So I have the headache from hell, and I wasn’t able to finish the disabled women athletes post. I’ll try to get it up on Monday. In the meantime, environmentally friendly housing has been on my mind. These links are from two old posts I did last year:
Cob Houses
Pic from:Welsh Youth Forum on Sustainable Development
Useful links
1.How to build a Cob House (with loads of pictures)
2.How to build a cob house, (another website)
3.The Hand-Sculpted House, A Practical and Philosophical Guide
4.Building with Cob, a step-by-step guide
5.Cob Works: Company that helps you build one
6. Advantages and Disadvantages of Building With Cob
7.Green Home Buildings:Cob Houses
9.Tons. Of. Pics. Seriously. Its a HELL of a gallery
Earthships (GLEE!!!!! I want one of these!)
More Earthship Informational Videos on Youtube
Advantages and Disadvanatages of Earthships
Article in Wired that breaks down the concept
dirt cheap builder: books, dvds available to teach you how to build homes cheaply and sustainably
Real estate listing of available earthships
Informative article in The Guardian:What a load of rubbish
John Kejr’s Earthship blog-get listings, ask questions find out how to make glass bottle bricks…
Container Homes
Container Homes in London
SG Blocks Container Homes in the US
Informative Article with cool pics
And now a word from our sponsor…
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Alternative Housing: Otherwise known as “I want an Earthship!”
Outstanding collection of links on a topic I have as a hobby. Thanks!
Both of those things have the same problem – they’re both for climates that don’t suffer from icy winters… not that Wales is terribly balmy, but the article made it clear that a Cob house is an untested approach in climates with blizzards.
Likewise, the earthships are made in New Mexico.
I’m curious about approaches for upstate New York or Minnesota.
Silenced is Foo, the traditional ugly-ass 70’s underground house were developed mostly in Minnesota and central Canada. They don’t really have to be ugly. The cheapest modern underground house ever was developed for rural Idaho: http://www.undergroundhousing.com/structures.html
You can also do straw bale in an icy climate – there’s quite a bit of it in Wisconsin, I know, and Missouri – they don’t get quite the temperatures we do, but they do get quite a bit of snow.
Underground building here has the benefit of being safer in tornados, too.
This is a topic near and dear to my heart, which I researched extensively before building my own home.
Silenced is Foo is right. These designs are climate-dependent. That means that they are excellent in some climates (like New Mexico) and disasters in other climates (Minnesota).
Essentially, thermal mass is wonderful as long as it has the thermal capacity to weather the times when the temperature is too hot or too cold to be comfortable. When the time of extended cold or heat exceeds the ability of the mass to “charge”, what you have is not something comfortable at all.
Well, in the upper tier of the US, you can go months without dipping into the comfort zone. And we usually measure the thermal capacity of a thick wall in hours. If it’s really, really thick, we might measure in days. To store heat for months is possible, but it takes more planning than a thick wall, and there’s a lot of debate even in the funky green building community as to whether it’s worth it in most cases.
So, I’d happily live in an earthship in Arizona. I’d happily live in one in Minnesota, too… in the summer and autumn.
The same goes for cob houses, because cob houses typically store less heat than earthships. They work as a vernacular architecture in the British Isles because those coasts get cold, but typically not for long, sustained periods, and because they have other virtues than thermal performance: inexpensive materials which are locally available. No one can cut you off from your ability to maintain your housing when you get it out of the local ground, field, and cow.
Certainly, but straw bale is a different animal. Straw bale has significant insulation, sandwiched in between two layers of mass (1-6 inches of stucco, typically). It can work very well in cold climates. It’s an effective combination in any moderate climate, and also in cold or warm climates, if you get the other details right. Straw bale is only a wall system. There’s still the orientation and how to maximize or minimize solar input, and the roof, and the foundation, and the windows and doors.
For all modes of building, the devil is in the details, and you need to understand the consequences of the choices you make. If you build a house yourself without self-educating at least to an associate’s degree level, and it turns out really well, then you got really lucky.
Grace
the best alternative home site that I’ve found to date is:
http://www.logicalhomes.com
absolutely stunning shipping container buildings that are beautiful, makes me want to live in california