Germany’s solar energy success story

In Germany you get paid a bit above market rates for the electricity that you feed the grid. This is paying off in different ways.

1. They produce over 50% of all solar energy in the world, despite the fact that the country is covered in clouds very often.

2. CO2 reductions are huge, for different reasons. An obvious reason being that people buy solar panels to feed the net. Another one being that consumers will probably start thinking greener as they will be more aware about their consumption.

3. Germany is building a huge solar panel industry with factories and the knowledge that goes with it.

Read the story here: http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/2009/11/27/catching-rays-cutting-emissions/

Passive homes

Today I heard a news article about passives homes on the local radio. Passive homes look a lot like conventional homes but they are super-isolated and use technology like heat exchangers to minimize heat loss. This way they there is very little need for heating during the winters.

http://www.passiefhuis.nl/

http://www.mijnpassiefhuis.nl/

Earthship Florida

On the Facebook page of Earthship Florida I discovered some more photos. I placed them in chronological order.

Ready for concrete. The vapor barrier is down and the red you see is PEX tubing for a hydronic system; water will be pumped through the thermal mass of the large concrete slab to help regulate temperature inside the home.

Also in one of the facebook discussion I found out why there is a giant concrete slab.. surprise surprise… the government made them do it!

Jonah Reynolds

too bad they made you do a giant slab... they made us do that in Japan too... its funny because it doesnt make it stronger, in fact if an earthquake hits (not that it will) then the concrete cracks and the rammed earth in tires dont crack... ;-) we have to do something similar for the retrofit project in Long Beach...

June 2 at 6:07am

Earthship Florida

Yea Jonah, we even had a structural engineer look everything over who said concrete footings weren't necessary. Thing the building department was insistent upon was tying the roof to "the foundation" because of hurricane codes. The fact the walls are earth bermed to the roof didn't matter. It's down now and on to the walls though!

June 2 at 3:16pm

Another Earthship in Florida

While googling for more information about the Florida project I found another near finished earthship in (central) Florida.

The photo is made of snapshots from the video on Vimeo, as you can see it is a big building. It has multiple bathrooms and a garage.

The looks of it are much more conventional than the other earthships that I’ve seen. From the outside you cannot even tell it is an actual earthship. It is clear that it is not circular and there are no roof domes.

The guy who made the video does not tell much about the earthships specifically, except about the tires and cans in the walls. So this leaves the viewer unsure about the use of solar water heaters and solar panels for electricity. I do think they use a rain catch,  a large water container is visible in the video.

Earthship Florida

The Earthship in Florida is the last one on my list of possible reference Earthships for Cameroon. It is located in Manatee county, so it’s actually not an A climate – but still very close to the A climate its edge.

It has a professional website and the build has started, but goes undocumented. There is some information in a Youtube video, like this design sketch. Again it shows a dome roof and circular shape. Also the multi layer skylight is present again.

However, the skectch is different from what you can see in the video here, which I found after some looking around. This video clearly shows a larger structure.

There is another video here (again, more searching). It shows enormous amounts of concrete – quite unearthshipesque! I’m not sure why they did that… The video also shows very clearly how large this ship is going to be.

Another interesting feature of this build is the use of a pneumatic hammer to ram the earth in the tyres.

At 80% of the video a map is shown, I cut and pasted the pieces together here. It shows around 8 circles – so it’s quite big..

Ah, this resembles something I saw vaguely in the first video, the shape reminds me of a butterfly :-)

Watching the last video it seemed strange building the interior walls with cans on top of this giant slab of concrete they have created. It felt a bit out of place there. Also I wonder if it’s worth building an interior wall like this, eco-wise, because a lot of concrete is put into this wall. Maybe you could erect a 3cm thick wall of the same height with it. Ok, then you would need some form of structuring element to prevent the wall from collapsing – but still: it is not really saving the planet. Also, why not use wood in stead? Aluminium is a reusable material and could be recycled, Aluminium can be considered garbage in a lot of countries, but not in the USA where they have a recycling program. Concrete is eco-expensive and wood might be faster to use and eco-cheaper, it also saves a lot of plastering!

I hope they put some work in their website, to get a clearer picture of what’s happening there and to determine if it might be a reference for Cameroon.

Earthship Bonaire

The Bonaire earthship resembles what we’ve seen before in Jamaica very much. Picture can be found on the biotecture site. It has been build in 2008.

Unfortunately I cannot find a day to day blog about this build.

Earthship Brazil

I found some video material on Youtube by Aventura about this earthship which is called Casa Organica.

It is a huge, 3 story, building! You can watch some videos on Youtube.

The Aventura website is found here.

Earthship Hawaii

This one is built in 2006 and is located in Hilo, Hawaii. We actually saw some photos of it in the visitor center in Taos.

Again: circular shape and dome roof. A dome roof is the way to go for sure. Below you can see a design sketch.

 

When searching for info on the Hawaii eartship I stumbled on another one that is being build right now. They do not use tyres, it seems.. (found on green Hawaii).

Earthship Nicaragua

The Earthship in Nicaragua seems to be part of a community called Casa Llanta and is located in El Carizal. It is sponsored by a real estate company and has a nice website, this is the build overview page. Interesting detail: it is built in two weeks time, oh make it a bit more: 30 or so – but still little time!

