… and read the book Passive Annual Heat Storage – Improving the Design of Earth Shelters by John Hait. Should Earthships be insulated? Yes (but not in the obvious way it’s being done today). Should Earthship floors be insulated? No. Can an Earthship provide a comfortable (21c) climate using passive means during the winter season [...]
Category Archives: Earthship
Earthships and Ventilation in Cold Climates – Problem?
Ventilation and air quality is one of the last and most problematic issues I’m left with in regard to Earthships in cold climates. Cold climate is what I’ve experienced in a mild Romanian winter which includes snow cover, continuous (many weeks if not months) subzero temperatures and no sunshine (passive solar gain) for two week [...]
Is It Possible to Build an Earthship in Moist, Freezing, Expansive Clay Soil?
We have beautiful, heavy, clay-rich soil. It’s great for cob (which explains the local proliferation of cob houses), great for earthen plasters and earthen floors but it seems to pose some challenges when it comes to underground construction such as Earthships. I hope in this post to outlines the challenges and what solutions I have [...]
How to Avoid Spacer Blocks in Earthship Tire Walls
I came across these two excellent illustrations of how spacer-blocks can be almost completely avoided in rammed-tire walls. It’s one of those cool smart and simple things. It comes complement of Earthship Belgium from an excellent post on how to efficiently organize and build rammed-tire walls. Both of these solutions rely on the use of [...]
Global Model Earthship Build Animation
It seems that Earthship Biotecture have put together a wonderful animation of how a “Global Model” Earthship is built. It is beautifully executed, very educational (many subtle details) and answered a few questions I still carried with me.
Earthships and Indoor Solar Systems
Solar systems such as hot-water heaters and solar-electric panels are an almost obvious component of any Earthship. These are systems we would love to embrace but simply cannot afford to buy given their market prices. However, we can and intend to go about building our own. We have been researching do-it-yourself systems for quite some [...]
Earthships & Living Roof
Roof harvested rainwater is the primary (and often by design the only) source of water in an Earthship. One of the defining features of Earthships is therefore a sloped roof designed to collect rainwater. Water is accumulated in large underground (or sometimes indoors) cisterns, passed through a series of gradually refined filters and is then [...]
What is different about “Global Model” Earthships?
The modern incarnation of Earthships seems to be going under the banner of something Earthship Biotecture calls the “Global Model”. There is very little documentation of the “Global Model” (I’ll get to that point a bit later on in this post), so here’s what I’ve been able to piece together. I am sure there are [...]
From Hemp to Earthships
I believe and have passionately shared my belief that hemp-lime construction is one of the best methods of construction available today (at least in the Romanian climate in which we live). We were planning to build with hemp-lime and our architect designed a magnificent house for us – unfortunately we could not afford to build [...]
Tires Together
One of our core projects here at Bhudeva is building our future house. We have been doing a lot of research on sustainable and ecological construction and we have been facing many challenges in bringing existing knowledge into context for our life here in Romania. Our latest design envisions a mostly underground house that will [...]