Name: I thought this rotating house was impossible.
Uploaded: 2026-01-14T16:55:23.000Z
Duration: 7 min 31 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

There are quite a few rotating buildings in the world.

Houses for people who want their view to follow the sun.

Maybe they're built as an architect's dream house, maybe as an engineering challenge, or sometimes to give the best angles for solar power.

Over the years, I have asked to film in a few of those houses, but

They're private homes, but this one near San Diego, California is now on sale.

The real estate agent got in touch and asked if I wanted to have a look around.

But I just wasn't going to turn this down because there are two things I want to find out.

First of all, how on earth does the plumbing work?

And second, if this is someone's dream house, and it is, then why are they selling it?

My wife and I decided we're going to build a house.

Just so happened this lot went on the market that same day.

Then I thought, some rooms still have to look at the mountain.

I thought, crap, I got to figure out how to do that.

So I started to figure out how to actually build something that would rotate so every room would have every view.

I asked if I could flip the switch and control the rotation.

It's very strange to push a button and then have the world start to rotate around you.

My wife and I started construction in 2000.

It took a good two years to get to the point where we had a structure.

We did hire some people and had them working here.

And I found that they would go home at 4 o' clock and I would be here till 7 fixing what they had done because they're used to building square, and

The fella at San Diego county would go over our plans and he says, I just want to tell you, you're building something that's way stronger than it needs to be.

No way you can rotate that much mass and have it work.

He says, hell, I don't care if it rotates.

And I said, well, then, can we just agree to disagree and you let me go ahead and build the damn thing?

In doing all the Calculations I came up with needing a five horsepower motor.

Have you ever driven your car in fifth gear at 25 miles an hour?

It goes through a 25 to 1 reduction transmission, a 71 to 1 torque hub that drives the 216 inch in diameter wheels.

You can go to bed to the sunset and wake up to the sunrise in the same bed.

We'll turn the house so that everybody at the dinner table gets to see the sunset.

In a lot of rotating buildings, it's only part of the floor that rotates.

The things that require plumbing, like the kitchen and bathroom, don't move at all.

But here the sinks and toilets and electrical sockets all rotate as part of the house.

And all the explanations I can find seem to hand wave the details.

They just say that there's a central non rotating core that handles the pipes for electricity.

There are off the shelf components that can deal with rotation.

There's a thing called a slip ring which is a very standard piece of equipment.

A merry go round goes around and around and around and doesn't have to go backwards.

A copper piece, about that big and they ride on the copper and that is your connection for telephone and Internet.

There's also an off the shelf component, a mercury slip ring.

A sealed connector with a small pool of mercury conductive liquid metal in the centre.

I can understand having one connection going through the middle.

For water or wastewater or gas, they can just sit on a central pipe and swivel.

But how can you have all three going through the same central hub?

But if they're offset, then as the house rotates, surely the lengths of the pipes and cables has to change.

Or if there's slack, surely they'll get twisted.

It turns out OWL has a very clever solution to that.

Obviously you don't want to mix the gas, the gray water, the sewer, the drinking water.

So I designed a slip ring for those services.

Big piece of steel, about that big around.

We grooved it about a 3 inch by 3 inch groove all the way around.

Top groove is sewer the next groove is gray water.

And there are holes drilled through this from the sewer, from the gray water and so forth.

They're all separate holes that come out the bottom.

Then there's a piece that comes down the outside.

You have a sewer line that comes down and connects to the outer piece.

There are seals in between each of these grooves.

There's a seal, sensor ring and a seal, a seal, a sensor ring and a seal, so forth.

For all of them, you would have to have two seals and two sensors fail before you had any mixture of fluids.