Musicians and Earthships

I've heard that one of the things about living in an Earthship (or an Earthship-inspired home, as it were, but to save my fingers a lot of typing I'll just say "Earthships" and with apologies to Mr. Reynolds and his legal team I hope y'all will know what I mean) is you have to throw out the mentality of everything being tightly controlled, immediately available as-much-as-you-want on tap, etc. because really you're part of an ecosystem, a living thing, with its natural cycles and fluctuations, ebbs and flows.

Cool, love it, I'm already there mentally.

But delicate wooden and metal objects such as musical instruments, that require ambient temperatures and humidity levels be kept rather constant, do not have this kind of flexibility. So I wonder: how do musicians store their instruments if they live in Earthships?

Maybe they choose a different form of habitat that suits the instruments/.

John C Daley wrote:Maybe they choose a different form of habitat that suits the instruments/.

In other words, musicians are precluded from living in Earthships?

Hi Ned,
I do not think it would be too much of an issue. Many lower level musicians have instruments that are cheap enough to take the changes or be replaced easily. For the professional level musician, most instruments are kept in cases which do provide some level of temperature and humidity control. Naturally they are exposed to all sorts of conditions when transported and played for various gigs. If the instruments can survive being transported in all sorts of weather, I think they would be fine in an earthship which does not tend to have extremes if I understand them properly.

Matt McSpadden wrote:Hi Ned,
I do not think it would be too much of an issue. Many lower level musicians have instruments that are cheap enough to take the changes or be replaced easily. For the professional level musician, most instruments are kept in cases which do provide some level of temperature and humidity control. Naturally they are exposed to all sorts of conditions when transported and played for various gigs. If the instruments can survive being transported in all sorts of weather, I think they would be fine in an earthship which does not tend to have extremes if I understand them properly.

Thanks for the thoughtful answer Matt.

I'm a "lower level musician" --an amateur/hobbyist-- and although I didn't pay thousands of dollars for any of my instruments, I paid enough (or put enough work into making them) that they would be nontrivial to replace. In my experience, an instrument can survive about +-10˚F from room temperature for up to a few hours without any serious damage. My understanding is that earthships  undergo even wider fluctuations than this, for much longer than just a few hours. At the very least this would mean instruments constantly going out of tune, and at most it could mean permanent damage to the instruments. (And I have not yet touched on humidity, mainly because I'm less familiar with the numbers, but the same principles apply.) That would be a near-intolerable risk to me with my instruments, and probably a dealbreaker for a professional musician.

You are correct that instrument cases mitigate atmospheric changes, but only to a degree and only for so long. It makes me wonder if you could cheaply build one room inside an earthship that was more carefully controlled. If it was not too big a room (12x12 feet, say, with 8 foot ceilings) it shouldn't take too much power to circulate conditioned air and run a de/humidifier. I wonder if anyone's done it. (Musicians deserve sustainable living too!)

Musical instruments survive just fine in damp Ohio, and the arid Utah desert. They survive the high humidity and low ambient temperatures of Central California.

Earthships seem much more stable than the large range of daily temperature and humidity swings in my stick-built abode. Humidity levels vary widely during a day, depending when I turn on the evaporative cooler.  Despite all those daily, weekly, and seasonal changes, I rarely tune my guitar. After transporting an instrument,  I might tune it before giving a public performance, but not for day-to-day use at home.

I'll take your word for it Matt, but are you saying conventional stick frame houses have wider temperature and humidity swings than Earthships? I have always heard it the other way around, that people who want to live in Earthships should expect wider temperature and humidity swings than what they're used to in a conventional stick frame house.

Ned, with all respect, are you sure this isn't a tempest in a teacup?

I've been known to strum a chord or two, and warble along in my gravelly voice. And I have a rather eccentric collection of acoustic and electric guitars, many of which I've restored to playable condition. And I live in a place with massive shifts in relative humidity between summer and winter.

The acoustics with solid wood tops are particularly sensitive to relative humidity -- some literally change their setup and in extreme cases the fretboards shrink. So any that I care about live in hard cases. During our very long and very dry winters, humidifiers are placed in the cases on a casual but regular schedule. This has proven effective.

Temperature (as long as well above freezing) doesn't matter all that much to wood and the glues that hold instruments together. It's all about the humidity relative to temperature.

And yes I have a couple of tough-as-nails laminated top instruments that go out into all weathers, damp and freezing, and give live music to people around a blazing fire. I have to rebuild them on occasion, but they bring joy to me and others. Live music rules! Crawl back under your rock Spot***!

Ned, there maybe a few lessons in life coming with this topic for you.
1

In other words, musicians are precluded from living in Earthships?

  I think this one may go under the category of 'self exclusion', if it actually happens.
Much the same reason may apply to bag pipers in Submarines.
2

are you saying conventional stick frame houses have wider temperature and humidity swings than Earthships?
  I have always heard it the other way around, that people who want to live in Earthships should expect wider temperature and humidity
  swings than what they're used to in a conventional stick frame house.

