deteriorate with time, especially on the coast. Enertia’s Gluelam walls exceeded the best stick-frame rating right “out-of-the-box.” Toth proposed some bolt patterns and wall layouts that could take 240 mph, equal to a F5 tornado, and past that of a Category 5 hurricane. And because the walls were solid, there would not be the common hurricane problem of water soaked insulation and sheetrock. Bring it on!
Major innovations in house building are rare, especially game-changers like an innovative new building technique, with a new form of energy (thermal inertia), and a new form of architecture (the double-shell house) all at once. Enertia® is to house building what the iPad is to communication - innovation that makes all prevalent technology obsolete.
