Lew Ashby

Cristo Balete wrote:

And, honestly, I've wondered why people want to live with off-gassing tires.

What do you mean by this?

I have no idea where I'm even going to get the dirt for cob to try and get started.

John C Daley wrote:I believe sand will just keep dribbling out and if you need to purchase it the economics may be ruined.
Earthbags are a practical concept, do you have you have suitable soil on site?
What size are you looking at building?
What is your location, it helps to tell. Somebody may know the soil type or even be able to help you on site.

I wouldn't want to use soil from where i live just because I would end up with a pretty big hole in the ground, if  I lived at the foot of the mountain and owned the property I could maybe use my own but that's not the case, and again I don't have the time to spend bounding each tire for 20-30 minutes full of soil. Earthbags is an idea I have considered but I need to do a little more research, I have no idea how expensive it is or how it holds up, but I think it should hold up fine especually with copy around it on both sides. I live in Tennessee about an hour from the city of Chattanooga.

I've been looking at cob houses for a while and with cob I'm also considering an earthship design. One of my setbacks is using tires which also led me to creating a post about using hay bales instead. The biggest reason that I'm hesitant to building an earthship house is the amount of labor involved in filling the tires. When I watch videos and read books on the topic they always fill each tire with dirt and pound it with a sledgehammer repeatedly, per tire. I have a full time job(something I want to free myself of via natural living) and I drive 45 minutes one way, so roughly and hour and a half a day to and from work, so using tires is something I just don't see myself having time to do. A few weeks ago I was showing a friend cob and earthship houses on the internet, he was in the army years ago and he immediately mention how they use to build tire bunkers and fill them full of sand. That gave me an idea, sand doesn't really need pounded/packed as it's already really fine. I could order a few loads of sand and fill each tire with it really speeding up the process. Is there any reason sand wouldn't work? Do you see an drawbacks to using sand in the tires? While we're here, what about earth bags as opposed to dirt filled tires?

Currently living in a single wide and working in an unfulfilling job. I want to be able to pend more time around family, doing things that interest me, and live a little closer to nature. One of my objectives in achieving these goals to live in a mortgage-less earthen home. Cob has my full attention and I'm also really interested in some of the features I see in earth ship homes (catching & reusing water from the sky, solar panels & wind power, maybe a greenhouse) but I don't like the idea of using tires. I have a full time job, single dad, and I drive about 45 minutes one way to work each day, so roughly an hour and half of driving, and I think all the packing tires with dirt row upon row is just something I'm not going to be able to get done. I am however interested in cob alone, or maybe cob with hay bale centered walls. Does anyone know how good/effective this is? How is it compared to other solutions? Would you put hay bales in the center or would you opt for cob alone? Thanks.

Thanks everyone. As far as powering appliances goes I'm just trying to learn and don't want to sink too much money into it, nor do I have a lot to sink. I think right now I want to see what I can do with a few panels getting the most important things off of grid dependence, namely the fridge/freezer, and then slowly grow from there. One question, I noticed several of you mentioned a generator, I'm not planning on going off grid right now, maybe after I build a cob or earthship house but not just yet so would I really need a generator?

I mentioned that I was wanting to have the solar/wind power feed energy into a battery and then have the house, or at least a few appliances from the house then feed from that batter. You said that the conventional setup is to have the energy from the solar/wind go directly to the house with only the excess going to the battery. Since I'm not getting of the grid just yet, would that setup cause power from my power company to keep feeding the battery that is really only there for the solar/wind? Thanks all.

Ultimately I want to build a cob house with some earthship features (catching & reusing rain water, solar/wind energy, etc...) but I currently live in a single wide. I would like to go ahead and test out solar and wind energy but I don't want my appliances to use that energy directly, I am wanting to route the energy captured from solar panels and wind to a batter and then have my house feeding off of that battery. Can anyone point me in the right direction for this as I know nothing about it? I need recommendations on good but cheap solar panels, vertical wind generators, the correct batter(ies) I'll need, and how to get all this working together. Any suggestions? Thanks.