Photo by Kelly Hart.

Kelly Hart has created a great slide show that displays earthbag construction and finished projects. He has also published a new web resource at earthbagbuilding.com. I’m a fan of earthbags. Benefits of earthbag construction include less water consumption, flexible earthen material ratio, courses and go up in moments ( no waiting for cob to dry). Bags can be plastered with earth or papercrete as Kelly has done. This type of construction is a form of rammed earth. The bags create a modular flexible form that stays in the wall. The polypropylene bags deteriorate in the sun, so covering them is very important. If you went to the moon, bring polypropylene bags and a shovel and you can build a shelter there… I suppose they would be called moonbags then.

Kindra Welch, a cob builder and designer, posted the the construction process of a cob house built for Jennifer Fruth and Robert Brown. It’s located in Lockhart, Texas about 30 miles from Austin.
What an awe-inspiring house. The quality and attention to detail really shows. The interior sculpting is delightful. The process shows the use of a bobcat for loading wet cob to where it needs to be. That must be nice! In the end, the entire cob house was lime rendered on the exterior.
Nice work! Continue…

Donkey’s dual rocket stove

I’m thinking about my next rocket stove, planning, drawing, scrounging and researching rocket stove mass heaters. While surfing the interweb I visited rocketstoves.com to see if there was anything new. I found a link to the rocket stove forum at Rocket Stoves… Experimenters corner. Thanks to Donkey for setting this up. I look forward to reading through the posts.

Anne and Gord Baird are building a Cob Dreamhome in Victoria. It’s the first code approved, high occupancy seismically engineered load bearing cob building in Canada. It’s a 1550 round feet building with solar PV and wind power, grid intertie, solar thermal heating, rain water harvesting from a living roof, composting toilet, grey water re-use, and passive solar design.

They have insulated their cob walls by adding pumice, a porous volcanic rock. So their cob mix was clay/sand, pumice and straw. I just love that they are running hydronic heating tubes through the earthen floors and benches. This is a great example of a cob demonstration home. I’m sure we will be hearing more about this project in times to come.

Here is a must see photo gallery of the building process.
For more information about this project and Eco-sense services visit eco-sense.ca.

Oliver at Natural Homes has created a pretty neato mashup of Google Maps and natural homes in the world.
Continue…