Greetings to all. We're going to be working at the land in NE GA next (Memorial Day) weekend. If anyone in the area is interested in dropping by and connecting, PM or email me.
Almost all of the counties in GA now require building code compliance, but some seem to be more reasonable than others. A lot can be done that is not specifically within codes if you have an engineer's stamp on the plans. I suppose that makes the code enforcement officials more comfortable since it puts the onus on somebody else if the place falls down. It does mean you need to be working with an architect and/or engineer to draw up plans, which means additional expense, but that's just the way it is these days. You could build on the lam, but I just don't think it's worth the risk, and even if you're planning on living off grid way out in the woods, it'll be hard to get away with. You could also limit yourself to structures classed as mobile or temporary, but that really limits your options, too.
At any rate, we've made some significant progress on the water tower in the last few months, and now have the second floor deck framed up and the subfloor down. Next step - the second floor wall and roof framing!
Just FYI - we'll be up at our land in NE Georgia Thanksgiving weekend working on the water tower. If anybody will happen to be in the vicinity and would like to drop by and meet, PM me.
Kari Gunnlaugsson wrote:doug, here is a platform plan for tipis that might give you some ideas you could adapt for a yurt...it is sectional for easy moving and could be insulated, i thought it was a clever layout.
I'm not a big fan of the bubble wrap. A layer or two of felt is really really nice. Not necessarily all that spendy (p.m. me if you'd like..), and bubble wrap isn't free either.
It would be a learning curve but i bet you could even make felt, if you get to know a sheep farmer they often have literally tons of fleece to deal with and it's not really worth anything. This is a fun video of mongolian felt making out in the country.
I don't know how long the yurt will serve for us, but when i think of all the time and resources we could free up if we never had to build a real house...well, there are a lot of other fun and good things in the world we could direct our energies towards..
Thanks for the link - that's a very cool floor design, and actually very similar to something we did years ago for floors for our SCA pavillions. Those were built more lightly, as we had to schlep them on a trailer from Florida to Pennsylvania once a year, but the same principles apply. I'd definitely be interested in finding a good source for felt. PM to be sent shortly.
Andrew Parker wrote:Buckminster Fuller proposed building a trailer with a full kitchen and a bathroom to which a tent or other temporary structure could be attached, or used as a core to build a permanent structure around. Something like that could cut down on lifestyle changes. You could use the trailer to mount solar collectors (PV and/or evacuated tube, etc.), house a generator and batteries, water tank, fuel tank, or whatever.
You might be able to quilt some wool or cotton batt insulation, rather than use felt. Foil faced bubble insulation is very popular (and reasonably priced, if you look around) with yurts, but it won't breathe like felt or some of the other options.
Once you pick your spots, prepare each site to make sure you won't have any drainage problems.
The trailer idea occurred to us, and might work for some locations, but I have a feeling that some of our preferred "homesites" might be inaccessible to a trailer. I like it in general, though. The bubble wrap idea for the yurts REALLY appeals to me. We plan on testing it on the yurt we build for temporary shelter whilst building whatever else we end up doing.
Kari Gunnlaugsson wrote:Yep, the idea has occured to me as well. Maybe a couple of good basic 'platform' sites. A few seasonal locations, winter snow access and windbreak.....summer shade. Rocket stove at the winter site, and woodshed.
The nice part would be having a really thorough spring cleaning and downsizing twice a year.
The big drawback for me would be getting too far away from the water well for part of the year.
Platforms are what we had in mind, too. Either a wooden deck that can be disassembled and moved, leaving only the piers in each location, or permanent decks in each. I imagine that would depend on my ingenuity in making the decks as "kits." The water issue is a big one, on both the input and output sides. We plan on using composting toilets (which we refer to as Jenkins boxes), so black water would not be a problem, but we'd have to plan ahead for grey water in each location. Water supply we might be able to handle via the infrastructure we plan on running from our well house/water tower to the rest of the property.
My wife and I have been fans of your work since first getting the $50 Underground House book years ago (and following it with the greenhouse and y2k books later). We have 15 acres in northeast Georgia, and originally intended to try a PSP home. Unfortunately, we let ourselves be swayed by emotions (fell in love with a particular piece of land) and bought where building codes rule. My first question, then, would be: do you think it is possible to adapt the PSP method for a residence in building code country, or would it be pointless to even try because the costs would go up so much? Even if we cannot use PSP for a residence, we're still looking at it for a root cellar type of facility. My second question, therefore, would be: do you think PSP would be suitable for such a structure in our generally warm, humid climate with relatively high subterranean temperatures?
