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Light straw clay

 
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So I’ve been building with straw and I’m curious on what others think.  We had a good slip going but one wall is running around 122f internal temp.  It’s about a 13” thick wall and about 8ft tall.  It’s in a Larsen truss and the bottom is exposed and the top is exposed.  We started to vent the outside of it to keep the heat down.  Most of the other walls are running about 37 percent moisture but the temp is around 70f which is the temp outside.  Any need to be worried?  I’m guessing it’s just some decomposing happening.  At any rate it is infused with clay so I’m not sure if that adds a difference.  I’ve just heard stories of barns combusting because of straw and hay being stacked and the heat gets trapped.  Typically 1000 bales or more.
 
pollinator
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Location: Bendigo , Australia
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Hat stacks catch fire if they are stacked when the hay is too wet.
Can you provide more details of your methodology with wall construction?
\I do not understand why the wall is heating up.
 
Kyle Moss
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Sure,

So we have a larsen truss (ladder system) which hangs on the outside of the timber frame.  We put straw through a tumbler and then coat that straw with slip.  The slip is a clay mixture of clay and water, I run it thick but the straw will only take so much of that coating and the clay slip falls to a tub.  Once all this passes through the tumble we board the trusses and pack the walls.  Using a 2x6 it's smashed into the walls.  Once the wall is packed we open it to the outside.  The inside and the outside of the wall is exposed to air for drying.  I have a 4ft roof over hang, which keeps water away..BUT the question is why the wall is heating up.

The wall is pretty thick, 12" in some parts of the home, 13" in other parts so it's a rather large walls system.

The straw is heating up because it's wet, when packed I'm always around 45-46 percent moisture which is expected.  What I didn't expect was the heat, I suppose there is some sort of thing happening inside the walls causing it to heat up.  Composting because of the wet clay slip?  I've heard of straw bales being store in barns wet and then the gases created from the composting causes them to explode.

I'm just concern that the wall will catch fire but perhaps I'm overthinking this.  The walls are packed super tight and I do have a few that never even went over 100F.  Moisture has fallen to 15% but in the middle I'm looking at 25% which given some more time I believe will dry out to about 1-20% mark.  These walls are fine and pretty much have harden to concrete feel. This one wall seems hot to me but maybe I can control it with a dehumidifier and seal the wall with plastic.  Just see what people experience doing this..OR have ran into.. maybe it's a normal thing.. I don't know.
 
Kyle Moss
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I would like to finish my own thread, so the walls did heat up but eventually they died out and the temperature is nothing more of that than the ambient temp now.  Moisture is falling and is around 20-30 percent so that is a huge deal.  I want to stress with 12" walls you only check moisture at the 4" mark.  I'm not sure why but that is what I was told per the ASTM, but I also found the same talk in the econest book.
 
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