Porous lava rock — scoria (cinders) and pumice — is an ideal building material. We’ve covered this amazing material many times on our blog, but I just learned something very exciting. It turns out scoria is available in Alaska, British Columbia and to some extent the Yukon. All these areas have cinder cones (a type of volcano) that produce scoria. This is great news because porous lightweight lava rock is a good insulator and also fireproof, rot proof, easy to work with and doesn’t attract pests. It’s affordable if there’s a nearby source to minimize shipping costs. So this discovery makes it practical to build lightweight superinsulated earthbag houses in Alaska and Canada. Use the search engine on the right to search this site for details and example projects.
earthbag home
Video: Canadian Earthbag House
Here’s one of the bigger houses built using the earthbag method.
Eternally Solar Earthbag Projects
It’s been a while since we’ve profiled Eternally Solar’s projects from Earthbag Build.com. These are from their gallery page. Eternally Solar has perfected bags that are ideal for sand. No stabilizers needed. Note: slightly higher cost bags are offset by no stabilizers and no labor for mixing.
Spanish Earthbag Building Guide Now Available
Thanks to the hard work of Zafra Miriam, Cato Arce and Gonzalo De la Isla Arias the Spanish version of my Earthbag Building Guide is now available for $10.
A Sustainable Life
“Hello friends. My name is Morgan Caraway. My better half Mary Jane and I built an earthbag house near Asheville, NC (some info about this technique at EarthbagBuilding.com), a cordwood bath house and recently completed an earthbag sunroom addition. We also built our own yurt, set up a rainwater system, built our own micro solar electric system and have learned a lot about sustainable living in general.
New FAQ’s at Earthbagbuilding.com
The Frequently Asked Questions section of www.earthbagbuilding.com has been accumulating pertinent questions and answers for over a decade. These had been categorized into only about a half dozen pages, which had become overly long and cumbersome for finding specific information. I finally decided to organize them in such a way that it is now much … Read more