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 house
Costa Rica Earthbag Time Lapse
Earthbag House Time-lapse – February/March 2013 from The Yoga Farm on Vimeo.
February/March 2013 This is 6 weeks of work in 2 and a half minutes :)
Plenitud Earthbag Roundhouse Workshop in Puerto Rico
Hello Owen,
My name is Tyler Nesbit. I am a friend and co-worker of Owen Ingley of Plenitud Initiativas Eco-Educativas. Would you please share this call for Earthbag Building Interns on your Natural Building Blog?
Bio-Construction with Adobe or Earthbag Building
March 17 at Tres Amigos farm, Las Marías, Puerto Rico.
“A 6-hour hands-on and theoretical training facilitated by Fox McBride & Owen Ingley. We invite you to learn about tropical bio-construction with earthbags, an inexpensive, sustainable and easy to learn alternative; appropriate for the tropics and highly resistant to natural disasters (earthquakes, hurricanes and floods).”
Earthbag Dome Build in Grass Valley, CA 2012
Short video on the earthbag domes we built in the summer of 2012.
Free Economizer PDF Plans Now Available
Complete plans now available as a downloadable PDF. This PDF was actually finished about six months ago but somehow never got uploaded to our Free Plans page. Dozens of people wrote for the free plans. I mistakenly sent them to the preview page, which doesn’t have all the plans. Plus, the preview page had my old email address. (My new address is at the top of the page under About Us.) Sorry for the mix-up.