Bag Material

Thermal Performance Data on an Earthbag Dome

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Awhile ago, I wrote to you asking if you had any recommendations for stabilizing our 14′ (inner diameter) scoria dome tank house which had started to fail as a result of the bags breaking down. I wanted to give you an update.

Beldar
We paid a crew last November to shotcrete it inside and out, and it is performing very well. I just wish I knew whether it was the mass of concrete or the insulation of the bags. Probably a combo. I am interested to see how it performs once the mass has heated up a bit this summer.

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Sean’s Adobe House

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sean1

Within the same alternative community as Ted’s ruins (see the previous post) is Sean’s Adobe House, also featured in my Sampler of Alternative Homes video. Sean Sands built this house about 20 years ago for less than $1,000. He used the native soil, which is an almost perfect adobe mix of about 25% clay and 75% sand. All he would do is moist the soil where he wanted to harvest adobe the night before he planned to dig it. Then he placed the damp soil in a hydraulic ram press to make compressed earth blocks. He would let these cure in the sun for a few days before building with them. Part of the walls of the house were made with old tires packed with soil.

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New FAQ’s at Earthbagbuilding.com

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The Frequently Asked Questions section of www.earthbagbuilding.com has been accumulating pertinent questions and answers for over a decade. These had been categorized into only about a half dozen pages, which had become overly long and cumbersome for finding specific information.  I finally decided to organize them in such a way that it is now much … Read more

Hyperadobe with EarthenHand

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This is one of the best videos I’ve seen in illustrating how to go about building a project. In just a few short minutes it manages to show the construction process from foundation to roof, using lots of animated portions to speed it up. There are several particularly worthwhile aspects of this 800 square foot … Read more

A Cautionary Tale

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Sometimes people send us emails asking specific questions about their personal projects, and we usually try to help them as best we can. Not long ago we got the following email with several photos attached:

earthbag dome

I came up with the idea of building my own dome here in south Morocco where I live. I got some refurbished polypropylene bags and decided to do a 5m diameter dome to provide a shelter for horse food and equipment.

I decided to use the soil from our garden which is very close to sea sand. Since this was an unstabilized soil, I decided to tie the bags very firmly at the top to prevent any sand from slipping out, and also damped the sand so it could be tamped better. I dug a trench down to half a meter that I leveled with double bags filled up with small rocks, and then started the courses of bags, with two barbed wire between each course. We went up to half a meter straight, and then started to corbel the bags inwards. We have been working for two weeks now in a team of four, and it’s getting quite high. I wasn’t planning on doing a loft, since there would be no use of it for me. I’m getting a bit worried as we are working at higher levels that the whole thing might collapse, so I thought I should give it a try asking your advice. It feels quite strong while working on it, but when tamping, you can really feel the strikes wherever you are placed up on the wall.

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