The rate of speed of earthbag wall building will naturally vary from project to project, depending on the number, strength and skill of workers, complexity of design, how far materials have to be moved, etc. But let’s examine the Somos Children’s Village since Cecilia Rodriguez, architectural intern and project manager, has measured their production rate.
Owen: How many linear meters of tubes do you place per 8 hour day?
Cecilia: 150 linear meters are placed per day. (492 lineal feet or about 1.6 football fields)
Owen: How many workers are there filling and tamping?
Cecilia: Normally we had one or two persons mixing mix, three carrying the soil, three filling the bag and one or two tamping behind. (total = 8-10 workers)
Note on the Project Somos Children’s Village Slideshow. This slideshow has photos of each step of construction so it’s easy to visualize their project. It looks like they’re doing a great job.
You can also watch the slideshow on Picasa, where it’s easy to study each photo as long as you want.
Previous blog posts about Project Somos:
Somos Children’s Village
Project Somos in Guatemala
Owen, this is a side note, but are you putting your book in print any time soon? I am wanting to get your book, but I hardly read e-books because I prefer real paper.
Any plans?
I have everything finished in Blurb, but got an error message on upload. A professional formatted the book specifically to their standards, but somehow it doesn’t work. I’ve hit a wall and not sure what to do next. The book will be expensive through them. E-books are actually better. Everything is hyperlinked — table of contents, links to video clips, etc. You can zoom in to see details. You can print the book from PDF if you want.
I love their project. Do you know of any other “villages” or eco-villages that have gone up like this, made with earthbags? I’ve seen cob, stawbale, and timber villages. But I’ve heard lots of people around me idealize with an earthbag eco-village, and I join right in. But Project Somos is really doing it. Plus they’re doing it for an incredible cause.
My hat goes off to them. I wish I had ten hats, so they’d all go off to them, haha.
This is one of the best earthbag projects. I have a blog post coming soon on My Favorite Earthbag Projects and Somos is on the short list.
The only other earthbag ecovillage to my knowledge is the one in Costa Rica that I posted the other day. There may be others, but it takes time to locate them in google. They may not use the words ‘earthbags’ or ‘ecovillage’ and so you have to keep trying different combinations of terms.