If people can live in yurts through winters in Mongolia, I'm sure they can handle the southeastern US, with the proper materials (although those felt yurt covers can be pretty spendy). I think our biggest problem with the idea would be the necessary lifestyle adjustment rather than the physical practicalities. We're already committed to giving up as much of our useless stuff as we can, in order to live in a more sustainable (economically AND financially) way. Doing the nomadic thing would take that to a different level. It's appealing in many ways, but also intimidating.
We're considering building a yurt as a temporary shelter while we build our permanent home on our 15ac in NE Georgia. While we were contemplating yurts, a radical notion occurred to us. What if we never moved beyond the yurt stage? What if, instead of building a permanent home, we continued to live in the yurt(s), and moved them around our land periodically. It's kind of a goofy notion, but it appeals to us in an odd way. We could try out different locations on our land (which is fairly variegated), optimizing for the season or our needs, and it might even get us around some building code provisions, since the "home" would by definition be temporary, even if it only move a few hundred feet from time to time. Anyway, has anybody tried such an approach?
Yup, cattle panels do bend nicely into (big) circles. I was thinking, vis-a-vis the pond liner, that in a typical pond situation the liner is either under water or (at the edges) covered with stone or other landscaping. The roof should eliminate any concern, though.
Very cool idea, and since we're using a ton of cattle panels for fencing, we might actually have some of the materials on hand already. Are you at all concerned about UV degradation of the exposed pond liner?
Our submersible, which is down our well (which is 640' deep) is a Franklin sub-drive. Then we also have, in the same bore, a Simple Pump, which is currently hand operated (but which will get the gear motor and solar panel when I have time to install them). We'll be filling the tanks directly from one or both of these pumps (with on/off handled by float switches). I also have a simple on-demand non-submersible 12v jet pump, a Shur-Flo, that we will use for some limited distribution of water from the tanks.
We're doing something similar (see the Homestead in NE Georgia thread), in that we're building a water tower on our land. Our pumps include a grid powered A/C submersible pump (although we have no grid tie on the property yet) and a Simple Pump (to which we will be adding the gear motor and a solar set-up). Both will fill the IBC totes in the water tower, and the water will be distributed from there to the rest of the property by either gravity flow (when we have power) or a jet pump (when we don't). The main thing about getting the water into the tower, as far as I've been told, is to use one or more check valves in the supply line.
OK, so it's been a year, and I have not posted diddly regarding our progress on the homestead. Fortunately, we have been more diligent about making progress than we have about documenting it! We've connected with a wonderful architect (Howard Switzer) and permaculturist (Katey Culver) and are making some real headway on the design of the home. We also have finally made a start on the construction of the water tower. Unfortunately, we decided we would have to go with a fairly conventional construction method instead of our intended earthbags. We're just not there often enough, or for long enough at a time, to make earthbag construction practical. Once we move, the story will be different. At any rate, a pic of the beginnings of the water tower, and also of the design into which it will eventually grow are attached.
We're still very interested in connecting with folks in the NE GA area, so if you're in the neighborhood, let us know!
Have it, and love it. Yes, it can be a bit preachy at times, but it's full of enormously valuable information, ideas, and inspiraton for natural builders (cob or otherwise).
We've definitely considered light clay (which was actually developed many centuries ago in Europe and is still used somewhat commonly as an infill in Germany in half-timbered buildings). The problem we foresee with light clay, in our particular (very humid) environment, is the very lengthy drying times and the potential for mold development. The dry season, in northeast Georgia, might not be long enough (or dry enough) to allow light clay to work.
On that note, Patti Stouter has been doing some very interesting work recently with a hybrid of light clay and hyperadobe that she calls hyperwattle, and which looks very promising.
In general, I would think that for free-standing (non-bermed) walls, cob should be fine in your climate as long as it is coated with a lime paster. While the freeze-thaw cycles might not be as extreme as what you will face, cob houses (when properly coated and maintained) have lasted for centuries in very wet areas of the UK.
As for the bermed section, I'm of the opinion that putting a cob wall against an earthen embankment is lily-gilding. You already have your thermal mass in the earth you've dug into, so why build an earthen wall between you and the earth? I would probably use another method for walls below grade. You will definitely need some sort of moisture barrier for the bermed portion, regardless of the type of construction, and depending on the site may also want french drains uphill from your barrier as well.
