ISRO Scientist constructs eco-friendly house at Vijayanagar

Here is a Environmentalist, who has constructed an eco-friendly house in his 40ft x 60ft site at Vijayanagar. Prof Venkataramaiah Jagannatha, a Civil Engineer working as a Scientist in ISRO, is the environmentalist who has constructed a house adopting Eco-friendly features that makes maximum utilization of the natural resources.

He has installed a mini solar wind hybrid power generating system atop his house that generates electricity which is stored in rechargeable batteries. The cost incurred to install the entire setup was Rs1 lakh, of which he invested Rs 50,000 on his own while the remaining Rs 50,000 he availed subsidy from CREDAL. Whenever there is a power outage, the inverter takes over the power supply. Apart this, the family member use power from batteries daily for two hours, which lessens the electricity bill.



Not only rain water harvesting but also recycling of used water has been done very effectively. In a 10 x 3 x 3 wet land system, water coming out of the drainage pipe after bathing and washing clothes is collected in a separate tank after gravel treatment and is stored in another tank which is used for flushing toilets and watering gardens, thereby reducing the demand for fresh water.



Rain water is collected in the sump and the excess is made to flow into a 250 meter deep borewell. The rainwater flows through a PVC Casing pipe and is filtered before it allowed flow into the borewell. This apart, he segregates the biodegradable wastes generated within his house and produces manure from it. He says everyone should segregate wastes beforehand and by doing this about 30 kg of manure can be produced from 100 kg of wet waste, and can can be used for gardening.

At the time of constructing his house he has used hollow clay bricks instead of regular ones as they provide better thermal insulation. This reduces the need for using fans or air coolers as the temperature inside the house will be much lower than outside providing more natural cooling.