Over the past couple of years, Michael Ryan Leinweber has been working to spread the word about hempcrete, a mash of natural lime and hemp hurds that can be formed into blocks used in place of fibreglass and mineral wool.
Leinweber’s business, Gnome Homes Hempcrete, has the motto “Dream it, Build it, Live it.”
“I’ve been doing general construction since I was 14 and I got tired of hanging drywall and learning about all of these toxic materials that we make our houses out of.” Searching for natural building materials, Leinweber kept coming back to hempcrete, impressed by its many attributes including resistance to fire, mold, pests and rot.
Fire resistance is of particular importance to Leinweber, who took his first hempcrete course just prior to a devastating wildfire. “I was out there to do my thing, I learned what I learned, all these wonderful things about hempcrete, and then I came home and everything burned,” said Leinweber. “And here I was sitting on this product that I realized is a solution and remedy to living in a forest fire zone. I’ve spent the last couple years trying to figure out how to get the word out there without being too much of a disaster capitalist. It’s not about taking advantage of the issue, it’s being ahead of the issue before it becomes a problem.”
Leinweber likened a home made with hempcrete to a log home, where once heated, the walls hold and radiate heat. “It works in thermal mass… once you get that mass warm, it stays warm,” said Leinweber. “Because now your entire wall system is warm when your furnace turns off, rather than your house immediately starting to cool down because the only thing you’ve been heating is air. The wall starts to relay that energy back into the living space…”
When it’s cold out, Leinweber said a hempcrete wall creates a balance between the cold air outside and the warm mass inside, “and it actually uses that wall mass to balance the heat and humidity inside the building, so it’s warm in the winter and cool in the summer. “I like to say it’s like living in a cave above ground that you build yourself.”
Leinweber and Gnome Homes works with Hempcrete in two ways. One involves the use of pre-cast blocks and the other is a cast-in-place method “where we form against the walls of the house that’s sitting there. We ‘pour’ the entire mash in the whole house all at once,” said Leinweber. “The only thing with that is once you’ve poured it, you need six to eight weeks for that material to cure before you can finish.
“The blocks that are on my website and the idea of a pre-cast product is we create these blocks and let them cure… then we bring them to the site and install them. The advantage there is that once they’re installed we can plaster and finish them the next day.”
“I love to help people build their dream home however they want it done,” said Leinweber.
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