10 percent boat, 90 percent house.
Lifestyle

10 percent boat, 90 percent house.

Visiting Alexander and Ekaterina Klimchuk, owners of a Russian company producing «green» housebots.
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Ekaterina and Alexander Klimchuk spent the winter with their newborn baby in a house on the water - a houseboat built by their own company - and they are sure that in the near future whole villages from such houses will appear in Moscow and its surroundings. Itboat visited them to find out how this movable form of real estate works.

Prologue .

A week ago, my colleagues and I were mooring at the Royal Yacht Club after a corporate swim and discussing a nearby chic houseboat with a helicopter on the roof. Opinions were divided, but in the end they decided that the helicopter is not real - a model to demonstrate the potential of houses on the water, which is built by the Russian-Danish company Houseboat.ru.

Another week later I visited Moscow Yacht Show organized by Motorboat magazine. The helicopter houseboat was one of the key exhibits at the show, so I didn't fail to take the opportunity to settle this dispute once and for all.

«Yeah, a $600,000»toy - the owner and president of houseboat.ru Alexander Klimchuk smiled in response to my suggestion.

On a heliport the small Robinson shone in the sun, the most that neither is real - a tribute to the past business of Klimchuk on sale of rotorcraft.

House on water

The covered part of the upper deck of the Hausbot is the homeowner's fiefdom: a large office takes centre stage here.

On the walls there are renderings and drawings of future houseboot models. «This next model»of ours, - Alexander Klimchuk shows a drawing of the houseboat more modest size than the one in which we are now.

The figure shows Fisher 155, the most budget model with the area of 90 to 120 square meters and cost from 15 million rubles.

The president of houseboat.ru himself, of course, has the top model of the lineup - Heliboat 209 with an area of 300 square meters and cost 84 million rubles.

From a window of a cabinet the second control post of houseboat is visible. The first is below deck in the living room. The steering wheel, the engine control lever is in place, but the whole dashboard is electronic, on the iPad screen.

On the wall across the street is a picture of Alexander and his wife Katya on their first date. «We were sitting in tandem on a paraglider from a great height," remembers»the owner.

With the same courage, they have «worked together to» create a market and culture of the Hausboths in Russia, a country where people prefer to live on solid ground, in extreme cases - on marshes.

A post shared by Houseboat.ru (@houseboat.ru) on

Alecasander and Katya moved to Hausbot immediately after the birth of their son and lived in it all autumn, winter and spring. In order that no one has any doubts that the house is adapted to live in Russian conditions, the family blogs about their life in the houseboat.ru, in Instagram and on YouTube.

Houseboat is 90% home and 10% boat. The boat is everything below the waterline: the steel hull of the catamaran with floats divided into 5 airtight compartments each.

The catamaran remains afloat even with two damaged floats. In winter, the steel housing freezes in the ice, so there is no need to pull it ashore.

The walls of the house are built of 10-layer composite sandwich «with» heat and noise insulation, on heat conductivity identical brick wall thickness of 3.5 m. The house is almost completely independent.

Water supply .

From the faucet flows pre-treated by reverse osmosis method of intake water. Waste water is drained into the water, purified at 96%. Seven months in a year requirements for hot water and heat are satisfied by the solar collector which by means of the solar batteries established on a roof of a houseboat collects thermal energy of the sun and heats the heat accumulator located in a hold.

At the rest of the time, a water-water heat pump is responsible for the hot water supply, whose principle of operation is based on the simple fact that even in winter the temperature does not drop below +4°C under the ice at the bottom of reservoirs and rivers.

The pump pumps the intake water through a special heat exchanger, where the water interacts with freon, which «draws» heat from it. Freon is sucked in by the compressor and during its compression the temperature rises. The hot substance heats the water to +60°C. This water is not only used for hot water supply, but also for heating the house - in particular the floor heating system implemented there everywhere.

Heat supply .

The house has five heat supply systems. In addition to the two already mentioned above, a supply and exhaust ventilation system with heat recovery is installed: the supply air is heated by means of a warm exhaust air, the automation controls the level of fresh air impurities. In addition, there are electric and diesel boilers that work as backup and are switched on when the first three systems do not work for some reason.

Five systems - it is even too much for a house on water, admits Alexander Klimchuk. Just in the first, test sample wanted to test the effectiveness of all of them.

And so it will be enough two - working and reserve. Customers of Hausbot will be able to choose which heating technologies to use in each particular case. Naturally, the more complex engineering - the higher the cost.

Electricity .

Solar batteries and collector provide the home with electricity needs for 7 months a year - the rest of the time you need to be powered by cable in marinas. This is a must if you turn on the sauna - the pride of the owner of the house.

Smart House

All systems in your home can be controlled and monitored from the iPad screen, such as switching lights on and off, adjusting air temperature, ventilation, humidity, etc. You can also view the CCTV camera picture from your tablet.

Permissions .

No special permits are required. The length of houseboats in the range houseboat.ru does not exceed 20 meters, so the rights of GIMS are enough to manage them.

Cost of maintenance

The cost of houseboat maintenance is 1% of the cost of the house per year. Alexander and Ekaterina pay 15 thousand per month for parking in the marina, where electricity is free. It is two times less, than a «communal in» their Moscow apartment the area of 130 sq. meters. Hausbot is not subject to property tax - only transport tax, as a car.

Prologue .

At the start, the idea of building a houseboat seemed crazy to Alexander and Ekaterina, but soon their house project turned into a business that had already begun to work: the family company Klimchuk received orders for five housebots to be built by the end of 2018.This year they are going to organize house races and have far-reaching plans to equip special places for the Housebots «villages in Moscow and the» region.

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