Jeff Stagg

This is a step forward IMO. If I had a choice between the Tesla and any other battery bank with cost being equal, Tesla would win hands down. My Rolls Surrettes are only a couple years old, but once they go - I will happily replace with the Power Wall.

Dawsonville Ga. saying hi to Y'all! If you are in N. Ga. you might want to checkout the North Ga Permaculture Guild. We Hold potlucks and get together's pretty regularly - always looking to meet new Permies. Check us out!

I have Yankee blood too - born and raised in PA. I have always had A/C and felt it a necessity for summer survival. When I decided to retire from Corp/Am at 43 and homestead for the rest of my life I knew I had to toughen up. My whole purpose for building a totally off the grid bale is to escape wage slavery. I designed my home not just to be efficient, but to be as bill free as possible. A/C, central heat, a dryer, a dishwasher, etc are all luxuries the poor homesteader cannot and does not want to afford. The bodies ecothermic cooling system adjusts to a more natural environment very quickly. Cold showers year round also help the bodies natural systems work even better. I wear my independence from artificial systems as a badge of honor - it is living true and it feels great. Honestly - 73F is not really roughing it anyways. I used to keep my A/C set at 72F and it ran all the time.

I built a cob pizza oven last summer and do enjoy cooking in it, but find that the 1 1/2 hour warm up time is not always conducive to my schedule. I got a nice gas/charcoal grill unit with a side burner that I do the majority of my summer cooking on. My kitchen oven is a non-electric Brown Stove works propane model - best oven I have ever had - cooks breads and pizzas wonderfully.

Yes - absolutely no A/C. Being on a an off the grid PV system - A/C does not really fit into the plan. I have tried using a de-humidifier, but have not been impressed with the results. I have been burning scented candles in the basement to reduce humidity and to freshen up the air down there and that seems to work better than anything else I have tried. Currently 85F outside at 4pm and we are sitting at 73F inside. Who needs A/C?

Brian - I appreciate you taking the time to analyze the impact of skylights on overall roof efficiency. I agree with everything you mentioned. I do have Velux skylights with the proper metal roof flashing kit and am 100% certain water leaks will not be an issue. With everything said on keeping a home cool in the Southern summer heat, my personal experience has been that cooking indoors is the biggest killer to keeping a straw bale home cool than anything else. Because of my homes design with very high vaulted ceilings - any daytime heat rises out of the day time living space on the ground floor up onto the ceiling and is easily vented out via the skylights once the sun sets. The homes interior temperature is then re-calibrated to within 2 degrees of whatever the night time lows happens to be. The windows and skylights get closed and this temperature is held all day with no more than a 5 degree rise in interior temps. It is rare, even in the hot Georgia summer, for my interior temps to exceed 75F, unless I bake a loaf of bread or make pizzas - then all bets are off. A 500F oven has a peculiar way of killing a cool straw bale!

I do not notice much heat gain from the skylights - they are very good quality and heavily glazed to reduce UV rays from heating the interior. The pitch of the roof being a 10/12 also prevents the sunlight from directly penetrating. The real upside to them is that they provide diffused interior lighting throughout the house during the day/moonlit nights reducing energy consumption on lighting and they allow the cool night air to fall into the home from the ceiling, like a waterfall of cool air. I feel without the skylights that the house would not cool down as much as it does at night - this is quite evident on stormy nights were I keep then closed and the house barely budges off its daytime highs despite all windows being open. I think it is fair to say that whatever inefficiencies the sky lights may have during the day is more than made up for by the amount of venting and cooling the allow during the evening. In the winter they are more valuable than one would imagine, with the wood stove occasionally belching smoke during reloads/restarts, a cracked sky light quickly clears the smoke out of the house. We also keep them cracked slightly on those days were it is too warm during the day to have the wood stove going, but we keep it going because night time temps are dropping below freezing. Just a small crack keeps the house from over heating and keeps it quite nice inside.

Hi Brian,

Glad you enjoyed my little write up. It could be attributed to the increased air tightness, more than likely it is a combination of being tighter and having more thermal mass. Whatever the case - it is working! A reason for the interior humidity could be attributed to the fact that I am still plastering the interior and it takes about 3-4 weeks for the plaster to fully dry. Since I am plastering all summer - I always have walls at different stages of drying and thus putting moisture into the air. Next summer the plastering inside will be complete and I will be able to get a better read on interior humidity. Take care.

I live in North Georgia and have been in my bale for about a year and a half. My biggest concern when designing the house was keeping it cool without A/C, as my home is also on an off the grid PV system with limited battery storage. To achieve passive cooling I first designed the home with a wrap around porch properly angled to block the suns rays from reaching the windows. I opted for a vaulted ceiling with 4 opening skylights (no attic) to help vent the ceiling. I super insulated the ceiling with blown in cellulose to achieve R-65. The exterior roof is un-painted galvalume, this has a reflective quality to it and I believe helps reduce heat gain through the roof. I am using clay based cob like plaster to coat the bales up to 6" thick. I have noticed an extreme difference this summers with 80% of the interior plastering completed vs last summer when only about 30% of the interior was plastered. The thermal mass of the clay holds the coolness all day. My daily summer routine is to close up the house by 8am and then open it up around 8pm. The nighttime temps normally go below 70 and have recently dipped below 60 allowing me to get the house down to the mid sixties by morning and keeping it under 72 before opening it up again. The real challenge is humidity and overall dampness. The humidity inside the house is usually 5 - 10% less than the exterior humidity. I attribute this to the clay plaster absorbing some of the moisture as we keep multiple ceiling fans going to circulate the air and move it over the tile floors and clay walls. But even at that, humidity levels are typically 75% or higher inside the home throughout much of the summer. We love those occasional dry spells but they are few and far between during the Ga. summers. Now winter time is a completely different story - we heat the home with a free standing wood stove and it keeps the house mid to upper 70's all winter long with interior humidity of less than 20%. Winter is my favorite time of year to be living in the bale - it is so warm and toasty you can barely stay awake!

Hi Phillip,

Congratulations on deciding on post and beam straw bale construction. I have been in my bale for about a year and a half now and it is truly a wonderful experience being in a natural home that is so well insulated and comfortable. I built my home myself, but I had my it professionally designed and then certified by a third party structural engineer before going to my local planning office. This service cost me about $2K US, but I found the piece of mind as well as ease of permitting well worth the money. I do not have any experience with tires as a foundation, I opted for a basement on my home, but I would proceed somewhat cautiously. For one, straw bale homes are very heavy - much heavier than a conventional home and if you are going the timber frame route, you will be astonished by the amount of lumber needed to handle the loads and prevent racking due to wind. My concern would be the tires shifting under the weight of the home or the sheer of the wind. I cannot imagine anything worse than a moving foundation - this could jeopardize the entire home. Moisture and integrity of the tire walls themselves would also be concerns for me. Most used tires are past there prime and one cannot be certain how old they are or how they have been stored. Too much degradation and extreme weight could be a recipe for disaster. If I had not opted for a basement. a rubble trench foundation would have been my foundation choice. Good luck.

How is the project coming along?