I recently got an email from Sunny Tsai, a Chinese professor of architecture (now retired) with an update on a lovely meditation dome he and some 1400 Buddhist volunteers have just completed in Taiwan. He says that “To reach my idea of carbon reduction and sustainability, I avoided using all kinds of industrial materials and … Read more
There is a fun and free online tool for calculating the materials needed for building earthbag domes. I think that it errors on the conservative side, but this is probably a good thing. If you go to www.terra-form.org you can interact with the calculator.
From yesterday’s www.businessmirror.com written by Jonathan L. Mayuga:
CORON, Palawan—Eco-friendly earthbag homes for Supertyphoon Yolanda survivors will soon rise in Barangay Lajala, one of the coastal barangays devastated by the super typhoon in this island municipality last year.
Mayor Carla “Fems” Reyes said the island municipality is planning to construct 300 earthbag homes for those who remain homeless after Yolanda triggered a storm surge that swept away thousands of houses along coastal towns in Central Philippines.
The earthbag homes, with a floor area of 24 square meter, will have one bedroom, one comfort room and a concrete floor, according to a plan approved by the local government of Coron.
Instead of ordinary hollow blocks, a mixture of cement and soil—one part cement and seven parts soil—was used to make bricks that would be used for the walls of the house. For the roofs, doors and windows, bamboo poles or kawayan and nipa will be used.
We are always pleased to hear from people around the world about their building projects. I recently received this email, along with several photos:
“Dear Kelly I have seen your inspiring works with earthbags and am happy to inform you that I am also into green building here in Kenya. I have done a demo house using earthbags and will be going for the next level of building as an eco-friendly training school using this method. We would want to include off grid power eventually, but that is for the future. Regards, Barry Kungu”
After finishing the chicken coop described in yesterday’s post it was time to start work on the pantry/root cellar portion of the complex. I hired an excavator to dig out part of the hole and give me a head start on the project. While he was here with the machinery he also leveled an area for the rest of the building, dug an extension of the water line so we would have water next to the chicken coop, and brought in road base for inside the barn.
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