Low Impact Living recent posted about this on their blog.  This particular post focuses on a new designer collection partnered with Dwell magazine.  Prefab homes have often been criticized in the past for being bland, generic, ugly, or all of the above.  The homes sponsored by Dwell, while not traditional, represent a much more stylistic, modern type of home.  I think this is the direction that these sort of homes needs to move.  Granted something cheaper the Dwell options would be nice.

The advantage to Prefab is a standardized design and mass production environment that leads to a lower price.  In the current market the demand is not high enough and so the prices still have a lot of downward potential.  Not all prefab homes are the same though and the possibilities exist to have a large amount of customization.  An on-site build will always offer more customization, but I think the Dwell homes are a good example of the range of design available.  As more architects and designers take on prefab homes, the prices will come down and more people will adopt them.

Efficiency is another trademark of the prefab homes.  Most promise a greener home with more efficient materials.  These homes should be cheaper to operate than a traditional home.  Efficiency plus good design?  I look forward to this type of home becoming more cost effective and widespread.

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First let’s look at some of the properties of tin. Tin has a low melting point, 505 K. For reference, aluminum melts at roughly 933 K and carbon steel at roughly 1800 K. This low melt point is tin’s biggest weakness compared to structural metals but it is also its more important characteristic. Liquid tin does not boil until 2900 K. It also has a very low viscosity and wets the surface of most materials.

Given the characteristics described above it makes sense that most Sn-alloys are used for solders. Tin-lead (Sn-Pb) alloys have historically been solder but more environmentally friendly options such as Sn-Ag-Cu (tin-silver-copper) alloys do exist and are becoming more widespread.

Ok, so solder and foil aren’t that interesting, I know. Remember what I said earlier about tin’s high boiling point and low viscosity? Well, the surface of molten tin is also perfectly flat. Using these properties, molten tin can be used to create large, flat sheets of glass, called “float glass”.

Imagine a continuous river of molten tin, now pour molten glass onto the tin. Tin is a good head conductor and it has a perfectly flat surface so it conducts the heat quickly and uniformly allowing for a perfectly flat piece of glass with a uniform thickness to form on the molten tin surface. Pretty cool, right?

The idea of float glass has been around for awhile but it was not successfully implemented commercially until the 1950s. Sir Alastair Pilkington, a British engineer, gets the credit for the process that is still used to produce about 90% of flat glass today. There are a few other details to the process but the basics of it are pretty simple. Thickness can range from around 0.1″ to 0.6″ so the float glass process can be used for a wide range of large, flat glass panels.

Think about it the next time you go window shopping. How were those large, flat windows manufacturing? Odds are it was using the float glass process.

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