I cut the tops off of two, and also cut them down the sides into halves, drilled holes along the cuts, and laced them back together with bulk shoelace (shoelace in bulk 144 yard rolls is cheap, strong, and just amazingly useful, by the way). These were used as potato planters for the method that involves adding successive layers of dirt to growin potato plants. The idea was that I could unlace one side and open it up clam-shell style to dump the contents and harvest. It worked OK, but in retrospect, a simple wire bin would have been better and easier.
timby wrote: Again, if they were main stream I could go to my local Home store supply and get them. I can't. So that is the point. Yes, if I make considerable efforts I can find some of these materials. However, It's hard to find anyone that is using them and understands how to best apply the material.
While that may be the point for you, it's certainly not the point for me at all. The point for me is to make the additional efforts necessary to find materials that are more ecologically (and hopefully economically) sound than what I can find in the builders' supply. If I have to call or ask around a bit to find somebody in my area to deliver a load of road base to my site, so what? It will still be miles less polluting than a comparable load of portland cement based concrete, and almost certainly less expensive to boot. If I were to limit my selection of building materials to what I could find at the local home supply store, I would have pretty much zero need (or likely desire) to read a green building message board on a permaculture forum.
For anyone interested, we've actually made some progress this year, but nothing I'd class as really fun. We now have a 40 foot shipping container on site for storage, we've had some extraneous trees cleared (which really makes it easier to feel the available spaces), and we've rethought our plans a bit. Our construction plan is now to start with a water tower - hopefully of earthbags (containing 275 gallon totes for water storage) and hopefully this year. When the weather cools down a bit, we should be able to get back to the fun bits.
In particular, in such a structure, would it be feasible to build the earthen mass and/or the bale walls to a level such that they would also contribute to the support of the roof? Would using embedded (treated) posts be a possibility?
Yes. In GA, counties have their own building inspectors, and our particular county operates under the Southern Building Code. The primary reason for using a timber frame is that it will be easier to get a variance for a non-load bearing infill system than it would for a structural system.
While we intend to build with either earthbags or cob on our homestead land in NE Georgia, we are well aware that building code enforcement may make that impossible. As a fall-back plan, we've considered using a post- or pole-framed structure to support the roof, and using earthbags or strawbale as an infill. Timber framing is not going to make our code inspector's hair catch on fire, and we can probably talk him into an alternative infill system much more easily than an alternative load bearing structure.
One idea that sort of appeals to us, should we end up having to build a redundant timber frame to satisfy code, is to use BOTH bags (or cob) and strawbales to achieve both thermal mass AND insulation. Essentially, we'd end up with a ~3 foot think wall, with earthen mass walls on the inside and strawbales on the outside (faced with earthen plaster and probably a lime coat), with the timber frame members spaced along the interface between the two wall systems. The earthen and bale walls would be notched/shaped as needed to form up against the timbers, which would be invisible, being in the middle of the wall. Barbed wire could be used to tie the strawbale wall to the earthen wall, and could tie both to the timbers as well, if need be.
Has anyone tried something like this? Anyone have thoughts on the feasibility? Would there be undue concerns about the timbers in the middle providing an entry point into the wall structure for moisture?
Sounds like it will work perfectly well. Are there any pasture or cereal crops that will definitely NOT like the intermittent sun such an arrangment would provide. e.g. does sorghum or some other thing absolutely definitely positively HAVE to have unobstructed sun from morning to night?
This has probably been covered, but I could not seem to find the right combination of keywords on the search engine ...
As we've been planning how to arrange things on our land, the topic of which areas should be pasture and which should be orchard has come up. Initially, we were thinking of running the orchard in a linear fashion down each side of our road, and separating it from the pasture with fencing. Lately, though, we've begin to wonder (having seen the quality of light and grass in some local pecan orchards) if it might not be better to scatter the orchard trees throughout the pasture instead.
As long as we put some fencing around each tree (probably wattle, which we love) to keep the sheep and/or goats off of them, the trees should be protected from girdling. It would seem from what we've seen locally that scattered trees (even if regularly placed on rather a tight grid) allow plenty of light to hit the ground for growing grass/hay or even cereals (the ancient Greeks grew barley underneath their olives). Finally, having a mixture of sun and shade in the pasture would allow our animals more choice as to where to be, which will be of particular importance in the hot Georgia summers.
Thinking about it, we tried to figure out why it's not more commonly done this way, and the only thing we could come up with is that the trees would interfere with mowing or hay gathering by large machine too much. Sicne that's not likely to be much of an issue for us, it need not really be considered. Are there other major reasons NOT to do things this way?
