Earthbag Home

My friends recently built their first home on a very modest budget... wait I actually mean almost no budget! Here's a link to their website were you can see pictures of the process, from the temporary homemade yurt to their cute little, low cost, and simply constructed earthbag home.

http://asustainablelife.info/

It is neat to watch how they have progressed.

Their design brings up the issue we discussed on the Radon thread - their earthbag yurt is sitting on the ground, or better put, without an air space between them and the ground.  So I wonder how air tight this house is, it looks very tight.  And if radon or other such earth emissions will be an issue.

Anyone else have a comment?

Other than knowing the word, what is radon exactly? Or could you point me towards a good reference on the subject?

Sure, read the discussion here https://permies.com/bb/index.php?topic=947.0

That is a super sweet structure.  I'm so jealous of places that don't have as strict of codes then here in NY.  Where did they build this?

Your friends should be proud ..they built a really nice shelter. 

The yurt is nice also.  They seem to have a lot less supports for the roof then I've seen but it seems to hold up fine.

I'm not sure I'd want to have a bunch of dirtbags in my neighborhood!   

I call this design the easy yurt. I read "Mongolian Cloud Houses" and "The Complete Yurt Handbook" and knew there was no way that I was going to stitch hundreds of feet of fabric together. The main modification I would make to the design is to make the wall poles tall enough that the roof poles could lay in between them and be held in place with a loop of rope, ala the yurt handbook.