Inside the Segway inventor’s self-sustainable island home

Aditi JustaDec 16 2009

After inventing a wheelchair that climbs stairs, the Segway scooter, and a robotic prosthetic arm that moves based on thought and many others, Dean Kamen takes his ingenious talent a step further by constructing a self-sufficient home for himself. Creating a LED environment on an island, he claims to bring down energy usage by 50 percent.

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The three-acre island house stands on North Dumpling Island that lies just off the Connecticut coast. Kamen has installed a 10-kilowatt turbine that provides energy to power up some of his gadgets. The lighthouse also includes solar panels on the roof that track the sun for maximum exposure. Kamen calls the vacation house ‘independent nation’ and hopes to benefit the environment with his green creation.

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In order to reduce energy consumption, he switched over to LED lighting. Kamen collaborated with his friend Fritz Morgan, chief technology officer of Philips Color Kinetics to replace all the incandescent fixtures with LED’s. This green replacement resulted in bringing down the energy consumption used in the house by 50 percent. The exterior pillars also illuminate using LED fittings.

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Via: NYTimes