If I hear or read anything contrary to my expectations I always ask for knowledge details of the person making the claim.
I believe a lot of others would be equally surprised as I am about that claim.
One reason is the " thermal mass' which is covered in a separate topic.

I've been a professional musician off and on for over forty years. I have some moderately sensitive instruments and they have fared just a bit worse in a relatively modern (mid 90s) stick house in a temperate climate than they did in the desert where temperature and humidity hit extremes. But really, the only thing I've had trouble with in recent years has been bows. Both of my violin bows just spat all their hair at the ferrule this year and it's really annoying. I keep the violin and viola in our bedroom, as it doesn't seem to fluctuate as much there. All the guitars and the Hammond live downstairs and the problem I've had there has mostly been mold on the cases.

Any earth dwelling that I'm aware of will most likely have less variation over the short term. You will see the seasonal changes, but those happen slowly and this is usually fine for wooden things. It's rapid shifts, especially the sort induced by forced heating, that cause grief. My mother had an Italian cello from the early 1700s that had been stored in an abandoned mine near Tucson for decades, and then "discovered" in the 1950s. As soon as it came out of that stable environment into the desert surface air, the cracks started. I still remember all the trips to the repairman.

When I was in high school and switched to viola, we decided to buy one built by a local luthier. He used woods from the western US in the theory that they might be a better fit for the climate than the traditional European timber. My mother ended up getting a cello made from the same pieces of spruce and maple (he planned on making an entire string quartet, but one of the boards had a defect so there was only a single violin and I think we know where it ended up). Both of our instruments have done well and had no structural issues, and they're closing in on half a century.

Thanks for the replies, everyone!

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:Ned, with all respect, are you sure this isn't a tempest in a teacup?

The other day I was doing two things I do almost every day: 1) playing guitar and 2) daydreaming about the house I want to one day build. And I realized in all the videos I'd seen about earthships (which is every video I could find) I never once saw a musical instrument lying around inside. So I got curious, and then after I'd signed up here I realized this was a place I could ask my question. I did want to make sure all my fears and doubts were settled, and I hope it didn't come off as being argumentative.

John C Daley wrote:Ned, there maybe a few lessons in life coming with this topic for you.

And since I'm new here let me state up front that I will never to come here to pick a fight. I am here to learn--I'm here for the lessons!--and I appreciate your help.

John C Daley wrote:If I hear or read anything contrary to my expectations I always ask for knowledge details of the person making the claim.

In this case I did not have an opportunity to ask for more knowledge details from the person who made the claim (about indoor temperature fluctuations) since I saw her in a video on Youtube, but I can tell you she was a woman representing an organization called Earthship Nebraska, and I thought she came off as credible. If you want I can try to find the video.

I also thought I read something similar in an old thread here ("Earthship woes", I think?) before I joined, with the person making the claim appearing to be someone who had actually built/lived in earthships. But it's possible I'm getting different memories confused.

Phil Stevens, thanks for your account as well. The combined information in this thread has set my mind at ease about the question, at least.

Hi Ned,
This is definitely the place to ask questions like this. For what its worth, there are people on here with far more musical experience than me, and far more earthship experience than me. I have a $300 guitar that I play around on occasionally. I have often lived in old houses where the temperature could swing perhaps 40 degrees F on a winter day. I might have to re-tune it, if its been sitting for a while. We let the temp get low overnight, and then during the day the furnace brings it back up, and the sun coming through the windows even more. Humidity too can swing based on the amount of showers and cooking and how your house was built. I live in Maine and the houses have quite a bit of change during various seasons. I've not researched earthships extensively, but I understand they are semi-underground and well insulated. Generally speaking this would slow down the temperature swings as has been mentioned. At the same time, I can imagine if someone was not using any kind of HVAC at all, that even in an earthship there might be temp swings in the front, with all the windows.

I think the consensus here is that you will probably have temp and humidity swings wherever you are, in whatever kind of house. We do our best to reduce or slow this from happening, and do our best to deal with the rest.

Thanks Matt, yeah that makes sense. Currently in my late 1970s stick-frame split level, I keep most of my instruments in my basement office, which also happens to be the mechanical room. That is probably the most temperature-stable part of the house, rarely falling below about 65˚F and rarely rising above 70˚F no matter what time of year, and the reasons are obvious.

Solipsistically, based on this, logic dictates that earthships should also be very temperature stable--it's just that a few of the accounts I heard run to the contrary. Maybe because of the passive heating/cooling systems in earthships being (again, according to anecdotes I've heard) so powerful, maybe combined with the fact that earthships tend to be much smaller than my 2000sqft house?

But yeah either way this thread put my fears and doubts basically to rest. Thanks again.