The motors wouldn’t be a huge expense compared to protecting the house. Looks like four motors hold up to 300 lbs right now, and they expect to get up to 500 lbs.
So if the below is anywhere near accurate then that’s 690 units to float a ranch house, or 690 units of power from however many scaled up units. The kickstarter is selling them for $299 a piece, so $206,310 to float a house, not including the metal base. I would not be surprised if you could cut it to a half that price, fewer stronger items are generally cheaper than individuals adding up to the same strength. Then assuming mass manufacturing capability then another half, bringing it to $50k or so. If it’s a house somewhere super expensive and the value of the home cracks a million, or several; what’s 50k plus installation to save the house?
360k for the larger house, a quarter of that is 90k, again, if you break 7 figures on the house it’s chump change.
Istallation would be a bitch, though it depends on teh number of units. I would assume you would use metal pylons set in the ground as the material to bounce off of, but I don’t know where the weight goes, I assume this won’t work with a material that can’t take the weight of the whole house, if they could do it with foil people would be jumping all over it.
I think the ideal way would be to wait a calculated time after the initial shock to avoid any aftershocks. If the system is built well you might not even notice false alarms with the house lifting to avoid light shocks.
I built a hypothetical 1,600-foot, single-level home in my head and
on paper, based on known delivered weights of given materials. It
totaled 345,000 pounds (including 160,000 for the foundation and 30,000
in the garage floor), compared to the rule-of-thumb house weighing in at
320,000. Pretty close! Of course, what good is a house without a deck?
In my hypothetical house, I added a deck, a gazebo and a hot tub, which
pretty much explains the difference. Adding in the weight of a
foundation, slabs, appliances and fixtures to the house-mover’s figures,
we cross-check pretty well.
Refiguring for the “average” 2,200-square-foot, two-level newer home,
rule of thumb comes it at 605,000, which I suspect is on the high side.
Why do I think that’s high? Because the foundation hasn’t increased
dramatically in size over my hypothetical single-level house. But then
again, I don’t have a scale that big, so what do I know?
Imagine what this could do for the mobile/manufactured home market though, shipping and installing just got a lot easier. slide out the metal plates for a path to the home site and just move it with a Bobcat.
Or just put metal on fast lane on the highway and really get some speed out of that old Camaro. If you could just mix metal into the road surface maybe you could use this system to reduce the weight of vehicles on old bridges or any number of things.