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.