One Natural Builder's Next Big Adventure Called: The Fossil Fuel-Free House Morgan Caraway is a natural builder, homesteader, intentional community co-founder and author. In 2009 his wife, Mary Jane, and he moved on to a piece of undeveloped land in the Blue Ridge Mountains and began a homesteading adventure. Theye built a yurt, earthbag house and a cordwood bath house. Since then they have joined a small, private intentional community and have helped build a pole barn and an earthbag house using earthship principles. Please help them in this IndieGoGo campaign. Our first earthbag house. In our 7 years of living off-grid, we've learned a lot and we will put all of this knowledge and more into our most ambitious project yet - a fossil fuel-free house that uses passive solar design, thermal mass and hydronics (heated floors) to stay comfortable year-round without burning ANY fossil-fuels. Over a lifetime, conventionally built modern houses use an extreme amount of energy to heat and cool them.
An Earthbag Round House For Less Than $5,000 Looking for a very stable design which does not only come cheap from the start but also makes you save money in the long run. Due to its shape and materials used, the earthbag house has less area than your normal home, so it’s cheaper to keep it supplied with energy. Don’t be scared if you never built circular structures before, because the example shown here used a technique called the compass arm which you can easily learn. Starting on the rubble trench foundation. Covering over our sediment fabric with pea gravel. Two rows of stem wall – 80 lb sack concrete. 2 strands of barbed wire go between every row. Firewood used to hold the barbed wire in place. Door frame up. A strip anchor to hold the door in place. Mary Jane and Morgan on right The little window near the camera will also be a cold storage in the winter. Cal-Earth, Earthbag, Earthbag Building, Natural Building, Round House, Superadobe
Earthbag Construction EarthBag Homes - you're standing on the building materials... earthbag home Long sandbags are filled on-site and arranged in layers or as compressed coils. Stabilizers such as cement, lime, or sodium carbonate may be added to an ideal mix of 70% sand, 30% clay. earthbag home Plastic bags recycled into plastic bags -- if plastic does not break down for a thousand years, this building is sure to last several lifetimes. earthbag construction Foundations differ as per site. earthbag construction The time consuming part, filling the bags. earthbag construction Testing the strength of an arch. earthbag home Project Seres, Guatemala. projectseres.org, flickr.com earthbag home CalEarth -- Emergency Shelter Village, Hesperia, California. earthbag home Cal Earth -- Emergency Shelters. earthbag home CalEarth let the layers show. CalEarth -- this might not be totally earthbag, but like the fish face. earthbag home CalEarth photo by Mike Smith flickr.com CalEarth Vault under construction. Resources:
Dream Green Homes: Earthbag Plans How to Build Dirt Cheap Houses The following list summarizes some of the potential savings from using natural building materials and alternative construction methods. If you’re wondering why they’re not more widely used, it’s because contractors, banks, realtors and others in the housing industry make more profit from the current system. It’s up to you to get informed and switch to a sustainable lifestyle. 1. Foundation: Insulated frost-protected foundations do not have to be as deep as standard foundations and therefore use fewer materials, require less excavation and backfill, less form work and less labor. Earthbag foundations – polypropylene bags filled with gravel, scoria or pumice on a rubble trench – make an excellent foundation. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Earthbag House Plans - Tiny House Design Owen Geiger over at Earthbag House Plans has been busy. He has posted the preliminary designs for about 77 plans for earthbag homes available on his newest website. An earthbag home is essentially a home made from the dirt under your feet. It’s scooped up and placed in bags like old grain bags or sandbags. They are then laid up like bricks and you can build strait walls, curved walls, and domes. It’s probably the fastest and easiest way to build walls and the best part is that it’s as cheap as dirt. Photo credit to the people at earthbagbuilding.wordpress.com and earthbagplans.wordpress.com.
The Shantikuthi Earthbag Spiral House [video] Alternative homes are popping all over the world. The next example comes from Nagano, Japan. The earthbag house may seem like a building coming from fantasy novels, but it is a real place you can live in. The Shantikuthi Earthbag Spiral House [video] Alternative homes are popping all over the world. The next example comes from Nagano, Japan. The earthbag house may seem like a building coming from fantasy novels, but it is a real place you can live in. The builder, Michi-kun, is an experienced carpenter and permaculturist. The walls raised with bags of earth sit on a 60 cm-deep rubble trench foundation.
My Tiny Earthbag House that I built, so I could follow my dream of writing I built my own earthbag home in Turkey, and now run The Mud website for earthbag and sustainable living from there. I’d love to be featured on tinyhouseblog.com. I had little money and almost no building experience when I started my project. But making my own earthbag tiny home was one of the most empowering things I’ve ever done. I love the earthbag technique for a number of reasons: It renders Portland cement unnecessary, it’s inexpensive, you can create attractive, earthquake proof roundhouses, and the method is incredibly simple. The earthbag technique involves filling grain sacks up with damp mud, laying them end to end and tamping them flat. Also, until April 30th my ebook Mud Mountain – The Secret Diary of an Accidental Off-Gridder is available for FREE download.
Eco-Dome: Moon Cocoon - Cal-Earth Building Designs The Eco-Dome is a small home design of approximately 400 square feet (40 sq. meters) interior space. It consists of a large central dome, surrounded by four smaller niches and a wind-scoop, in a clover leaf pattern. Learning and building an Eco-Dome is the next stage after building a small emergency shelter and provides hands-on learning experience in the essential aspects of Superadobe construction. The finished "very small house" is self-contained and can become a small guest house, studio apartment, or be the first step in a clustered design for community use in an Eco-Village of vaults and domes. Built from local earth-filled Superadobe coils (earth stabilized with cement or lime).Tree free.Maximum use of space through alternative options. The Blueprints for this design are approved and built in Hesperia City and San Bernardino County, California, as well as other regions nationally and internationally. Note:
Step-by-Step Earthbag Building This Instructable explains each main step of construction for building vertical earthbag walls. Videos on my Earthbag Natural Building YouTube channel demonstrate the process. For those who don’t know, earthbag building uses polypropylene rice bags or feed bags filled with soil or insulation that are stacked like masonry and tamped flat. I got involved with earthbag building when the Indian Ocean tsunami hit Southeast Asia in December, 2004. Our websites at EarthbagBuilding.com and Earthbag Building Blog explain just about everything you need to know for free. The following instructions assume you have cleared and leveled the site, removed topsoil, positioned fill soil around the building site to minimize work, dug a trench to stable subsoil, put about 12” of gravel in the trench, and added corner guides and stringlines.
How To Build A $1,000 Indestructible Off-Grid Home Natural building methods will always be the less expensive route to build your own home, they are labor intensive and you will need hands to help you achieve your goals. The end result is always beautiful, calming, inspiring. Building your own home is never free, but a growing number of homesteaders and off-gridders are discovering it can be far cheaper than we often envision, simply by using the resources already on the land. These modern “earthbag” homes cost as little as $1,000, can be built without much skill, and can survive earthquakes, floods and even wildfires when other homes in the surrounding area are destroyed. In other words, they’re less expensive than conventional homes but more durable. Earthbag homes are the subject of this week’s edition of Off The Grid Radio as we talk to Kelly Hart, one of the nation’s foremost experts on earthbag structures who also hosts several earthbag websites dedicated to spreading the word about their usefulness. via OffTheGridNews