Haha, immediately you can see it is not a circular building with a dome roof. So my previous conclusion was wrong; a ‘conventional’ layout could work as well.

As you can see, it is really open – what about mosquitoes!? Dengue and malaria do not seem to be big problems in Nicaragua.

I like the sight of palm trees and solar panels!

Ah, here we are: there are domed roofs, but they were not visible from the first picture. Also I notice that they bermed the back wall a bit. I am not really sure why they did that – I think it is not necessary in this climate.

Here’s the video.

Again, a nice reference for Cameroon! This Casa LLanta blog is a bit nicer than the real estate agent’s one.

Earthship Jamaica, continued

I found the Jamaica page on Biotecture. It contains a lot of photos! At the moment it seems to be nearing completion. It is quite a build, with two large buildings.

This looks like an open hallway.

You can just see the solar panels on the rooftop.

A view of the water tanks and veranda. The veranda roof doubles as a rain catch.

Nice windows.

 

It seems to be a very interesting reference for Cameroon.

Reusing a 20 ft shipping container in an Earthship?

My mother in law has one or two 20 ft shipping containers, might they be of any use when constructing an earthship?

In the book there are some retrofitting options, could be worth investigating.

Cold air inlet

Yes, there definitely is a cold air inlet in Jamaica. Here you can see it before being buried.

On the left you see the outlet which will bring in cold air, the warm air will disappear through the sky window. I guess both air-inlet and outlet can be closed manually, when needed. Also there might be some kind of chicken wire fence to keep out small animals and large insects, at least – that’s what I would do!

Here you can see even two pipes, I think at least one functions as air-inlet.

Earthship Karuna in Kodaikanal, India

While browsing around the Earthship Biotecture website, I stumbled upon an earthship in India. Somehow it did not show on the global earthship map. It has a nice website with lots of info.

Kodaikanal is not in exactly the same climate (it is Aw, w standing for dry winters), but it is close enough to be an interesting reference. As you can see in the first picture, the ground is wet and orange – just like Yaounde!

A thing that strikes me directly is the circular shape, just like the one in Jamaica, it will also have a dome roof. This seems to be the most logical setup for A climates.

Interesting to read is this paragraph:

The building is not bermed with soil since we are in a sub-tropical climate. It will be insulated around the exterior walls prior to final plastering. The roof will also be insulated with natural materials sourced locally.

So, no berm needed - that saves some work!

In the picture below you can see that there are windows which are perpendicular to the ground. This is also typical for earthships close to the equator, you do not want too much sun!

This is also interesting to see, the ‘foundation’ is ‘waterproofed’ , there is a water outlet (or air-inlet?) and a rain funnel(?). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The toilet seems to be a hole in the ground, still need to look into how this is going to work.

After looking at the earthships in Jamaica and India my first basic setup notes are:

• waterproofed foundation
• rain funnel / water-outlet (?)
• domed roof
• circular shape
• no berm
• windows, perpendicular to the ground
• skylight with air-outlet (manually operated)

I think there was a cold-air inlet in the Jamaican earthship, still need to study that one a bit more.

Earthship Jamaica

One of the earthships that might function as a reference for the one in Cameroon is located in Negril, Jamaica. There does not seem to be an official site for it, so I aggregated some data from different websites.

A good start is the website of Nadine Pauland, she helped building the earthship.

As you can see, it is quite tropical in Jamaica, just like coastal Cameroon.

Also the roof is not flat, but dome shaped. Makes sense, it is a traditional way of building in many warm countries.

Furthermore the building is following the roof its shape and is circular.

On the rooftop they installed an interesting 3 layered skylight.

Köppen-Geiger climate classification

Today I thought it might be good to look for earthships that have been build in more or less the same conditions as they are in coastal Cameroon. In high school I was taught the Koppen climate system, so I looked it up and found an official Koppen website.

As you can see on the map the climate in coastal Cameroon is defined as Af or Am, meaning: Equatorial fully humid / monsoonal. On the map you can see that there are a lot of similar areas around the world. It’s all the dark red areas that might have good reference earthships.

On the official Earthship Biotecture website there is a section containing a global overview of all eartships. When browsing it I found that there are earthships in Hawaii, Florida, Bonaire, Brazil, Jamaica and Nicaragua that might be good examples!

Earthship Cameroon

Being a fan of the earthship concept I cannot help myself stop dreaming about building one. It will not be easy to build one in the country I live (Netherlands), but my mother in law lives in Cameroon and is actually buying some land to build a house on. As a country Cameroon is much more suitable, in many ways. There is loads of sun, rain, cheap labor,  less red tape related to building permits, etc.

So, it is now my task to convince her to build an earthship. A bit selfish maybe, but I’m sure she’ll be very happy with it in the end. After all, at the moment she has to pay for crappy water and electricity service, is cold in the wet seasons and too warm in the dry seasons. All solved when living in an Earthship: cost to build is the same as for a conventional house, but cost to live is much less and you’re self-sufficient!

She’ll visit us for Christmas, so that will be a good time to talk about it and visit our local Earthship Zwolle and maybe even go visit the one in France.

This picture was taken during a visit to the Earthship community in Taos.

First post

This blog is about being a bit greener. I try to be a bit greener and dream about owning a green home (earthship!) every night.

Over the years I gathered many bookmarks and ideas that I'd like to share with the world and secure for myself.

So, here we go!