Ned Harr

Nick Williams wrote:That math doesn't work out, you're multiplying feet by inches. 50*12.5/12=52 sq ft. Not nothing, but definitely not a whole tiny house.

Oops, you are correct. Good catch!

This is advice I try to give myself, and try to remember to take:

The more you learn about construction, the less you will attach to any one particular method or material, and the more you will allow the location and the process and context to inform the decisions. These don't wrestle the decisions away from the guiding principles or sensibilities entirely, but all of them must communicate.

Keep learning and experimenting, and keep an open mind!

If you can, visit different kinds of "natural built" homes or structures, and pay attention to details there. What problems does it look like the builders had, and how did they overcome them? How do they solve or prevent the sorts of problems found in conventionally-constructed buildings? What lessons from conventional construction translate well to natural buildings? What do natural builders have to do that is completely different? Are there hidden costs about the natural buildings that videos or articles don't show? Etc.

Mike Haasl wrote:As I understand it, ice dams are primarily caused by air leaks from the house up into the attic that warm the roof deck and melt snow.  That snow melt runs down the roof until it hits a colder section of the roof deck, typically over the eaves.  There it freezes, forming a dam.  

So you can yell at your roofer all you want but the problem stems from a lack of good air sealing between the house and the attic.  Or heat from other hot things in the attic like a chimney or heating unit.

This is accurate; as a home inspector we are trained to look for ice damming or conditions that could lead to ice damming, and those conditions are exactly what you said: insufficient thermal barrier between conditioned space and attic space. The solution is to better insulate the conditioned space

There is a second cause of ice damming, which is when attic spaces are not properly vented. Due to the stack effect, relatively warm air can accumulate under the roof decking even if that warmth did not originate from inside the conditioned space. To prevent that you need nice big openings down low (i.e. in the eaves/soffits) for cooler air to enter and plenty of openings up high (i.e. near the ridge) for warmer air to escape. Best practice is to use soffit vents that are 100% perforated (they look kinda like pegboard, but made of aluminum) and ridge vents instead of just box vents or gable vents.

This is also a more "permie" solution because it uses simple physics and no moving or energized parts, unlike heat tape along the low edge of your roof which requires an extra energy input and is prone to failure and other issues (in addition to being a dead giveaway, when it comes time to sell your house, that you had ice damming problems).

Judith, I also suggest going through your phone’s settings and turning off background data and background permissions on most apps, though there are a few system apps you usually have to leave those things on for, in order for your phone to work properly. Certainly turn it off for any apps you personally downloaded unless you specifically know why it needs background data.

Often the app gives the company more insight into your activity (i.e. it's a corporate surveillance bug). Whereas through the browser they only know what you clicked on, what pages you looked at, and for how long, and maybe other stuff you've navigated to in your browser, with an app they can potentially see everything else you do on your phone and also where you go.  (Transmitting all this back to the mothership in realtime definitely doesn't use less data.)

They try to entice you to download the app by giving it more features, or a smoother customer experience, than the website. Most people fall for that.

John C Daley wrote: you are building an earthship, space should not be an issue.
When you think about we are talking about 4 or 6 inches across the building, its negligable!

Straw bale walls are what, 18” thick? 24”? Maybe more if you want them higher. That’s thicker than a conventional wall by at least 12.5”. There are a few ways to find out approximately how much square footage that eats up, but as a rough estimate you multiply the strawbale wall perimeter in linear feet times the thickness of the wall. If your equator-facing wall is 30 feet wide and sticks out 10 feet from the berm, that’s 50 linear feet. 50 x 12.5 is 625, so you’d lose approximately a Tiny House worth of space, or need to expand your footprint by that amount to keep it. (That’s if that wall is only like 8 feet tall, but I’ll bet you want it taller; strawbale has to be 5 and a half feet tall for every foot thick, according to what I’ve read.)

Below is a short list of stuff that turns me away from strawbale, in no particular order.

When I say "expensive" I mean not just in terms of money but also in terms of time and/or headache, the environment, etc. as applicable:

1. The labor (as you said). Labor always seems to me like one of those things that is consistently a lot more expensive than expected.

2. I worry about rot in strawbale, especially if it's built by someone without a lot of experience doing exactly the kind of construction called for (in your case, both Earthships & strawbale).

3. Straw bale makes sense in certain places, less sense in others. Which kind of place are you in? Depending on your location, it might be a lot less expensive to use a different material that is more readily available locally.

4. Strawbale walls are a significant gobbler of square footage unless the house's footprint is expanded accordingly; expanding the footprint will make the foundation (and most everything else) more expensive, especially it's made with expensive ingredients.

And then for the retaining wall at the rear...I need a wall material to replace the tires as I want to experiment with an alternative to tires. But I don't think adobe or cob or rammed earth are suitable for applications that might get wet

Maybe it would help to look at the berm as a compromise?

If you install everything that needs to be there and do it absolutely right, then you get thermal mass without water intrusion, possibly even without humidity or mold problems, and your thermal mass helps regulate the temperature so you don't have to use a lot of energy to heat the house.

But in exchange you probably can't afford to be too experimental or picky with the retaining wall. I don't like the tires either, personally; I think I remember seeing that earthbags are a popular alternative but they usually end up being filled in with a lot of concrete in the end anyway (in fact, tires do too). So I would probably build mine out of concrete block or something a bit more "proven".

This all kind of leads up to the question, why are you berming at all? Might it be simpler not to, and find some other way to get a bunch of thermal mass? You could also do all four walls strawbale that way and avoid the joint issue.

Cases can mostly be divided into the "hard" and "soft" subspecies.

The "hard" variety are typically heavier and usually need to be laid flat to be opened.

The "soft" variety often resemble guitar-shaped backpacks or bags. You can slip guitars into or from them more sneakily.

If you need more protection for your guitars, maybe because they are transported a lot, or are collectables, or you need to keep them safe from rowdy people, and you don't think having to take the case out, lay it flat, and open it will impede your guitar playing, then go with a hard case.

If you sometimes throw a guitar in the back of the car and head to your buddy's house but otherwise it mostly sits in a corner, go with the soft case.

All my instrument cases are soft, but padded. (They make soft cases that are really more like cloth bags--I avoid these.) I look for lots of handy pockets, backpack straps, and sturdy construction especially where pieces of fabric are joined together, but I don't like to spend more than about $20 or $30.

Whatever case you buy, make sure it is appropriate for your type of guitar (acoustic or electric), matches its size, and is designed to accommodate its shape.

It seems "vegetarian" is prepended as a description of who the coffee is intended for, or perhaps who profits by it, rather than of the coffee itself. Similar to:

Gay cinema (movies themselves have no sexual preferences)
Chicken wire (also technically a "vegetarian" product)
Girl Scout cookies (not made from actual Girl Scouts)

Edit to add:

Okay I got curious and did a quick DDG search on "what is vegetarian coffee". I got a result for "what is vegan coffee" that basically said it's coffee that is processed using methods that don't harm animals. I still am not sure what that means: how are they defining "harm" and "animals"? And so it reinforces the "it's just marketing" answer which I was riffing on above.