“Slide show of the process of putting a ferrocement curved barrel vault on my earthbag house. Annotations and video rendering is a constant thorn in my side. We’ll go with this – you’ll have to pause the video to read most annotations. Original elevator music “the Hat” is by Doctor Dirtbag and The Baby Shakers. Thanks for watching.”
Earthbag Building
Wegain Zone: Kathmandu Earthbag Workshop
Wegain zone is vegan and no smoking non profit zone with five different organisations in the zone in houses built with earth friendly style. We have two rooms built out of mudbricks, three out of bottle and mud, one out of earthbag and now we want to build a dome out of earthbags. The main focus of this zone is to show documentaries. We have an indoor and outdoor theatre and common space for anyone who wants to share their knowledge and organise workshop for free.
Sangbo
Modular Solar Domes
There’s lots of demand for solar homes, earth sheltered homes, super energy efficient, low cost/ do-it-yourself designs and domes. This design combines all these features. The main living dome in this stellar design is flooded with light and ventilation through a 12’ south facing arched window wall. Plexiglass skylight and ferrocement eyebrow windows (optional) provide additional daylighting and solar gain in lofts. Alcoves provide space for baths, walk-in closets, pantry, etc. Wood pole reciprocal roofs reduce heavy work high on the domes. Buttresses contain earth berms covered with grass, zeriscaping or edible plants. Additional domes can be joined with earthbag vaults to create larger homes in modular fashion. For instance, two domes could be joined side-by-side with south facing arches.
Deviation to an Earthbag Concept: Earthbag Firepit
“It was another great weather weekend up in WY. I got up around 2PM on Saturday and started working on stabilizing the walls with an earthbag process. Instead of buying the polypropylene or burlap bags, a landscaping supplier Weedbarrier.com sold me a woven landscaping cloth. 15′ X 360′ of it as a matter of fact -figuring this will get me further than buying 1000 earth/sand bags at a time. So far, the process is working out well. I’m mixing approximately (5-5-1) 5 shovels full of dirt, 5 – gravel and 1 – portland cement. Once it’s all mixed (dry), you shovel it into the cloth (of varying lengths) and fold it over. From here, you flip the open side over, facing the ground – wet it down, place and shape it, then tamp it down to set it.
Ernas Mamas builds training centre with affordable materials
“Mamas making up the Ernas Women’s Association have tapped onto a creative initiative to boost their everyday income, at the same time promote tourism development within their area, when they decided to build a house using much cheaper and affordable materials which will be used as a training centre.
Affordable Lava Rock Insulation for the Far North
Porous lava rock — scoria (cinders) and pumice — is an ideal building material. We’ve covered this amazing material many times on our blog, but I just learned something very exciting. It turns out scoria is available in Alaska, British Columbia and to some extent the Yukon. All these areas have cinder cones (a type of volcano) that produce scoria. This is great news because porous lightweight lava rock is a good insulator and also fireproof, rot proof, easy to work with and doesn’t attract pests. It’s affordable if there’s a nearby source to minimize shipping costs. So this discovery makes it practical to build lightweight superinsulated earthbag houses in Alaska and Canada. Use the search engine on the right to search this site for details and example projects.