Here’s a natural substitute for steel rebar. It seems like this material would work perfectly with earthbag building, especially in seismic areas where additional reinforcing is typically required. Image and content below is from the Smarter Building Systems website. “Zeebars Basalt Rebar is an alternative to steel and fiberglass for reinforcing concrete. Made from volcanic … Read more
The subject of sun tubes or solar tube skylights keeps coming up in email exchanges with readers, because they’re often more efficient than conventional skylights. There are numerous competing brands and designs, but the basic concept is a skylight that directs light through a mirrored tube. Some designs like the Solatube skylight pictured above bend … Read more
Compressed earth blocks (CEBs) have countless uses and come in dozens of shapes (many more than shown here). They are commonly used for residential and commercial structures, earthquake resistant structures, privacy walls, columns, bond beams, pavers, planters, stairs, etc. For instance, you could make CEB columns on your house and privacy walls and stack earthbags … Read more
Sometimes special hardware can really come in handy for speeding construction. That’s probably why there are hundreds of different anchors and straps available – they really do make buildings stronger and easier to build. The anchors pictured above are used to build hogans, an octagonal shaped structure favored by the Navajo and others living in … Read more
This is a follow-up blog post to my previous post entitled Fastest Corner Pinning Method? I’ll keep it brief. I just wanted to provide a close-up photo of the final pinned corner. (Click to enlarge.) You can see how simple this method is. Just poke sharp galvanized wire (about 16 gauge) through the folded corner … Read more
You can adjust the moisture in your soil mix. In this case we’re using road base. You can see that this is too wet. If it looks glistening with water then it’s obviously too wet. If you squeeze it and see water coming out like this then it’s too wet. So you can take your … Read more