Sounds like your soil may be somewhat similar to our north Georgia clay! Ours is not quite so powdery, but it sure as hell is heavy enough. As a guess, I'd say it will probably be fine. My main concern would be that those fine particles are, in fact, clay and not silt. From what I've read, it can sometimes be hard to tell the two apart, but they can behave very differently when you try and build with them.
For ourselves, we plan on doing some of the soil tests found in the documents at the link below on ours, and making some test bags, this weekend (or possibly next).
Typically, the soil used in the earthbags is slightly moist before tamping, and it's allowed to cure after tamping. Using totally dry material, I think you might miss part of the process of "flexible form rammed earth" - the compression and curing - that makes it so effective. Without that step, you would be depending on the structural qualities of the bag not only during construction and curing, but permanently. In essence, you'd be building a sandbag wall, not a rammed earth structure. In that case, I definitely would NOT want PE bags, as woven PP is generally a LOT stronger.
As for the moisture barrier thing, one of the points very frequently emphasized in the earthbag (or cob, for that matter) building literature is that an advantage of earthen construction is its ability to breathe. This is one of the big contrasts of earth building with most typical modern construction, which (due to the presence of Tyvek wrap or other moisture barriers) cannot breathe. PE does not breath. Woven PP does. As do earthen or lime plasters, as opposed to cement based stucco. I suppose if your sack filling material is totally dry, it might not make much of a difference, but this seems to me to be another area where using PE bags would eliminate the benefits of building with earth to begin with. Also, unless you're building in the middle of a desert, it will be awfully difficult to achieve total dessicaton of your building material.
That said, there's probably not a single combination of bag and earth materials that somebody somewhere somewhen could not make work somehow.
Edit - just saw your additional post - the first link is to cellophane bags which would probably not stand up to a stout sneeze. The second, however, looks like the type of woven PP that is usually mentioned in the earthbag context. Personally, I'm very excited about the possibilities of hyperadobe using mesh tubing.
Even in a thicker polyethylene, you'd still have the problem of it not breathing, and the contents not curing properly. That's why woven polypropylene of the feed sack type was the initial bag of choice, and raschel mesh of the produce bag sort is possibly going to become the new (hyperadobe) standard. Yes, a big part of the advantage of earthbag over free form adobe or cob is that it is less sensitive to the precise soil mixture, but that is largely due to the structural integrity added by the bags during construction and curing. In order for that to work, though, the bags have to do their part, and I do not think that solid polyethylene will do that. As a moisture barrier, PE is great, but generally the last thing you want in an earthbag is a moisture barrier.
The book you link to, by the way, is out of print and the prices on it fluctuate a bit. It's nice to see it on Amazon so inexpensively at the moment. "Earthbag Building" by Kiffmeyer and Hunter is more easily available, and I highly recommend it. Patti Stouter's PDFs on earthbag design and construction are also excellent, and you can't beat the (free) price.
this is a big tube instead of lots of bags. It works exactly the same though, you just have two ends to seal.
Its WAY cheaper....
That's solid polyethylene tubing, not woven polypropylene. I doubt the earth mix inside would cure with any speed as the moisture would be trapped inside, and I also wonder how well it would stand up to tamping and/or barbed wire in between the courses, especially as it's only 1.5mil, which is REALLY thin stuff.
I think I'd have trouble (at least at first) with the cute factor, but not as much as I would with a rabbit. In general, I'm a wuss when it comes to slaughtering mammals ... I'd far prefer to off one that is a stranger (e.g. a deer) than one I have "known" since it was a baby. Eventually I'll learn to NOT grow attached to the ones destined for the table, but I'm definitely not there yet. Regardless, I see some BIG potential avgantages for guineas over rabbits, the biggest being their superior ability to handle heat. Rabbits in NE Georgia could be problematic in the summer, and even though there are rabbit breeds less affected by heat, I suspect that GPs would probably do better.
yukkuri_kame wrote: Thanks for the response, Doug. I am familiar with that blog. I had read a little about Prof. Inoue. The organization he works with is considered a cult by many in Japan. I do take that label with a grain of salt, because the Japanese tend to label anything outside the mainstream as a cult...and not entirely without reason as there are lots of cults in Japan. Regardless, I hope to see Prof. Inoue's domes one of these days.
Strange the way that happens. The place in India from which I'm probably going to buy a manual compressed earth block press is also (according to folks in India I've talked to) widely regarded as a cult, albeit generally a benevolent one.
yukkuri_kame wrote: How would you reinforce besides with barbed wire?
