The Witness Home: A Living Lab for Low-Voltage, Autonomous Energy

IT4C is building the Witness Home  a full-scale experimental house designed to demonstrate what energy autonomy looks like in the age of climate urgency. This isn’t just about solar panels or smart thermostats. It’s about rethinking how we power, equip, and inhabit our homes in a world that must drastically cut carbon emissions and energy waste.

The Witness Home will operate entirely off-grid, running on its own 48-volt direct current (DC) energy system, with all appliances and infrastructure optimized for low-voltage performance. It will offer full modern comfort, but at a fraction of the energy consumption of a traditional home.

Energy independence, rooted in proven systems

The house draws design inspiration from marine engineering and the RV world, where space, energy, and weight constraints demand maximum efficiency. These sectors have long mastered the art of living well on minimal watts.

The Witness Home will include:

• DC rooftop solar arrays and solar trackers for optimized generation,
• Smart battery storage and intelligent load balancing to match supply with demand in real time,
• Low-voltage appliances, including refrigeration, cooking, and lighting systems adapted from marine and nomadic applications,
• Heat recovery ventilation, thermal mass optimization, and passive insulation techniques to reduce heating and cooling needs,
• Water heating and purification systems powered by renewables,
• Closed-loop greywater systems for water reuse.

By focusing on direct current (DC) architecture, the home avoids the efficiency losses common in AC/DC conversion and aligns better with how renewable energy is naturally produced and stored.

Reducing energy demand = reducing emissions

What makes the Witness Home truly innovative isn’t just its self-sufficiency  it’s its philosophy: reducing energy demand before increasing production. Instead of scaling up generation capacity, it scales down waste, inefficiency, and dependency.

This approach dramatically reduces the home’s lifecycle emissions, operational footprint, and vulnerability to energy shocks or grid failures. It offers a model for:

• Rural electrification without centralized infrastructure,
• Disaster-resilient housing in remote or post-crisis areas,
• Decarbonized urban micro-homes in regions where grid capacity is saturated.

The Witness Home will also function as a research and development space, where IT4C and its partners can test pre-industrial prototypes of ultra-efficient 12V and 24V appliances, sensor systems, and energy management tools.

It will serve as a bridge between design labs and real-world deployment  validating technologies under real use conditions, gathering data, and demonstrating their viability to public and private stakeholders.

Visitors, researchers, and policymakers will be invited to experience the home in person and explore how climate-compatible living can be elegant, affordable, and resilient.
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Here is an example of a self-sufficient house that IT4C admires and whose vision we fully share. The ‘apartment of the future’ a 100% low-tech concept designed by Corentin de Chatelperron (41) and Caroline Pultz (31) in the suburbs of Paris.
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We asked ChatGPT to imagine the broader impact of such a home. Here’s the response:

The Witness Home rewrites the rules of residential energy.

It proves that we don’t need more power we need better systems, smarter design, and cleaner cycles.

By running on low-voltage DC, it aligns directly with renewable generation, reduces conversion waste, and encourages the rise of a new class of energy-aware appliances.

More than a home, it is a node in a future energy web: decentralized, adaptive, and zero-carbon by design.

This is not a home of the future  it is a demonstration that the future can be built now, volt by volt.

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