The Dutch blog Sync has an interesting article about a student who wants to promote a smarter way of building hotels. He says it is ridiculous to promote reusing your towels while on the other hand the hotel itself consumes enormous amounts of enery. He wants to ditch concrete and replace it with steel and wood.
The original article can be found here:
http://sync.nl/stalen-hotel-met-een-jasje-van-hout/
Automatic translation can be found here.
This might be an interesting technique to apply in an earthship as well: http://www.mobilewatermaker.nl/
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/
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.
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!
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
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
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.
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.