Chicken wire? Buttresses? Recycled fish nets? Rebar?
We are looking at building with earth in Japan, the mother of all seismic zones, so it is a big concern.
I'd probably be using rebar and designing in plenty of buttresses. I'd also probably stay away from corbeled domes, but that's just me - I have an instinctive (admittedly irrational) distrust of corbeled domes. If you're considering building in Japan, I'd definitely head over to earthbagbuilding.com and the associated blog on wordpress. There's a great deal of information there, including discussion of reinforcement and engineering and also a good bit on work that's been done with earthbags and domes in Japan (IIRC, by a professor Inoue).
We're going to be having a 40' ISO Shipping container (high cube) placed on our land as a storage facility in the near future, and I'm wondering about the best way to support it and keep it at least minimally up off of the ground.
The location where it will be placed is temporary, with temporary in this context probably being a span of a couple of years. The plan is for us to start construction in one are of our land with outbuildings, then build the house later in another area. As such, we'll eventually want to move the thing from one site to the next. Before we realized the placement would be temporary, we were thinking of pouring sono-tube pilings for each corner, but that seems way overkill now. I've heard people talk about just setting them on railroad ties. The ties I've been able to find locally look like I could take them apart with a hammer though, which make me wonder about using them to support that much weight. Would PT 6x6s be sufficient? Say 5 of them - one 8' one across the width of the thing every ten feet? Would I be better off with cinder blocks around the perimeter?
PaulB wrote: That would depend on where you live, The omission of barbed wire in a seismicly active or potentially active zone could prove to be a fatal mistake. A dome still requires the use of barbed wire regardless of where you live, or what kind of bags you use.
As I mentioned later in my post - I'm not building domes at the moment. Actually, I don't really see all that much appeal in them except perhaps in limited specific applications (such as the potential smokehouse I may do later). For domes though, you are correct that (regardless of the bag material or the location) barbed wire is recommended by the experts. For a vertical walled structure, the consensus seems to be that barbed wire is unnecessary, as the wall is considerably more monolithic in nature. In an area with significant seismic activity, I would be reinforcing with more than barbed wire anyway. Even in a vertical walled structure, if you want to use barbed wire between the wall courses, it is dead cheap - a quarter mile roll of 12.5ga 4 point is well under $100. We fully intend to use it in some places, such as wal intersections and around openings (which will be arched).
As I said, though, I think the most important savings with mesh bag hyperadobe as opposed to individual bags is in time, rather than money.
One possible issue with the misprint bags is availability - if they're available in the size you want/need , it will be better to buy as many as you will need in one purchase, as you never know when they will be available at that price again. Nobody plans on misprinting.
castlerock wrote: Jay,are you having a basement?Also,if I get it correctly the stem wall will just be carrying the cob wall load,not the timber frame/roof load.Is this correct??
glen
That's the way I read his post, and if we're right, then really the stem wall may in fact be bearing a heck of a lot more load than the timber frame. Cob is heavy stuff, and even lightclay is not so light.
Hyperadobe is too expensive? The material is, as far as I can see, admittedly somewhat more expensive than woven bags, but on the other hand you don't need the barbed wire, which is a slight savings. The biggest savings, though, will be in the time required. Based on what I've seen, you could potentially be building a LOT faster with hyperadobe mesh tube material than with individual sacks. Time is also money, even when you have more of it on hand than money.
Also, if you're not high on the idea of a dome, I would consider a vertical walled structure with a reciprocal frame roof. That's what we're hoping to get built this year, as we're not big on domes ourselves (although we may do one for a smokehouse later on).
Finally, I would take anyone's estimates of how many bags = how many square feet of interior space with a huge chunk of salt. There are just too many variables. Sit down with your design and do the math on how many linear feet of wall and how many courses you're going to need and be sure.
pa_friendly_guy wrote: Frank Lloyd Wright used stones that were not good for laying traditional stone walls when he built his school out west. The stone was local and cheap, but it was porous and could not be cut. He made forms, laid the stones along the edge of the forms as he poured in cement, filling the inside of the forns with as much rock as he could to save cost. By placing the rocks along the outside edge of the forms he got a produce that looked like laid stone. He used this process to make beams and small walls. I am sure you can find something on line about what he did and how he did it. The path idea sounds like a good one, and it would be alot cheaper than trying to form concrete walls and placeing the idividual stone along the forms as you pour. I guess it all depends on what you want, and how much small stone you have. Good luck
That would be my suggestion as well - use it for slipforming Nearing style.
