Many of our readers long for building a home on their own land, but the high cost of land often makes the dream impossible. One option is to seek out remote rural land. This is not workable for everybody, that’s for sure. The conditions can be harsh, and I’m not going to give anyone the impression that this route will be easy. I’m just saying its one option to look into if you’re serious about going off-grid. There are remote places in NM, for instance, (and other western states) where land is very inexpensive. You might be able to buy a small lot for $2,000-$5,000.
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Planta Baja Domes
“The result is spectacular. Formal quality is unique, and the thermal and acoustic insulation are extraordinary.” Source: EcoDOME Casas Ecologicas
Small-scale Biogas Plants
Our blog focuses on low cost, sustainable ways of building homes with local resources. It’s equally exciting and practical learning about alternatives to costly centralized grid systems (electrical, gas, sewer, water) that tend to lock people into the system and make them vulnerable to price controls. Biogas is one of many renewable energy systems that provide greater independence at very low cost. Biogas is especially practical in rural areas where running power and gas lines are cost prohibitive. Distributed systems such as biogas and other biofuels, solar water heaters, wood stoves, solar ovens, etc. located at or near the source typically keep functioning during times of emergencies. When a whole city or region is without power, water and sewer during a blizzard, your family can be safe and snug.
Why I am Redoing the Theme of the Site
Sorry for the bit of chaos as I am redoing the site. There are thousands of WordPress themes available and the last one we were using was slower than this and it also had some coding that enabled the site to be hacked a couple of times recently. So a change was needed. There are … Read more
Have You Had Any Trouble At This Site?
I have been emailing with someone who has been having problems with this site. When I asked her what exactly, she wrote me: unable to cut and paste. the error message reads (from Internet Explorer) “a script error has occured at this website and may cause your computer to run more slowly. do you want … Read more
Moving from WordPress.com to this Self-Hosted WordPress Site
Recently WordPress.com shut down the website we had before this one, earthbagbuilding.wordpress.com, after it was seen as spamming. We emailed them and said we were doing our best to stay within all their guidelines and within a few hours a human restored the site and apologized, saying that somehow the site had tripped some filter they had and had not been human-reviewed.
Well, it was mighty nice to be back up… and we decided it was time to move to a self-hosted wordpress site, where we would have more control and could monetize the site. I realize that most readers won’t care but for the geekier ones among you, or others who will be doing something like this sometime, here is what we did:
1. We decided that since so many of the posts are moving beyond earthbag building, a more general name would suit us. After batting around quite a few domain name ideas, we registered this one, www.naturalbuildingblog.com — for two years, to get a little more credit with the search engines.
2.We signed up for an account at Bluehost.com. (That is an affiliate link, which means that if you sign up there through that link I will make a commission at no cost to you.) I have another account with them and when some of my WordPress sites were hacked last year, I got such excellent customer support on the phone from them (not outsourced overseas) that I am in the process of moving my other sites off Hostgator to Bluehost.