From Phillip, one of our readers: We went to see this temple in N. Thailand. One structure was made of adobe and rice hulls bricks. The whole village helped in the project. It had 2 floors. Ground floor was dining hall. Second floor was apartment for senior monks. We also saw a toilet built separetly. … Read more
Rustic By Nature built a pallet greenhouse in Alaska with a rain gutter grow system for watering. It’s very low cost, simple and easy to build.
UC Davis designed a CoolBot cool room (excellent project for homesteaders!) using rice hull concrete for insulation and a CoolBot controller to keep farm produce fresher. The cool room paid for itself the first year and even helped make a good profit for local farmers. The rice hull concrete was poured into forms to make insulating wall boards. This blog post will briefly summarize the outcome of their project. The full report is available online for free and can be found by searching for the title of the report: Cool room insulation – UC Davis D-Lab
This method allows concrete to be pumped into place to build walls without forms. Redimix concrete is delivered to the jobsite, then thickeners and accelerators as required are injected and intermixed in the pumping line, to give the fluid concrete the zero-slump-with-workability properties that you can see here.
This animation describes how water could be used as a level during the shaping process of the blocks, used in the construction of the Giza Pyramid. The second video below shows the entire building process.
We discourage using lots of cement because of its adverse environmental impact. However, there are times when it makes sense. For instance, concrete is very useful for making strong bond beams and water resistance structures in rainy climates. Foamed or lightweight concrete such as aircrete has become very popular lately because its lighter weight reduces labor and improves the insulation value. Bricks and blocks are the defacto international building unit, so I did a search for “aircrete blocks” and found the Forterra company in the UK, who is a major supplier of these green building blocks. Their products are profiled below.