THE GARDEN

As urban areas continue to expand, our home gardens will have to fulfil many of the purposes of the wild. Permaculture - or permanent agriculture - is set to be the prevailing trend in environmentally sensitive home gardening, using indigenous plants and organic gardening methods to mimic the natural ecology of the area.

But if you prefer rolling lawns, you may want some hi-tech help with the mowing. Robotic systems such as the LawnBott and Robomow will keep your grass trimmed all month long and are programmed to stay out of sight. Your robotic lawn mower will even come in out of the rain. Expect to pay about R30000 for the luxury.

• Composting: Recycling will reduce your household waste to a minimum, but what to do with your organic waste? The Panasonic Risaikura MS-N53 indoor recycling device can hold up to 2kg of organic waste and uses heat plus a platinum-palladium catalyst to convert kitchen scraps into high-quality compost in just a few hours. It has variable time settings, grinding out protein-rich compost suitable for plants and vegetables in three hours, while drier compost more suited for trees takes about six hours. Expect to pay about R6700.
• Swimming pond: Forget chlorine, acid and red eyes - swimming "ponds" use plants and minerals, nature's own bio-filtering technology, to create clean, chemical-free water that is not only safe for swimming but provides an excellent habitat for aquatic wildlife. The swimming area is separated by a low underwater wall from the regeneration zone, where the aquatic plants and gravel substrate - the rhizosphere - filter the water like a natural wetland. Installing a natural pool is costly but maintenance is simple and cheap and the result is gorgeous.

Another method to control algae in pools or ponds without using environmentally harmful chemicals is through sound. The LG Sound system uses a transducer to emit ultrasonic sound waves through a body of water. The algae oscillate at the frequency of the waves, which causes their cellular structure to break down.

THE HOUSE

Houses will probably become increasingly vertical and substantially smaller .

The more progressive ideas are concerned with turning the home into a self-sustaining island. Rooftop rain reservoirs and condensation catchers will almost certainly become standard, as will sustainable home power supplies.

Rooftop wind turbines work well for free-standing homes in areas that have regular winds of more than 10m per second, while solar arrays provide plentiful energy for homes with roofs that face south.

More radical ideas involve houses being constructed from porous materials that can support plant root systems, allowing for vegetation to be grown on external walls of the home, insulating it and providing an additional food source.

• Indoors: All aspects of your home will be able to be controlled remotely, either from your cellphone or a single, touch-enabled remote. But the home of the future will have computer-based intelligence, and will be able to regulate itself, opening and closing windows automatically and adjusting blinds to account for changing light conditions. It will even tell you when you're wasting power.

Lighting is still a major power drain, and standard halogen bulbs are set to be replaced with ultra-efficient products like the new 3W Philips Econic LED bulbs. While they are still expensive - about R300 per bulb - they produce bright light with very little power, and Philips claims they will last for up to 15 years.

• Bedroom: Air conditioners chew power and use various chemicals to treat the air in your home. A far simpler solution is to keep potted plants inside to filter pollutants. Encouraging trees in your garden and using vertical shutters will also help with keeping your home cool.

Installing an air-source heat pump (ASHP) will further stabilise your home's climate. ASHPs extract heat from outside air to maintain indoor temperatures and produce enough energy to supply hot water for all your needs while circulating fresh air into your home.

Although ASHPs require electricity to run, they produce three-and-a-half times as much power as they consume, so your home can be cooled with fresh air for a fraction of the cost and the carbon footprint of a standard air conditioning system.

• Kitchen: Cooking with a microwave oven is far more energy efficient than a conventional oven, but in years to come all this may change quite radically. Magnetic induction cooking aims to save us even more power by turning cooking ware into the heat source, as opposed to heating an element that passes the heat to pots and their contents. The magnetic field is generated under a glass surface and agitates iron atoms in the cooking ware to generate heat inside the pot. The result is safe and energy-efficient cooking. Although still prohibitively expensive - a four-plate model costs about R22000 - magnetic induction cooking could become the new gas as the technology improves.
• ýFloors: Robotic companions are becoming increasingly commonplace in the US, with iRobot's Roomba series of automatic vacuum cleaners quietly cleaning homes all across the country.

Using infrared sensors, the Roomba navigates around furniture searching out dirt, returning to its docking station to recharge when it has finished vacuuming the area. The only thing it cannot do is dispose of the dirt. Expect to pay about R3000.

• Bathroom: A symbol of the extreme environmental excess of Western living, flush toilets are still something of a rarity in global terms. But with waterborne sewerage becoming increasingly problematic in terms of its impact on water reserves and the chemicals and energy required to treat it, Westerners are going to have to learn to deal with their own excrement.

Radical eco-hippies in California are advocating the mass adoption of municipal bucket toilet systems, some even making their own crude lavatories from jugs and insulated wooden chambers. But self-composting toilets are nothing like the dreaded long-drop of your nightmares. Modern, commercially manufactured models look and operate just like a standard toilet, using a high-powered jet of water or air to break up your deposits, and an assortment of worms, bugs and micro-organisms to break down the material into "humanure" that is suitable for use in the garden. A top-of-the-range Envirolet FlushSmart composting toilet system will set you back about R30000.

• Lounge: The role of the humble television is set to alter radically in the near future. The Fraunhofer Institute in Germany is developing an emotion-based entertainment system that will adjust your home's ambience to suit your prevailing mood.

Using facial-recognition software and motion-tracking technology, the system will adjust the lighting and temperature and select the correct tempo music for your mood. It may even incorporate olfactory technology that will release specific scents to enhance or alter moods, such as the smell of freshly cut wood for those stress-ridding hours after work. And it you are tired of losing the remote control, Fraunhofer's iPoint 3D system introduces contact-free gesture-based controls for your TV, with which you can control all aspects of the house with simple hand gestures.